CEO Insights Magazine

What Separates average businesses from sticky businesses?

Brand Builders & creative marketers — the people who lead and grow the brand and the business. CEO Insights’ exclusive team engages in a conversation with one such passionate marketer — Benny Chow, Founder & Chief Marketing Officer, Firefly Photography — who thrives in the field of brand building with the purpose to teach and inspire people and communities.

A passion-driven modern marketer and creative director, Benny began his professional journey as a freelance skating sports coach to a small skate school franchisee. The humble but significant start to his career made him learn a lot about entrepreneurship and helped him to discover his motivation and passion for teaching and marketing. Leveraging his self-learned entrepreneurial skills and craft in modern marketing, he established Firefly Photography in 2012, and ever since then has been helping customers and businesses immortalize and materialize media assets that communicate stories of love, bonds, and glowing moments. He is using his knowledge of a wide range of digital marketing platforms & tools to help businesses and consumers achieve their goals by connecting with visually compelling work.

Benny is well-versed in business development, team building, and implementation of unmatched strategies & techniques and spearheading marketing, partnerships, and Human Resources of the company, and optimizing systems and processes to deliver captivating results. His goals for Firefly Photography are inspirational and ambitious – pushing the boundaries to help customers rejuvenate their lives or business practices.

Apart from being a business leader, Benny is also a Certified Performance Leadership Coach and performs executive coaching for participants from various organizations at Leadership Management Singapore and helps leaders develop their skills and secure a fulfilling future for themselves. Let’s hear it from Benny as he speaks about his venture and more.

How would you define Firefly Photography as an organization and its position in the market? What is the unique proposition that your organization offers to clients?

Firefly Photography is a customer-experiencefocused photography and videography company that creates and documents visually compelling stories. We are the highest-reviewed photography business in Singapore. Our differentiating factor is our deployment of AI in all our processes to enrich customer experience. We are very open to using the latest technologies in our businesses so that our process and the systems become easy for both our team and our customers. A photography session with Firefly is more than just capturing beautiful moments, it is an initiative to empower family bonds and enrich lives.

What has been the vision and mission behind the establishment of Firefly Photography?

My personal mission statement has been to build businesses that give people enriching and rewarding lives or it’s not worth doing. Hence, Firefly Photography was built with the mission to deliver exceptional creative service experiences to customers and our teammates with empathy and efficiency. As a customer-centric organization, we live by the vision of establishing a studio in every city with creative leaders who bring together people and create stronger bonds amongst every family in Singapore.

As the CMO, what are the latest strategic plans you have adopted to expand/ optimize operations and engage new audiences in the market?

We are working very closely with different marketing agencies in Singapore to drive our advertisements and outreach more customers to engage with our services. We are also working on new technologies such as 360 video booths and more high-tech photo booths to provide our customers with a unique experience. These are some among many other strategies that we are developing in order to acquire more share in the local market, and we have parallelly invested in consultancies to improve our systems & processes to scale in the overseas market.

Could you reflect on some of the toughest challenges you have encountered in your journey so far? How did you overcome them?

In the photography industry, the turnover is very high and so is the competition. In 2014, we came across a major challenge caused by low sales in our business which eventually led to declining revenues and a loss. To overcome the challenging situation, we instigated a partnership approach in our business operations where we connected with major brands which enabled us to provide our photography services at a very low cost for their customers. This helped us to overcome our challenges and develop a new way to market our services. We have collaborated and formed great partnerships with large brands in Singapore to add value to our customers. We appreciate the trust and confidence people and businesses have in us and aspire to continue to do our very best to live up to their expectations.

What is the future destination you are heading towards?

We, as an organization, are moving towards a more technology-driven experience for our customers where we are mastering our core capabilities like video production and dabbling towards 360 virtual tours. These 360 virtual tours of any desired location would help our customers to offer their audiences a rich and interactive experience optimized for mobile, with fast, professional hosting with CDN and embedding options. We also have a professional film crew who are excited to deliver optimized video production services for any kind of social platform. I am always grateful, and optimistic and hope to have a chance to connect and learn from like-minded individuals.

As an industry leader, what advice would you give to budding entrepreneurs?

Artificial intelligence is already here and it is impacting businesses every day. From the mundane to the breathtaking, AI technology is disrupting virtually every business process in every industry. With this growth in technology, the service industry will create many opportunities for emerging entrepreneurs in the coming years. Business leaders must embrace technological evolution to create services that will generate value for people and communities. And along the way, they must not give up easily on their aspirations and remember that there will always be a way to get things done.

Benny Chow, Founder & Chief Marketing Officer, Firefly Photography

An expert in modern marketing, Benny has 10+ years of experience in helping businesses and consumers bring ideas into reality by connecting with visually compelling work. Through his venture, he is making connections, building relationships, and bringing value to customers and his teammates through collaborative efforts.

• Hobbies: Chinese Metaphysics, travelling to new destinations, and learning new skills and knowledge

• Favorite Cuisine: Salmon Sashimi

• Favorite Book: 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

• Favorite Travel Destination: Yemen, Socotra

• Awards & Recognition: Recognized as a Notable Chief Marketing Officer aged 40 and under for the pursuit of his craft