Blue Ocean Marketing Strategy means inventing innovative products and finding

new markets that no one has entered yet but which are ripe for growth, instead of continuing to struggle in current high-density markets.

President Nalinee Paibool said the company currently had a wide variety of products with which to penetrate markets from low through medium to high-end segments.

The company has allocated Bt80 million for marketing this year, up from Bt75 million last year.

Nalinee said the company needed to increase the budget in order to stimulate consumer spending amid the current economic slowdown.

However, the company has no plan to expand new Giffarine centres as the current 94 are already enough to cover all regions nationwide.

She said Giffarine planned to increase prices of its consumer products by Bt2-Bt3 due to

an increase in raw-material costs.

She believed this would not affect sales because the increase was very small and the company had not increased prices for a very long time.

Nalinee said Giffarine's performance in the first quarter showed good growth with more people joining it as independent sales representatives. New members per month during

the first quarter numbered 45,000 compared to 30,000 last year.

Giffarine currently has approximately 300,000 members and 2,000 products.