The 4Ps on the shop floor: how one tape measure won back Singapore

Product, price, place, promotion — and the fifth P, people. Winson Choong’s account of rebuilding a Japanese tape-measure brand in Singapore is the clearest 4Ps case study we have heard, and he turned it on his own Facebook page. Part 2 of our notes from his talk.

By the VibeFlow team · 28 October 2026 · 12 min read

In 2016, back from Africa, Winson Choong was invited to rejoin KDS, the Japanese maker of measuring tapes, cutters and hand tools he had worked for before, a brand in Malaysia for more than 30 years. It had a problem. Its Singapore distributor had collapsed into a family dispute — two cousins fighting over ownership, in court — and with the wholesaler paralysed, the brand had lost about 90% of its sales channel there. Sales had fallen to about S$13,000. The company was supplying a few hardware shops directly with old products, and several sales managers’ rescue proposals had been turned down. His assignment was to revive Singapore.

He told the class the story to explain the 4Ps — the marketing mix of product, price, place and promotion — and then a fifth.

Start by walking the market

He spent half a year on a market survey, interviewing hardware retailers himself and sending his junior salespeople out too. Their first reports were what anyone would expect: too expensive, not enough products, a brand weaker than its competitors. His view of the industry was blunt: for twenty years, managers had written marketing strategy in the office without connecting to the market.

The detail that mattered was small, and he found it only by asking one more question. Retailers kept calling the KDS tape “soft”. Asked what that meant, they pulled the blade out: it buckled at about 2.2 metres. A leading competitor held out to 2.4 metres, and the best sellers to about 2.5.

Product: design for the person holding it

Why would a quality Japanese tape droop sooner? Because it was built for a different customer. Since its property bubble burst in the 1980s, he explained, Japan’s economy has been driven by manufacturing, and Japanese tapes were designed for industrial users working indoors: compact casings, and a thick, highly durable coating that keeps the markings legible for years. KDS had developed its own long-life coatings.

In Malaysia and Singapore, growth is driven by construction. The people buying tapes are contractors, renovators and engineers measuring long distances outdoors, in rain, dust and sand. For them the coating was not the point — and the heavy coating made the steel blade heavier, so it buckled sooner, while sand that got into a compact casing jammed it.

He asked headquarters to stop developing coatings for this region and to redesign: an ordinary coating, no compact casing, and a stand-out of more than 2.5 metres. The new tape reached 2.72.

Price: one price, and a margin shops can count on

Before, KDS sold to a wholesaler, which added its own markup and left each shop to set its own price. In his example, the same tape sold for S$15 in one shop, S$12 in the next and S$10 in a third. A shop that stocked it expecting a 30% margin found its neighbour selling for less and earned 10%. With no margin it could count on, no shop wanted the brand.

He set a recommended retail price — S$15 everywhere, no discounts to end users — and rewarded the shops behind the scenes instead: one carton free for every ten, plus monthly, quarterly and yearly targets with product, cash and voucher incentives, hotel stays among them. To the maker the free carton cost about 5% of the order; to the retailer it was about 10% more margin.

Place: build the market before you ask for a distributor

Singapore’s four big wholesalers turned him down. KDS was no longer well known, they said; they would carry only its single best seller. A sole distributorship for one product out of a hundred made no sense to a maker, so for the first year he appointed nobody. He and two salespeople sold direct to hardware shops, any quantity at all — “you want one piece, I deliver one piece” — on one condition: the product had to hang on the shelf.

Wholesalers do not push new products for a simple reason, he said. Their salespeople carry thousands of lines and only have time to note what sold out, take the order and rush to the next shop. A maker’s salesperson has time to teach a retailer the features, show how the product is used and leave the materials behind. So the shops bought a little, then a little more.

Within a year they had reached about 150 of Singapore’s roughly 500 hardware retailers, each carrying around 30 KDS products, and S$500,000 in sales. Then he went back to the four distributors and invited them to bid for the sole distributorship. One offered S$1 million a year; another S$1.1 million with 5% growth every year; the contract went to the highest offer. This time the maker set the terms.

