we are Icone Media

We help belgian companies sell high quality products on the Korean market and we help small Korean brands sell their products on the european market

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We use branding, advertising, digital marketing, targeted distribution and our own personnal network to help find the right customer for the right product. We strive to make the world a better place by increasing the customer happyness.

Ok, I know, you might think this is commercial bullshit so allow me to explain ?

Origin Story

At the begining of this story, there was 3 belgian guys who shared the same interest for Digital Marketing, Video production and delicious food. One of them was living in korea since 10 years where he was running an advertising agency, the other two had created a digital agency in belgium.

One night, after drinking a bit too much of belgian beers they complained about the fact that the best belgian beers and chocolates or other quality products where not available in korea.

They decided it was time for a change. They decided they would solve this problem.

The next day, with a bit of a headacke, this idea had not left them and they started to try to understand why it was so difficult for a small belgian brand to be present and strive on the korean market. This is what they discovered .

Ok, let’s turn of the « storytelling mode » and go straight up to the meat of what we think is the problem. the problem is that companies that wants to sell their product on a foreign market need to bridge de Gap between their traditionnal B2B or B2C approach and the C2B2B approach that they should have.

Let me explain…

Most companies do this …

Say company A creates an incredible product

she wants to sell it in korea (I’m just saying)
she goes to a profesionnal fair
and if she’s lucky she finds a distributor
the distributor buys and resells the products to his own network of resellers
the is Traditionnal B2B approach
the resellers then promotes these products to his or her clients
and if she’s good at doing so the products will slowly begin to sell
this is traditonnal B2C approach

Hooraaaa this is great !

But, (there is always a but) …

The problem here is that this process totally depends on the willingness and quality of the distributors and resellers to educate and communicate with the market.

We all know that distribution does not mean selling. lots of great products are silently waiting on shop shelves to be bought simply because the customers don’t even know they exist.

Comapny A knows this very well, and if it was happening in belgium she would act upon solving this problem but because it’s in korea she does not know how to stimulate the market. She could hire and internationnal branding company but …. aaaaa, no way … it’s much too expensive. So? how to solve this problem?

This is where we come into play.

But they should do this …

First step we partner with a company which products we deeply like.

This is important because we will act as if the company was ours so we need to love the products. Then we act as the marketing and commercial department of this company this means we do mainly 2 things :

first we use our local network to find the right distributor for the products.
then we use our local agency to stimulate the promotion via the local social networks the distributor will not only ship the products to his network of reseller, but he will also be in charge of shipping the product sold via a local webshop.

Remember we are an advertising company and so we are very good at creating great storytelling. we use this skill to create the right kind of content to promote the products locally. This content is not only used to educate the traditionnal network of distributors and resellers, but it’s also used on local social media to bring awareness to the market.

How much ?

This is all fine and dandy but we still need to solve the money problem … cause it’s a lot of work to do this right so we need a lot of money but we understand that not all companies are ready to take the risk so we offer 2 options :

option one is a large amount upfront and a small commission on product solds
option two is a tiny amout upfront and a big commission on product solds you choose what you prefer.

And to further mitigate your risk , our intervention always starts by a free selection event. This means you give us your best samples and we organize a meeting in korea with a few selected distributors, if at least one of them is convinced … we go further.

and by the way, we do the same with corean companies that want to sell in europe but just in the other direction, …. of course that’s the advantage of being locally present on both markets.

In Belgium