Are You Building a Brand or Just Renting an Audience?

This isn’t an article disparaging TikTok per se. Rather, it’s a honest conversation about what happens when short-term tactics replace long-term brand building.

I was having a chat over coffee with a friend recently about sales versus brand. He sells paper tissues online—specifically on TikTok. By every traditional metric, his business is flying. He has built a network of 50 women entrepreneurs, trained them on TikTok Live, and each is pulling in 5-figure monthly sales.

In his delightfully candid, no-nonsense (aka Chinese uncle) way, he looked at me and asked: "Tse San, who needs brand? All you need is to get yourself in front of the camera and sell. Some days you get zero sales, some days you hit thousands of orders."

Curious, I asked him if everyone was selling the same product under one single brand name."No," he said. "We actually have over 30 different packaging styles and brand names. I just let the team choose whichever one they want to push."

Then came the real test: "So you pay them a commission as TikTok affiliates, right? What happens if all 50 of them walk away tomorrow? Do customers actually search for your tissue brand organically?"

Silence.

Another lunch, another friend. This time, it's with an international agency head. Her team has been up in arms with clients briefing them to do TikTok Live sales.

"And the product they are selling is milk!" she told me, shaking her head. "Who would purposely schedule to buy milk at a certain time and day on TikTok when you can walk into any grocery store to buy milk anytime, or pick it up during your weekly grocery run? Clients are so driven to report short-term vanity numbers that they have forgotten what long-term brand building actually means."

These conversations highlight a trap so many Malaysian business owners and marketers fall into. Relying solely on TikTok affiliates, flash sales, or performance ads is effectively renting attention.

• The Renting Trap: You pour money into ads or commissions, and sales surge. You stop paying, and the tap turns off completely. An influencer might rave about your product to a million followers today, but next month, she’s promoting a competitor's product to the exact same audience. You don't own that relationship—the platform or the influencer does.

• The Equity Engine: Building a brand is about owning attention. It is the quiet work that happens behind the scenes—creating a distinct reason for existence, keeping promises between what marketing claims and what operations delivers, and making consistent decisions about who you are (and who you aren't).

Renting attention through ads and affiliates isn't wrong; in today’s noisy marketplace, it is necessary to get initial traction. But renting without building an asset is just an expensive habit.

Advertising brings people to your door, but your brand is the reason they come back when the ads stop running. Don't just trade for today's sales—build something you actually own for tomorrow.

So, how do you actually start building a brand that stands on its own two feet? In my next article, we’ll dive deep into the essential building blocks of brand equity and how you can apply them to your business without blowing your budget. Stay tuned.