Tag: Japan

Hong Kong – Canada-headquartered customer experience management (CXM) and insights platform Alida has expanded its Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) team to build on its existing regional presence and propel further growth in the CXM industry.

Formerly named Vision Critical, Alida is a global platform that offers both CXM and extraction of insights and feedback. Its products offer brands a number of use cases such as customer journey, customer satisfaction and advocacy, marketing and advertising, and product and UX design across a broad range of industries.

The firm recently appointed its general manager for APJ, former CEO of IT firm NTT Steven Medeiros, and along with Medeiros’, its several appointments of senior industry leaders in the region support its expansion to drive new growth while making additional investments in its clients’ success and partner ecosystems. 

“We are seeing unprecedented demand from clients and partners seeking enterprise technology, industry expertise, and a high touch, localized delivery model. We will continue to invest in great people to better serve our clients and partners across Asia Pacific and Japan.” said Medeiros.

Phillip Walsh, former regional vice president for APJ at Texas-based computer software company Kony, joins the team as general manager for Australia, New Zealand, and Pacific. Walsh brings over 19 years of CRM sales experience, with leadership positions at Atomic Software, BMC Software, Pegasystems, and IBM Australia. In his role at Alida, Walsh will focus on formulating strategy and growing business in ANZ.

Jodarna Meade has been appointed as head of customer success for the APJ region. Meade brings over 20 years of experience and previously led Alida’s sales operations, partner ecosystems, and customer success management in North America recently relocating back to Asia Pacific region. Prior to joining Alida, Meade spent a decade leading marketing at Lendlease. 

Karen Lo joins the APJ team as head of marketing to further expand client and partner growth in the region. Lo’s decade of experience in leading corporate communications and marketing for Dimension Data and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, will strengthen Alida’s pipeline and revenue growth and expand brand presence across APJ.

Wingsan Lun, senior sales executive of APJ, joins the team to lead sales and growth for APJ. With more than 20 years of experience in Temenos, Adobe, and Salesforce.com, he brings deep expertise in digital marketing and customer experience. Lun will support the growth of Alida’s customer base in the region and support its clients to uncover the power of customer truth in their businesses.

Uma Jain, partner manager at APJ, brings over 18 years of experience in business development and execution of global go-to-market strategies for acquiring new clients and partners. Jain previously held senior management positions at Kore.ai, OutSystems, and Kony. She will support the growth of Alida’s global and partner ecosystem.

Jagan Sivanesan, the new principal solution engineer, has joined Alida to lead the regional APJ solution engineering team. Sivanesan brings over 16 years of engineering experience developing state-of-the-art software experiences, high-growth technology companies, such as Kony and Wipro Technologies.

“I’m thrilled to have assembled this powerhouse team of proven technology experts to drive our growth in APJ. Each leader brings unique expertise that is fundamental in propelling our business to the forefront of the CXM industry in Asia Pacific and Japan,” said Medeiros.

He added, “Their collective wealth of experience will drive our next phase of growth in the region. Our priority as a team is to know our customers and put them first.”

Manila, Philippines – “Designing the overall digital experience while creating magic in the details.”

The phrase, defining interaction design as a separate entity of user experience design, is a perfect summary of how new experiences can be developed out of ambiguity, as explained in one of UXPH Conference 2020’s lightning talks titled “Designers as Enablers of Change”.

Presented by Daisuke Yukita, one of global design firm IDEO Tokyo’s interaction designers, the talk centers on the importance of creating meaningful designs that speak to customer experience and accessibility. Furthermore, Yukita stresses the importance of bringing the stakeholders on board to further understand the design process and achieve change.

UXPH2020ConferenceSnapshots

“We should try as much as possible the stakeholders along the design process, and it’s not just the furnished parts, it’s also the messy parts. We need to learn to embrace that effort and time that it may take because it does lead to a bigger impact,” Yukita stated.

During the talk, he also narrates various instances that interaction design has led to a ‘golden age’ of small yet meaningful designs, from micro-features like Recycle Bin and right click, to more meaningful and interactive projects from ‘Remote High Five’ to creating a school from the ground-up.

While often met with ambiguous questions from clients on solving business problems, Yukita notes that most of them change from “I wish it was…” to “How it can be changed…”, all thanks to a diversity of effort.

“There are designers like interaction designers, communication designers, mechanical engineers, and business designers. It’s not just that, there are people from all sorts of backgrounds and careers, like physicians or musicians or food scientists. With these amazing people, we practice design thinking.”

Another key takeaway from the talk is that the design process is, and should be focused on the lens of the people.

