PTP, which was awarded a Certificate of Merit by the Institute of Public Relations Malaysia recently, reported that the true challenge was in further improving the awareness and perception of the PTP brand.

PTP Chief Executive Officer Mohd Sidik Shaik Osman said the building of any brand took strategising, planning and a concerted effort by the company to execute its plans.

When a brand was built, he said, there would be efforts to destablise the brand.

“In this sense, our efforts and plans this year are to further increase our presence in both local and international levels.

“The difference this year is that our increased presence will be more focused towards industry targets which are primarily shipping lines.

“We will need to demonstrate to these targets that PTP is aggressively marketing its increased capacity in Phase One and its future Phase Two plans. This is where we hope to achieve our multi-user terminal brand,” he said when disclosing how the port clinched the public relations award.

Before beginning marketing efforts for the port in 1999, Sidik said the port knew that crucial to the success of marketing was the building of a PTP brand.

Through internal strategizing, he said they came up with a vision, mission and strategies giving rise to the tagline Reliable, Efficient, Advanced.

“Several challenges lay ahead with the main one being that, even in Johor, there were many who had not heard of Tanjung Pelepas .

“The brand building targetted the general public and industry players in the first year 1999 and the year 2000.”

Sidik said the public was targeted as the port needed to build the image of a brand that was recognizable to all as the nation’s soon-to-be leading transshipment hub.

This primarily involved an advertising and promotions campaign which used several different themes throughout the year informing the public on what PTP was about.

“To complement this, we utilized valuable press and industry feedback on how the campaign could be improved.

“The success of the campaign in 1999 was seen in the awareness created in the general public. Year 2000 started to zero-in on our objectives,” Sidik said, adding that a convincing brand able to attract strategic partners to anchor in PTP was created.

He said that the securing of Maersk Sealand as a partner helped turn the tide of transshipment to Malaysia’s favour after decades.

PTP’s public relations feats were recognized in the award by Lloyd’s List Maritime Asia as Best Emerging Container Terminal in the year 2000, he said.

It was the first time any port in the world was awarded the honour after barely a year in operations, he said.