Thailand –Sansanee Songkiatthana, previously of Klook in Thailand, has been named as the new marketing director of retail group Bata Group in Thailand. This is according to her LinkedIn update where she dated the start of the role at September this year.
Songkiatthana’s marketing experience expands roles for Avon, Unilever, and Klook. At Unilever, she used to head marketing activation. Meanwhile, her time at Klook saw her assuming the position of head of marketing for Thailand, and then eventually moving up to the role of associate marketing director.
The Bata Group is one of the leading manufacturers and retailers of footwear with a global presence. It is active in 70 countries across the globe and has over 5,300 brick-and-mortar stores spread over its markets.
The Philippines –MARKETECH APAC‘s What’s NEXT returns this year with a stronger push to bring the industry together through a variety of knowledge-sharing activities. MARKETECH APAC will continue to feature thought-leadership articles written by renowned marketing leaders to cover various marketing areas, as it did last year.
With MARKETECH APAC‘s ongoing push to create relevant video content, we will gather the best in the industry this year and sit down with them to discuss how marketers can prepare for the upcoming year of marketing opportunities and challenges.
On November 3, 2022, What’s NEXT 2023 will kick off with a regional webinar, What’s NEXT: Events in Asia Pacific, in collaboration with event tech platform, Hubilo. On November 8, in partnership with influencer marketing platform Vamp, another regional webinar, What’s Next: Influencer Marketing in APAC, will be held.
True to its mission of creating a well-connected marketing community in Asia Pacific, What’s NEXT 2023 concludes with a two-day hybrid conference, What’s NEXT 2023: Marketing in Asia Pacific, on February 21-22, with at least 120 physical attendees in Manila and 1,500 virtual attendees from various markets in Asia Pacific.
The conference will spark offline and online discussions about digital, e-commerce, customer engagement, CX, esports, research, B2B, metaverse, and other relevant topics that will help marketers future-proof marketing strategies.
MARKETECH APAC’s What’s NEXT 2023 will be a go-to platform for checking out the marketing industry’s new trends, opportunities, and challenges to be explored in the region through this holistic approach.
Keep an eye on our website and social media pages for updates on the hybrid conference.
Please contact Joven Barceñas at [email protected] if you are interested in becoming a partner.
Singapore – TBWA\Asia has announced today that Mandy Wong, former managing director of TBWA\Singapore, has been named president of TBWA\Singapore. She will be taking the role together with Alrick Dorett, chief operating officer of TBWA\Singapore and Malaysia, and chief pricing officer of TBWA\Asia, as CEO Ara Hampartsoumian resigns from his position, a role he’s held since 2019.
Sean Donovan, TBWA\Asia President, said,“Change is opportunity. Time and again, the agency’s ability to respond to and grow from rapid change has been central to its success. Mandy and Alrick have demonstrated over the last several years that they are the ideal candidates to step up and lead our agency into its next great chapter. We’re thrilled both have accepted their new leadership roles.”
Wong and Dorett bring together a deep and diverse set of competencies, backgrounds, and business perspectives. Wong’s focus will include client engagement, new business, talent and expanding TBWA’s creative competencies, while Dorett’s focus will include innovation and technology-driven transformation, operations, finance, and commercial strategy.
Donovan added,“Ara has been part of the leadership team at TBWA\Singapore for eight years, first as managing director then as CEO. We thank him for the contributions he has made to the growth of our people, our clients and our collective. He leaves with our very best wishes.”
Asheen Naidu, deputy executive creative director of TBWA\Singapore, has been promoted to lead the creative department as executive creative director, replacing Andy Grant who is leaving the agency. Naidu will join the Asia Creative Leadership Gang and continue to work closely with Perry Essig, who returned to Asia as chief creative experience officer.
Meanwhile, Emmanuel Sabbagh who returned to Asia in July as chief strategy officer of TBWA\Asia will lead the Singapore planning department. Prior to moving to Asia, Emmanuel was chief planning officer at TBWA\Paris and global planning director for the agency’s McDonald’s portfolio. Emmanuel is based out of Singapore.
Donovan concluded, “We’re fortunate to have incredible depth of leadership, not only within the Singapore agency, but within Asia and globally. This continued commitment and investment in training and developing of our people across all our critical roles [have] ensured TBWA\Singapore is set up for success under the leadership of Mandy and Alrick. We wish them well, and we thank Ara and Andy for their contribution to TBWA\Singapore.”