“Always think in the lens of the people. When you create something new, you need to think of it from a business sense, which would be the viability; the technology lens, the feasibility, and the people lens, the desirability. You all make the key decisions with the people in the center of the design process.”

Daisuke Yukita, Interaction Designer at IDEO Tokyo

Yukita concludes his talk by adding that aside from taking stakeholders on board, designers must also provide rationale for future processes and create outputs that are distributive

MARKETECH APAC is an official media partner at the UXPH Conference 2020: Designers as Navigators of Change, which was held from November 14 to 15, 2020. 

London – The ongoing global pandemic has created varied consumer impacts and reactions within the consumer base within the Chinese and Japanese markets, recent statistics from consulting firm Ernst & Young show.

In their latest “EY Future Consumer Index,” the report showed contrasting behaviors on pandemic impact on consumer behavior and everyday life. Chinese consumers showed more optimism that the pandemic fear will fade off, as 46% of the respondents say the fear will only last about one to six months. On the other hand, Japanese consumers were less optimistic, with 66% of the respondents saying that the fear will last for about a year or more.

With a significant increase in consumers shifting to online shopping, Chinese consumers are very likely to show interest in online shopping, with appliances and technology-related items being the top shopping choice.

On the other hand, Japanese consumers’ behavior tends to lean more to a “normalization” perspective, which accounted for the top consumer trend in the country.

Andrew Cosgrove, EY global consumer knowledge leader, notes that such mixed consumer behavior means that the future of shopping means transitioning to online channels.

“This points to the risk of showrooming, with consumers going to stores to touch and feel the product for the experience but then making purchases online where products might be cheaper. Retailers and consumer product companies will need to ensure they have both seamless omnichannel experience and the stock and price point needed to make the sale,” Cosgrove stated.

Singapore – France-based ad-tech company Criteo has announced its third Japan-based data center based in the capital city of Tokyo, and aims to follow the rule on corporate responsibility by making its newest data center equipped to standards of green-based energy.

Upon migration, the Japan market will be the company’s largest data center within the APAC region. Being the largest market outside of the United States, the company aims to diversify its reach within the North Asia region, particularly in Japan and Korea.

Aside from being equipped with the company’s basic services for premium ad services and inventories, the newest data center’s facilities are based on using less power and less CO2 emissions. Features such as 25Gbps connection interfaces, faster and large servers are some of the new inclusions in the new green-based data center.

“Criteo is conscious of its environmental footprint and our IT infrastructure team has always had this in mind as we look at improving our data centers. By using leading technology combined with sustainable practices, our powerful data centers around the world can support up to 2.8 trillion bid requests per week, evaluate over 64 million campaigns per second, and accumulate 700 TB data per day,” said Diarmuid Gill, Criteo’s chief technology officer. 

In a statement, Megan Clarken, chief executive officer at Criteo stated that the company’s newest data center launch is in response also with the positive growth of the ad industry in Japan.

“Rapid increases have been noted for transactions of programmatic ads and Real-Time Bidding (RTB). We continue to diversify our solutions and invest in upgrading our infrastructure and R&D to provide better service and performance to our clients. As a green-energy based data center, it demonstrates our commitment to being a socially responsible company, caring for our environment and society,” Clarken stated.

Singapore – With a goal towards a larger ad market target, Singapore-based ad-tech company Adzymic has joined hands with branding and ad-tech firms in Thailand, Hong Kong and Japan to bring its full suite of dynamic creative solutions to advertisers. This comes after the company’s  expansion to Australia and India in 2019.

One of the company’s flagship advertisement solutions is the ‘Dynamic Creative Management Platform’ which functions as advertising transformation of physical to digital media, such as banners, carousel ads and social display ads, allowing advertisers to create ads without the need for coding experience. The company also offers a ‘Smart Tag’ technology, which enables advertisers to create personal ads through behavior tracking, machine learning algorithms, and updates.

For Hong Kong and Thailand, the company has officially tied up with Maadtech Global, a programming integrator solutions company, while also partnering with another Thai firm Spikebrand, a branding solutions company. Meanwhile for its Japan expansion, a collaboration has been forged with Atlas Associates, a local-based ad-tech startup focused on social networking site (SNS) management tools.

“Asia is expected to surpass North America as the biggest ad spender globally by 2021. 4 Japan, Hong Kong and Thailand are very exciting for us, both from a creative and growth perspective. They are known for their incredibly creative ads, and together with our partners’ local knowledge and network, we will deliver high impact campaigns with brands and agencies,” said Kenniess Wong, co-founder and executive director of Adzymic.

Adzymic, since its founding, has been involved with large brand partnerships, including DBS, Sony Pictures, Toyota and Esplanade Singapore.