By Stephanie Jacob
G. Gnanalingam says that what differentiates him from the rest is seeing opportunities where others do not and then taking full advantage of it. Long before the success of Westport Malaysia, Gnanalingam created a name for himself first in the tobacco sector and then in the media sector. In the first of three stories, Kinibiz looks back on his successes before Westport and asks what common traits he brought to both these projects.
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G Gnanalingam
G Gnanalingam’s success has been down to taking the opportunities when they come and making them count, and his achievements at Westports Malaysia are perhaps the ultimate embodiment of this skill.
However Gnanalingam or Tan Sri G as he is fondly known to many, first did this long before he entered into the corporate world, in perhaps what was the first massive challenge of his life, when at the end of his first year in university his father passed away.
With three younger brothers still in school, as the eldest son he felt that it was his responsibility to now support his family and he considered leaving university to look for a job. Even at that young age, Gnanalingam understood the value of a solid education and wanted to be able to complete his studies.
As he contemplated how to both fulfil his familial duties and finish his course, he happened upon a crossword competition in a local newspaper that offered a cash prize for the winner.
Gnanalingam entered the competition and ended up netting the more than RM7,000 prize when he won the competition – a substantial amount of money in those days. He used a portion to pay his university fees, and used the rest as income for his family.
It was the first time that he had taken a rather ordinary opportunity and turned it into a success, but it certainly would not be the last.
After earning his degree, Gnanalingam joined the Malaysian Tobacco Company (what would become British American Tobacco after it merged with Rothman’s) as a sales representative after responding to a job advertisement.
In an interview done several years back, Gnanalingam offers a reason that is perhaps hard to believe today given all his success, for initially answering the advertisement – explaining that a key factor was that MTC offered a RM60 per day stipend to all who attended the interview.
It was at MTC that his good eye for sales and marketing was first noticed and after working for awhile on the East Coast, Gnanalingam was back at headquarters to take on the role as head of the company’s sponsorship division.
With creative ideas and a change of strategy, the sponsorship sector became a key division at MTC. In one of his first changes, Gnanalingam decided that instead of waiting for organisations to come to him for sponsorship, he would go to them.
In this way the company took the initiative and this allowed it to become synonymous with some of the most prestigious sporting events during the time, as well as for some of the most memorable advertising campaigns.
One that sticks in the minds of most Malaysians even till this day is the Benson & Hedges ‘Turn to Gold’ campaign which was conceptualised by Gnanalingam himself, and went on to win multiple industry awards.
But it was the sporting competition that the ad campaign was created for which perhaps turned him into a popular name across the country – as it was created to run during the screening of the 1986 football World Cup matches on national television. Gnanalingam had been instrumental in securing the rights to broadcast the games in Malaysia, a fact that endeared him to the country’s football crazy fans.
Advertising tobacco companies and products was becoming a tricky job after the government introduced a ban on direct cigarette advertising and the MTC needed a new way to create brand recognition. Now a senior member of the company’s marketing team, the task of revamping MTC’s approach fell to Gnanalingam.
His solution was to pioneer the idea of creating parallel ads, in which tobacco companies would venture into other businesses under their brand names and advertise these products instead. Using this innovative idea cigarette companies started putting their branding on other products such as clothing, apparel and travel, and this created brand awareness that extended to its cigarettes.
He rose to become its marketing director at 34. Gnanalingam decided that it was time to move on after 19 years at MTC. He was in his forties then.
It happened that the timing of his leaving MTC coincided with the rise of TV3 as the most popular television channel in the country, at the expense of TV1 and TV2. RTM who were familiar with Gnanalingam from collaborating with him on many sponsorship programmes when he was at MTC, asked him to come on board and help them turn the national channels around.
Gnanalingam says that “at that time, people thought we were mad to challenge TV3, but the one thing I realised was that people watched programmes rather than channels. So for example when I brought in the World Cup, people did not care what the channel’s name was, I could have called it anything and they still would have watched it.”
“To take on the RTM job, I created G-Team Consultants – the G was meant to stand for my name of course, but I soon started calling it Girls Team because many of my key staff were women,” Gnanalingam laughingly recounts in an interview with Kinibiz.
The G-Team comprised of individuals who had an innovative streak and the ability to think outside the box. Gnanalingam emphasises that what set him apart was his ability to see opportunities where others did not. In building his G-Team he looked for people who had similar traits to himself.
Building on his theory that a channel’s success depended almost exclusively on the quality and timing of its programming, RTM’s schedule was reorganised to position the right shows for the right audience at the right time. Gnanalingam believed it was about putting the cartoons in the appropriate slot for example, timing was everything.
He was right of course, and from losing almost 50% of its revenue to rival TV3 within a year revenue had climbed to RM100 million and eventually hit RM386 million in 1996.
Gnanalingam was also again central to another sporting success, when he worked closely with the then sports minister Najib Abdul Razak to make the 1989 Southeast Asian Games hosted by Malaysia a success.
Both men agreed that sponsorship would be key to putting on a successful games and that it would also be necessary to engage the Malaysian public in the Games to guarantee its success.
They were right. By generating a good mix of sponsors and including everyday Malaysians – the Games were a success both as a sporting spectacle and from a financial perspective, with Malaysia becoming the overall champion among the participating countries for the first time and by generating RM16.5 million in funds, far surpassing the government’s original target of just RM5 million.
Although Gnanalingam praises Najib’s leadership as being key to the success, the Prime Minister himself took the effort to highlight the importance of Gnanalingam’s contribution when he attended Westports’ prospectus launch ceremony last year.
1996 was also the year that tycoon Ananda Krishnan’s Astro debuted and Gnanalingam knew that the advent of satellite TV would change the face of the television media landscape forever and he decided that it was time again for him to move on and focus his attention on the next big project.
“I felt the time was right to move on, especially after Astro was introduced…I knew that things (media landscape) had changed. Furthermore once I have a big project in view, I tend to want to focus on that in particular.”
That big project which was already taking shape was plans to build a second port in Port Klang, and Gnanalingam had been tapped by the government as the man best suited to take on what was not only as a difficult job, but one that was key in terms of national significance – the building and operation of Westports.
In tomorrow’s article, Gnanalingam takes us through his Westports journey – in a story that chronicles its development from a swampy island to one of Malaysia’s and the world’s busiest ports.
Tomorrow: A tale of Westports
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