Personal finance is such an essential and crucial part of our success, and yet not everyone has access to content to help build one’s financial literacy. This is the goal of Home Credit, the consumer finance company, in the Philippines when they recently launched the ‘Payo Para sa Life’ (Advice for life) radio program.
Together with Manila Broadcasting Company (MBC) and independent media agency PraXis, Home Credit launched an on-air radio program on local radio station DZRH that aims to share useful learnings and insights for financial literacy.
Watch our full interview with Home Credit PH’s CMO Sheila Paul
Sheila Paul, Home Credit’s CMO in the Philippines, sat down with MARKETECH APAC to share more about its rationale and concept.
The program airs at the very early morning timeslot of 4:00 to 5:00 am and this is because they are specifically targeting market vendors, farmers, fisherfolks, public transportation drivers, and security guards, who are already up and running at this particular hour.
Why this group, Paul said, “At Home Credit, we really believe that we should focus on the grassroots level when it comes to financial literacy, [and] the same with financial inclusion, mostly these are [the] sectors that get neglected or [are] underserved.”
“Definitely, we want to focus on the class that is very hardworking. In fact, they [have] to get up super early in the morning to be able to do their jobs and travel somewhere, and that’s definitely when they have the time to listen to the radio,” she adds.
At a time when newer media formats have sprung up–such as podcasts– some would say that radio is a slowly dying medium, but Paul said that it is about finding the right channel for their target audience.
“Through our media studies, we still see that radio listenership is quite high, especially in the remote areas. And although digital platforms, as well as internet penetration, have expanded over the last few years, still, only 50% of Filipinos are able to access the internet daily, so their main source of news and information, as well as entertainment, is still the radio, especially in the said sector,” said Paul.
Watch and listen to the full interview with Paul, which is now streaming on Spotify and YouTube.
In the conversation, Paul further imparts her insights on the current financial industry, specifically the growth of BNPL services, and shares the broader state of the financial literacy of Filipinos and the role that consumer financial services like Home Credit play in their financial success.
Singapore – Prasana William, former regional marketing manager of HubSpot for Asia, has been named as the new head of APAC marketing at Sprout Social, the US-headquartered company that provides cloud-based social media management software.
Based in Singapore, William will be responsible for growing the brand awareness of the company within the region, as well as running end-to-end marketing activities to expand its customer base and enable brands to maximise the power of social.
William is a seasoned marketer who brings with her seven years of hands-on experience in the Asia B2B tech space. She worked previously for fintech platform FAVE and email marketing platform GetResponse Malaysia. Prior to HubSpot, she also held the position of regional marketing manager for SEA at Singapore-based Ematic Solutions, a marketing and technology consultancy.
On the appointment, William commented, “Sprout Social recognises and is committed to its growth across international markets. So when the opportunity to co-create their journey in APAC was presented, I couldn’t say no. Social media touches every part of our lives today and the impact it is having on businesses is invaluable, which is why I am thrilled to be at the helm of the company’s strategy and culture in APAC and have a seat on this rocket ship.”
Sprout Social offers deep social media listening and analytics, social management, customer care, commerce and advocacy solutions to brands and agencies worldwide. As she steps into the new role, William shared that her main priority is to partner with General Manager for APAC, Amrita De La Pena to align Sprout Social’s sales and marketing functions. This is in line with the company’s goal to accelerate its international expansion.
According to William, Sprout Social is further increasing its pace of hiring with a strong emphasis on international markets. The company also continues to expand its product roadmap and partnerships, including the announcement of its most recent integration with TikTok.
“We are thrilled to welcome Prasana William to Sprout Social as Head of Marketing, APAC, based in Singapore. She brings incredible expertise and experience to her role and will have a meaningful impact on Sprout’s growth in the region,” said Marino Fresch, VP of acquisition & revenue marketing at Sprout Social.
As we enter the post-pandemic period, we are now dealing with an entirely new consumer – desires, needs, and motivations that have transformed to adapt to the new phase of the ‘new normal’.
Last April 20, MARKETECH APAC, in partnership with Braze, gathered marketing leaders from brands Astro Malaysia, BigPay, bolttech, Hmlet, Philippines AirAsia, ShopBack, Zeemart, and Zenius. to discover how brands are implementing their customer acquisition and retention strategies in this period of unprecedented changes as well as how they are building a culture of experimentation and optimisation in each of their organisations.
Watch the highlights from the roundtable that roped in marketing leaders from brands Astro Malaysia, BigPay, bolttech, Hmlet, Philippines AirAsia, ShopBack, Zeemart, and Zenius.