He insists he was not squeezing the distributors but taking their risk away: they do not care how many products a maker has, only whether what they buy will sell. Proving that first, with his own resources, is what turned the negotiation round.

The same mistake, twice: cutters in the wrong channel

KDS is also known for snap-off blade cutters. In Japan they earned about half the company’s income; in Malaysia and Southeast Asia, where tapes made up about 90% of sales, cutters were a minor line, and nobody knew why.

The answer turned up in a stationery shop, where he saw a competitor’s cutters selling well — to students, car-tint shops and factories. Factories, buying from a stationery shop? He kept asking. A factory’s maintenance team buys hardware tools perhaps two or three times a year; nobody needs a new hammer every month. But the production line goes through cutter blades constantly, cutting conveyor belts, silicone and everything else, and in Malaysia those orders go through stationery procurement, not hardware. KDS had been selling its cutters only in hardware shops.

So KDS started attending stationery fairs and appointing stationery distributors, in Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia, Australia and New Zealand. Cutters became the Malaysian company’s second-largest contributor. In his account the brand had spent thirty years selling an industrial product into construction markets, through the wrong channel, without anyone noticing, and he says he told headquarters exactly that. For a business selling to businesses, place means the channel, not the address.

Promotion is not “buy one, free one”

Vouchers and free gifts are tools, he said, not the logic. Promotion is the incentive that makes your target customer, business or consumer, willing to take your product — and you find it by putting yourself in their shoes. Why do they hesitate? What are they worried about? Can you solve it? A distributor’s worry is buying stock that will not sell, filling a warehouse and killing its cash flow.

He told a story about the wrong way. Before he returned, a KDS manager with a superb sales pitch had sold 1,000 laser distance meters — a high-end product developed with a well-known Japanese optics partner, at about US$100 each — to Malaysia’s largest distributor in a single order: about US$100,000, roughly RM350,000. He became the top salesman. The meters did not sell. The distributor lost confidence in KDS and refused its new products, and KDS’s sales there fell year after year.

His way was to test a product with end users through retailers first, then arrive with a year of shelf data — say, 200 units sold — so that the distributor only has to top up something already proven. Ten years on, he says, distributors still take a product on his word. He calls himself a problem-solver, and counts that trust as one of his achievements.

The fifth P: people

Marketers now often add a fifth P, people: the salespeople he called “the eyes of the company”. In his account, KDS’s managers and salespeople had been unwilling to go into the market, talk to retailers and find out what users wanted, so strategy was designed in an air-conditioned meeting room and was out of date by the time it reached the shelf. Even on his own campaigns, he said, salespeople treated a market survey as a chance to go out for yum cha, shopping or games. He sees himself as the fifth P: the person willing to walk the market.

The same five Ps for a personal brand

He ended the story by turning it on content. Does your content meet the needs of the readers you are aiming at? Are you on the right channel? He writes on Facebook because most of the retail investors he writes for are 35 and older — he is 45 — with money and some investment knowledge, and they still use Facebook to keep up. Xiaohongshu and TikTok skew younger, and younger people are not the biggest audience for finance and economics. The blog came before the seminars because it was the introduction: nobody pays to hear a stranger.

Measuring it: a KPI framework from the talk’s own figures

Dr Chan’s assignment asks students for a KPI framework and the tools to measure it. The speaker gave no formulas, but almost everything he described had been counted. Here is one way to lay those figures out — the layout is ours, the numbers are his.

Two notes on reading it. Shares carry the most weight early on, because they are how his writing reached Australia and Taiwan without any advertising. And conversion is the measure his first viral post lacked: 4 million views that turned into few followers is a reach figure with no next step.

Common questions

Sources

1. Marketing mix — Wikipedia
2. Tape measure — Wikipedia