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FROM RELATIVE TO ABSOLUTE

WHEN JONNEY JHIH started talking about selling laptops under the ASUS brand, it didn’t raise too much concern among established players in the PC industry. Shih is the chairman of ASUSTek (known simply as ASUS), a Taiwanese company that was a contract manufacturer of notebook computers and game consoles. While ASUS was well respected among industry insiders, few consumers were aware of its existence. Conventional wisdom holds that you need to build a trusted brand in order to get people to open their wallets, and establishing a brand is notoriously expensive. Friends and colleagues warned Shih that he wouldn’t get far without brand awareness, name recognition, and heavy advertising.1

When we talked to him in 2013, ...

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