Hybrid experiences to deliver high customer engagement
When during the height of the pandemic, consumers and businesses were thrust to interact entirely in a virtual manner, the less restricted post-pandemic meant that brands now must take into consideration the dynamics of the engagement brought by the physical experience and integrating that with the uncovered powers of the virtual space.
Allenie Caccam, head of marketing of Philippines AirAsia, shared that in order to bring cohesiveness to your customer engagement, it doesn’t stop with what is done in the brand’s app or website, but almost always culminates with an on-ground activation or face-to-face interaction “to personify the brand as a lifestyle.”
“We do drive cross channel customer engagement by identifying the critical points of engagement and addressing it through hyper-personalisation and experiential marketing,” said Caccam.
Priyanka Nadkarni, marketing lead of insurtech bolttech, echoes this and says that it is important to follow your consumers offline, as in their case, the discovery process for insurance products doesn’t stop within digital bounds.
“We need to remember that we’re not only digital anymore…for us, it’s really about where [do these] insurance and protection products really make real sense for the customer, and it’s not always online,” said Nadkarni.
Meanwhile, fintech BigPay also agrees with the same marketing direction. Jia Nina, country marketing lead of the brand, said that they don’t rely on the app alone, and remarked that marketing also goes beyond the app.
Raymond Muliadi, head of product at edtech Zenius, shared, “Offline will always be there. And we will not be able to dismiss online or offline. So we want to make sure that we build an ecosystem where the learning is complementing online and offline.”
Tapping into the fundamentals to effectively retain customers
During the roundtable, industry leaders were in unison about how it is to effectively retain customers in this period and that is to bank on the powers of the fundamentals – knowing your consumers inside out, and activating marketing that genuinely aligns what they want and value.
BigPay’s Jia Nina also shared her insights on this and said, “We really listen to customers… effective marketing is always a conversation, it’s not just you talking to people.”
Meanwhile, Astro’s Norsiah Juriani Johari, its VP for product marketing, believes that to keep customers coming back to your product, you have to be able to deliver authentic value exchange.
She says that we now live in a world of transparency and that customers “can see right through you” and will know when a brand isn’t upfront about what it promised to deliver.
“Listening to the customers and really holding true to our core values at these challenging times has really helped us a great deal as a business and as a brand,” she said.
Personalisation also came out as a top strategy among marketers for customer retention.
Edward Tan, the associate director for growth marketing at co-living space provider Hmlet, says that personalised engagement is what is able to draw customers back to the product.
“One thing we learned when it comes to customer retention, for locals especially, is to shift from purely selling them the co-living experience to the need for consistent and personalised engagement,” said Tan.
When driving that cross channel customer engagement, he says, “The most important factor to us when it comes to cross-channel engagement is definitely reaching the right customers via the right channel at the right time with the right messages.”
Shopping and rewards platform ShopBack, which is currently an adopter of Braze’s consumer engagement platform, also shared to employ the same strategy, which is leveraging the best channel for customer needs and then finding the right timing and triggers for your communications.
Its Head of CRM Scott Tan said, “For us, it’s creating a meaningful cross-channel engagement. It’s really about setting up your platform to make sure that you can (1) anticipate user needs, (2) [have] the right channel, and (3) find appropriate triggers and timing.”
Building a culture of experimentation and testing
Now that consumers have increasingly become more nuanced and that the staying power of trends is going away at lightning speed, these have put down greater importance on brands’ practices in experimentation and testing.
For Zeemart, an F&B procurement platform, and a pre-series A startup, it’s about encouraging a positive attitude toward ‘failing forward’.
“I think the advantage of being a startup is that you’re always building, learning and iterating,” said Tan.
“Develop this attitude of failing forward, because no one really knows the answers…facilitating feedback, gathering results and going out and fixing it, and testing it again,” he added.
Meanwhile, bolttech’s Priyanka Nadkarni summed it up briefly on the topic, “To be a pioneer, own it, link together and think outside in.”
As we move towards the post-pandemic period, virtual and digital are here to stay–but only better. Consumer experiences are set to become even more ingenious and innovative now that the period has enabled us to once again bring back physical engagement and interaction.
Among the insights the industry leaders shared, non-negotiable principles of marketing stood out, agreeing that no matter what the changes, marketing will always be and should remain experimental. We don’t get to the bottom of the ‘AHA’ moment if we stick to what has already been successful or what is deemed to be the best at present, as the future ahead will only become unpredictable and challenging for marketers but also groundbreaking with the emergence of unimaginable digital interactivity.
