PT Central Sari Finance (CSF), a subsidiary company of Bank Central Asia, is in their efforts of increasing sales within a fierce competition in financing business. Decreasing people's purchasing power opens wide opportunity for people to engage in credit scheme rather than cash for their purchasing purposes. Being a leasing company to provide services for buying new and used cars to their customers, the company seeks the possibility of expanding their market and grabbing more customers within an industry of mushrooming emergence of new financing companies as we witnessed the aggressive numbers of advertisements in the newspapers for 'kredit pemilikan mobil' (KPM - credit for purchasing cars) during these days. To add more fierce competition to the business itself, principal of car manufacturers are preparing themselves to actively play in future car business.

In looking at the possibilities and opportunities of further growth for the company, the question that then arose is how to massively penetrate the market. While the company has been using the logo of BCA, a well-established and widely known bank in Indonesia with its well-equipped infrastructure, the group pondered on 'branding' for the company by exploring its own resources. The contemplation for CSF's brand itself is mainly considered with the understanding that CSF will need to re-think its identity for the purpose of its long-term sustainability in today's turbulence changing environment. The basic idea for the quest of 'brand' for CSF laid on the importance of 'brand' that gives positive differential effect on customers' mind in deciding their response to the services that they are trying to have. Needless-to-say the success stories of several well-known companies such as Coca Cola and Mercedes Benz that are now currently relying on the value of their 'brand' equity. The strive towards building the 'brand' is no easy task for the company, it is not a short path to achieve and particularly not inexpensive to gain as it will eat up a huge amount of money on advertising and promotion effort.

The group worked to analyze the present strategic marketing efforts of CSF, and further explored the possibility on whether to continue BCA's logo thus relying the company to the 'brand of BCA and gaining advantage from their facilities including acceleration of promotion efforts to create awareness of customer on the strong relation of BCA and CSF with the implication that CSF will not posses its specific brand for the longer term that is significant for the future sustainability of the company, or alternatively, to explore the possibility of building CSF brand which implies hard work and strategic efforts from the company to include managing relationship marketing, internally and externally.

Based on the analysis of the group, a set of conclusion was drawn and some recommendations on future CSF brand building efforts are presented. One of the unbeatable conclusions is that 'branding' is crucial. The recommendations were then drawn up on the basis of the above.



Research Location: PT Central Sari Finance

Supervisor: Mudzaffar Daud, MBA

Accepted: 18 September 2003



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