Watch the highlights from the roundtable that roped in marketing leaders from brands AirAsia Philippines, Astro Malaysia, BigPay, bolttech, Hmlet, ShopBack, Zeemart, and Zenius.
Take a look at Braze’s latest marketing report, ‘2022 Global Customer Engagement Review’which shares the top three trends that are shaping customer engagement in 2022 as well as opportunities companies can seize for growth by industry and region. The report is free to download here.
More marketers are recognizing the power of branded content in our rapidly evolving digital age. Consumers are constantly being bombarded with all sorts of adverts, so it is vital for brands to tell stories that resonate with their customers to ensure they stand out from the crowd.
Content marketing also offers a range of other business benefits, including helping companies to build brand awareness, cultivate consumer loyalty, and generate organic growth through publicity.
Up to 80 percent of marketers regard content creation as one of the top priorities, according to a 2021 report by Hubspot. It also shows that content marketing makes up 26 percent of their business-to-business marketing budgets, while spending is on the rise.
Plan your next successful content marketing campaign
To better plan, manage and evaluate a successful content marketing campaign, it is important that companies put a clear structure in place. Here is our five-step guide to help you plan your next content marketing campaign.
1. Define your strategy with a framework for measurement
Brand equity modeling is a useful tool to assess the impact of measures of brand equity on long-term brand performance. Marketers should first include metrics such as ‘trust’, ‘quality’, and ‘reliability’ with a definitive monetary value and hierarchy, alongside other tangible indicators such as the audience engagement level or sales conversion.
With such a framework, marketers can constantly measure the effectiveness of each campaign and adjust their strategy to optimize the results.
2. Know your audience through data
Storytelling is a form of art, but tailoring your content to the right audience is a science. Making use of first-, second- or third-party data is instrumental in mapping out the key communications challenges of engaging your target audience.
By analyzing the data, which shows such things as who your audience is, what content they consume, and how they behave; marketers will have a better idea about how to strengthen the brand relevance to the target audiences in the right context.
3. Internal support for creative process
Compelling content requires creativity, but the bureaucratic approval process sometimes kills imaginative thinking. As such, marketers should lobby internally and get the backing of C-suite, or senior executives, to ensure the least intervention in the creative process, while gatekeepers are in place for quality assurance and crisis prevention. Ideally, two to three sign-offs would be sufficient in keeping the right balance between gatekeeping and the creative process.
4. Tailor your distribution plan to match user journey
With a massive volume of content available, both online and offline, marketers need to work towards more than just clicks and eyeballs. Instead, they should curate a content journey – through the right distribution channels at the right time for the right audience – that allows people to discover your brand, generate interest and build brand loyalty.
5. Focus on long-term benefits
Most content marketers define the success of a content marketing campaign by the number of sales conversions. This overemphasis on short-term results prevents marketers from benefiting from the long-term returns – gained from: creating real bonds with your customers and cultivating customer loyalty.
This article is written by Darryl Choo, regional sales director for APAC at South China Morning Post.
The article is published as part of MARKETECH APAC’s thought leadership series What’s NEXT.
This features marketing leaders sharing their marketing insights and predictions for the upcoming year. The series aims to equip marketers with actionable insights to future-ready their marketing strategies.
If you are a marketing leader and have insights that you’d like to share with regards to the upcoming trends and practices in marketing, please reach out to [email protected]for an opportunity to have your thought leadership published on the platform.
Our lifestyle today revolves around platform businesses, and the need for such services has been further heightened with social restrictions over the course of the pandemic. From what we eat (food delivery), how we commute (ride-hailing), to how we consume entertainment (video-sharing websites), we use the services provided by platform players. In fact, the market size of the global platform economy has surpassed the US$7t mark and is still growing at a compounded annual rate of 15%.
In 2022, there will be more startups coming to the scene disrupting traditional markets, and even established companies shifting their business model, all adopting the platform-based approach.
With increasing competition coming next year, what does it take for a platform player to emerge as a winner? The answer is the ability to create an ecosystem that not just meets the needs of both the consumers (buyers) and suppliers (sellers), but also one where both sides of the platform are committed and engaged in interacting with each other.
This can be achieved via platform loyalty programs. Platform loyalty programs are different from traditional loyalty programs. The program design of the latter is geared only towards the consumers whereas in the former, both players have their own roles to play to drive sustainable growth of the platform.
Five Strategic Archetypes of Platform Loyalty Programs to consider in 2022
As we enter 2022 with service platforms now deeply ingrained in consumers’ day-to-day, today proves to be the best time to double down on their engagement and build loyalty programs that will make the stay and long for a brand’s product or service.
Here are five strategies platform players can adopt in building a winning engagement strategy as their growth engine.
1. Two-pronged programs
The most direct way is to create a separate reward system for both consumers and sellers as means to create growth loops i.e. consumers bringing in more consumers; while sellers bringing in more sellers to the platform – to create more activities.
Example: foodpanda
Foodpanda is a great example of how they create a separate rewards program for both sides of the platform ecosystem. Consumers have access to challenges and rewards where you get to unlock badges and points and redeem them for vouchers. Meanwhile, foodpanda has Bamboo Rewards to recognize riders. Through Bamboo Rewards, riders get to earn rewards such as fuel incentives, vouchers, and free merchandise.
Source: Screengrabs from foodpanda app and website
2. Customized programs
A platform owner can allow sellers on their program to launch their own mini loyalty program, which offers and rewards customers based on their own business needs, but still within the overarching rewards design principle of the platform.
Example: Lieferando
Lieferando is a food delivery platform in Europe. While they have an overarching points program, they allow the participating restaurants to customize their own stampcard program where users will get to earn a stamp for every order they make and redeem it for vouchers – personalized from that very restaurant – after collecting x number of stamps.
Source: Screengrabs from Lieferando website
3. Coalition programs
Multiple brands join together in a partnership and offer a joint loyalty program, often having a single rewards currency in the ecosystem.
Example: PAYBACK
At the core of the coalition program, PAYBACK has market-leading brands in the everyday spend category. This helps to ensure sufficient scale to support the economics of the program and in turn attract other partners to the coalition. A highly liquid rewards currency is the main draw for the consumers where they can freely earn/ burn across the participating brands thus allowing them to stretch their dollars.
Source: Screengrabs from PAYBACK website
4. Alliance program
Similar to a coalition loyalty program except that participating brands do not have to forfeit their own loyalty program and consumers do not have to sign up for a new program to be part of the alliance ecosystem
Example: Star Alliance
Star Alliance is a two-tier rewards program that gives passengers more options to book their tickets from the participating airlines, simplified in-flight operations, and the ability to earn and redeem miles on other alliance members. To be a member, customers just have to be enrolled in any of the participating alliance members’ frequent flyer programs. For airlines, joining an alliance gives them access to more customers and by combining networks, member airlines can offer more flights to many more designations without having the need to operate these routes on their own.
Source: Screengrabs from Star Alliance website
5. Employer-Employee program
While this model is not quite a typical platform rewards program, the program is meant to solve the pain points of employers and employees while still driving the main activities to the platform itself.
Example: Grab for Business
The program helps employers and saves them from having to give and track transport allowance to staff, and staff (users) do not have to be bothered with manual expense reporting while still being able to earn rewards points on their business travels.
Source: Screengrabs from Grab website
Program design principles for a successful platform loyalty program
Whichever model a platform player chooses as their engagement strategy, they need to adhere to these principles to ensure their program is successful:
1. Platform owners must solve the pain points of both consumers and sellers; or at least give sufficient reasons for them to join the program
2. Program insights should be made available to sellers (e.g. real-time dashboards) to improve targeting and offerings
3. Personalization and segmentation are important ingredients for sellers
4. Loyalty economics (e.g. earn/burn, breakage, floats) are critical for platform growth.
5. Balanced earn and burn across all partners and program must be independently owned by 3rd party
Platform business is in abundance and the market will get even more crowded in 2022. Only those who can foster healthy relationships between consumers and sellers will be successful, therefore, it is imperative that platform players start investing in their engagement strategies today.
Platform loyalty programs are an important growth loop strategy for platform businesses to grow their players, both buyers and sellers. Introducing such a concept in the current market environment could prove to be a winning asset and a strong differentiator from the competition.
This article was written by Loyalty & Growth Leader Henry Christian. He is the former general manager of Singapore’s loyalty program NTUC Link, and previously the head of loyalty program of leading lifestyle retailer MAP in Indonesia.
The article is published as part of MARKETECH APAC’s thought leadership series What’s NEXT.
This features marketing leaders sharing their marketing insights and predictions for the upcoming year. The series aims to equip marketers with actionable insights to future-ready their marketing strategies.
If you are a marketing leader and have insights that you’d like to share with regards to the upcoming trends and practices in marketing, please reach out to [email protected]for an opportunity to have your thought leadership published on the platform.
Singapore – In August this year, top e-commerce platform Shopee unveiled its newest endorser, probably its biggest ambassador to date – global superstar Jackie Chan.
Following the announcement, Chan’s first visibility was for the platform’s 9.9 sale, and now the renowned action celebrity is back to grace Shopee’s campaign for 11.11.
Both advertisements with Chan were nothing short of the e-commerce’s creatives DNA – a cheerful and upbeat mood, animated movements, and of course, Shopee’s staple soundtrack.
Screencap from Shopee’s latest 11.11 ad
However, on the back of the recent release for 11.11, some marketing and creative professionals on social media gave their verdict on the ad – which leaned towards disappointment and frustration over its creative execution.
On Monday, October 25, Richard Bleasdale, a specialist advisor at media investment analysis firm, Ebiquity, shared an article about the ad on a LinkedIn post with the comment, “Is it just me? Or is this without doubt the worst ad ever made? I challenge anyone to nominate better (worse).”
The post attracted other creative experts and advertising leaders to share opinions of their own, which had a resounding rejection of the ad’s conceptualization and overall direction.
“The bar is very low…”, one ad leader wrote, while one marketing leader pointed out how the ad made him “lost for words.”
Another agreed to Bleasdale, commenting, “I know what [you] mean. Very disappointing. Was hoping for more [Jackie] action.”
MARKETECH APAC‘s Inner State reached out to some of the marketing executives that jumped on the post for their official insights on the ad.
A common sentiment among the marketing executives was how the brand failed to leverage Chan’s superstar imprint of action coupled with comedy.
Shopee’s 11.11 platform-wide sale is running from October 25 to November 11, and the campaign was launched on October 18 on the platform’s YouTube channels across its covered markets.
The ad showed Jackie Chan on the street, being slowly approached by dangerously looking men. With an impending fight scene, Jackie is seen mustering his strength to prepare to defend.
Throughout the 30-second ad, Jackie is able to fight off the men with Shopee’s ‘Big Sale’. Using only his phone, Jackie magically defeats the men by powering through Shopee’s ‘big discounts’, where for every press of a button, discount bubbles pop up, such as “$60 CASHBACK ALL DAY” and “$6 OFF EVERY $50” off the phone and beat the men down.
Anand Vathiyar, managing director of Cheil Singapore, describes the ad as an ‘orange mess’, a reference to the platform’s orange branding
“Jackie Chan’s brand equity is action-comedy…Shopee could have done something [on what] we’ve come to love Jackie for instead of the orange mess they’ve rolled out,” said Vathiyar.
Echoing this, Rob Sherlock, advisory board chairman at martech solutions DAIVID, said, “I do think they could have taken Jackie Chan’s trademark antics and dialed them up into something even crazier, more ‘action’ exaggerated – and still have Shoppee fully integrated into the story.”
He adds that instead of handing Jackie a mere phone in an attempt to inspire action to the ad, Shopee should have had “some whacky martial-arts impossibility performed by Jackie.”
“And make the Batman & Robin pow-wow cartoon bubbles more integrated into everything we love about the man,” continued Sherlock.
Meanwhile, Bleasdale, the one who published the LinkedIn post, shared to MARKETECH APAC that he thinks the ad has been “devoid of any idea.”
When asked what Shopee could have done better, Bleasdale said, “Start with a real brief – with a clear objective and a compelling consumer insight. Anything that responded to that would be better and more effective than this.”
On one hand, executives were also quick to poke on the past Shopee ad with professional footballer Cristiano Ronaldo, saying that the e-commerce brand had been underperforming with its campaigns even before when it signed the Portuguese sports personality in 2019.
Shopee’s 9.9 ad in 2019 with Cristiano Ronaldo
The two-year-old ad puts Ronaldo on a football field where shortly after scoring a goal, audiences in the stadium start changing into an orange-wearing army with the trademark Shopee pop-ups coming out of each one. At the middle to the end of the ad, Ronaldo performs the Shopee dance together with his team.
According to a survey done by consumer research Milieu, 24% of audiences in Singapore ‘dislike’ the 9.9 ad with Ronaldo in 2019, with 56% ‘liking’ it. Of those that disliked the ad, stated reasons were they found it “silly” (60%), made them cringe (60%), and was “annoying” (47%), and lacked product information (37%).
For Sherlock, Ronaldo was the worst use he’s ever seen of a mega-celebrity and thinks if Shopee had done a low-quality ad the first time, it would be difficult to redeem itself.
“It probably worked, drove sales, and tattooed the brand in the consumers’ brains. But, like any sequel, it’s hard to improve on the original – or in this case, be intentionally ‘so bad it’s good’,” said Sherlock.
MARKETECH APAC has already reached out to Shopee for a comment.
Shopee’s presence expands Southeast Asia and Taiwan. For the latest 11.11 ad, the Thailand market paid the ad a staggering 30 million views on YouTube as of writing.
The e-commerce platform continues to be the top platform in Southeast Asia with the most visits by consumers in 2020, trailed by Lazada.
Inner State is MARKETECH APAC’s dedicated platform for industry deep dive.
We know that the consumer is ever-changing but the fluidity of their behavior has taken an entirely different meaning this pandemic – with unprecedented changes that unfolded such as the constraint on physical interactions and the economic plunge of markets, this completely overhauled how brands and businesses engaged with their target consumers.
Last September 21, MARKETECH APAC, in partnership with CleverTap, gathered marketing leaders from all over the APAC region representing different industries, for the roundtable “Business Growth Levers from Acquisition to Retention” to discuss how the pandemic has shaken brands’ current playbook on consumer acquisition and retention strategies.
Growth and marketing heads from the edtech, grocery, TV, airline, fitness, fintech, fast food, and publication sectors each shared their unique challenges and how their teams adapted to emerging brand new cohorts, shifting priorities among consumers, with new desires and motivations at the front.
Watch live the highlights of the roundtable and hear straight from APAC’s marketing heads the notable changes this pandemic on consumer acquisition and retention.
The rise of new consumer segments amid the pandemic
The areas of educational platform, publication, and fitness witnessed the arrival of new consumer personas borne out of the heightened digital lifestyle.
Marisha Lakhiani, CMO of Mindvalley, a learning platform for self-help and entrepreneurship, shared that during the period, the platform suddenly attracted younger users, a group it didn’t predominantly draw in before.
Meanwhile, for global fitness brand Les Mills International, it found that its main fitness consumer now favors a split between in-gym and home digital workouts.
“The consumer’s new normal is 60:40 in terms of live and digital fitness; so if they’re doing 5 workouts in a week, 3 of them they want to do it in a club, in a live environment, and 2 they want to do as a digital workout,” shared Anna Henwood, CMO of Les Mills International.
As for publications, Philippines’ Summit Media saw these changes most evidently on how consumers shifted their patterns in finding and consuming content. Specifically for its parenting brand, Smart Parenting, Facebook used to be its biggest acquisition channel, but over the current period, the channel has not been giving the volatility that’s expected, according to its Growth Lead Iza Santos-Cuyos.
During the roundtable, David Lim, the vice president for marketing of grocery platform HappyFresh, pointed out that whatever strategies that may have served marketing teams pre-pandemic can now be officially considered bygones.
“As a marketer, whatever we have learned in textbooks, on websites, [and] on webinars can be forgotten in the past 18 months…because if you just look at acquisition, everything has changed,” said Lim.
Lim adds, “I think when it comes to the topic of acquisition, everything has to be extremely localized. We have to look at each market on its own, we have to look at each cohort on its own, and then link it back to how they retain, how they come back month after month in a very granular [manner], much more granular than before.”
For acquiring consumers, improving SEO and search strategies have been the common thread, while forging strategic partnerships showed itself to be the redeeming factor among marketing teams to both acquire and retain consumers in the current market climate. At the roundtable, marketing leaders also emphasized the importance of first-party data.
For Mindvalley and Summit Media, it has been the same go-to response – focusing and investing more in search and SEO.
“We identified the customers that we are actually retaining and try to acquire them, so like micro-acquiring a particular audience,” said Mindvalley’s Marisha Lakhiani.
Summit Media’s Iza Santos-Cuyos shared that as they bolster their search strategies, the publication realized that it is in fact attracting a different set of cohorts on search versus those coming from Facebook, bringing them to conclude that they cannot now discount Facebook altogether while focusing on search.
“What we learned from doing that is to devise a separate strategy for audiences acquired on Facebook versus those acquired on search,” said Santos-Cuyos.
Brands forming strategic partnerships to cushion drastic market changes
The fast-food industry took one of the biggest hits during the pandemic, with the phased-out in-person interactions blowing the footfall for dine-in.
In the roundtable, KFC Malaysia’s CMO May Ling Chan shared that partnering with food delivery platforms acted as a safety net, where within the e-commerce scene, the QSR sector has not been the fastest in adoption.
“I think what happened during the pandemic was [the] growth of food aggregators. For us, I think that’s the biggest part of acquisition that we see,” said Chan.
Online food delivery has seen an unprecedented rise in adoption by both brands and consumers. According to a report by Statista, in Asia, revenue in the online food delivery segment has been projected to reach US$223,372m this year.
Singapore’s supermarket chain NTUC FairPrice echoes the same gameplan, where its convenience store Cheers inked a tie-up with top delivery platforms GrabFood and foodpanda in order to answer to the surge in need for on-demand and fast delivery of food products.
Vivek Kumar, NTUC FairPrice Group’s director for strategic marketing & omnichannel monetization, cited ‘Supper moments’ which Cheers aimed to create through the partnership, where consumers can not only see product offerings in a snap but to “go ahead” and complete their transaction in real-time.
“Supper moments on food delivery platforms is quite a unique opportunity. [When] restaurants are closed and you [still] want your beer and your nachos and your croissants, and stuff like that, this is the place to go to.” Kumar said.
He adds, “We can’t wait for the customers to come to us. We can create the right occasion [as long as] we understand the customer’s needs. We must give them very friction-free shopping experiences where they can complete their mission – you can’t leave it midway.”
The fast-changing consumer patterns pressing the importance of first-party data
Global cross-border payments platform OFX was also one of the brands that participated in the roundtable and its Global Head of Digital Acquisition Shad Haehae shared that as the pandemic pushed the stronger need for brands to know their customers a lot more, this made the platform re-evaluate the quality of data it obtains.
“We’re a money business, and people send money for particular reasons, so those reasons have changed,” said Haehae.
OFX previously relied on third-party data for insights, but Haehae shares that as a business, OFX figured that it needed to be smarter on this front.
“We adopted new partnerships, new types of technologies [not just] from [a] martech [and] adtech perspective, even from a data perspective. We’ve done a lot of consolidation on platforms and data.”
The same is the case for TV and radio operator giant, Astro, in Malaysia.
“So it’s a balance between providing value to the customers to [keep] them from churning [and] aggregating our first-party data with social data, and with data that we have in the network to go after customers a lot more aggressively than we have in the past,” said Norsiah Juriani Johari, Astro’s vice president of marketing.
For Les Mills International, they eventually leveraged first-party data which it successfully included in its marketing strategy because of the direct-to-consumer journey it now has via its own fitness app. Predominantly, its consumer was a gym member which Henwood admits the brand had no prior visible data of as well as on how its products looked like.
With digital fitness now ingrained in people’s exercise routines, Henwood shared that content has become its differentiator, which is what makes “people stay.”
“So how we film our content [in] the lockdown, how we do that more and more so it’s really engaging with the customer, and how we [connect with] different personalities through [our] content – that’s been a big part of our retention strategy,” Henwood shares.
For Cebu Pacific Air, meanwhile, one of the Philippines’ leading airlines, answering to pandemic-induced shifts meant working inward and letting the team adapt to new ways of implementing marketing strategies.
Alongside relying on new consumer segments during this period, Michelle De Guzman, the airline’s marketing director, said, “Even the ways of working that we have as a marketing team, it has changed as well when it comes to user acquisition and retention.”
She shares, “We have also developed agile marketing sprints – and that was not something that was done before, but [has become] very important on what we do now.”
Consumer acquisition & retention in 2022 and beyond
While overcoming each of the hurdles in their industries, marketing leaders agree that staying on top of the game is all about being continuously aligned to the shifts – from the minute to the massive transitions – in consumer and market behavior.
HappyFresh’s David Lim believes that we cannot apply the same methods of acquisition anymore, and in 2022, one of the beliefs and assumptions that their team has is things would not be the same as pre-covid.
“Every country has [its] own announcement, every country has [its] own waves of covid with different government announcements. I think when it comes to the topic of acquisition, everything has to be extremely localized,” said Lim.
Building trust among consumers also remains a vital factor in the consumer engagement journey, says Katherine Cheung, CMO of edtech Snapask.
“One key factor that we have in Snapask on user retention and how to retain customers to our platform is of course by building trust. We have to bear in mind that since the pandemic, people have so much more free time, as most of the regions are still experiencing lockdown and they are not allowed to go out from time to time. We have to bear in mind that users have so much more time to invest in your product,” Cheung said.
FairPrice’s Vivek Kumar’s advice to leaders, “As a marketing leader, we need to create that vision and then keep people involved in the journey, so that becomes their objective and their mission and not just [acting according to] marketing teams’ wishlist – the moment that silo happens, we have lost the battle.”
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