Singapore – Marketing reports are aimed at giving a holistic view of a particular trend or landscape in the industry, but this time, MARKETECH APAC, in partnership with IAS, presents a comprehensive and targeted study that eyes to inform the community of consumers’ overall social media usage as well as their perception and receptivity towards in-feed advertising.
In-feed ads are a format inside a user’s social feed. ‘Social Ads and Consumer Perception study – Singapore Edition’ aims to provide readers with the current behaviour and perception of Singaporean consumers towards social media and more specifically, in-feed ads.
The report is based on a survey of over 500 Singapore consumers and vows to shed light on topics like the effect of fake news on consumers’ trust towards ads, the effect of the placement of content together with brand’s ads, and the consequence of the context of a particular ad on brand favorability and intent to purchase.
“Social media has become a mainstream platform for advertisers to engage with the online consumers. This report shows that nearly nine out of ten online Singaporeans have engaged with an ad on social media in the past year, and that six out of ten feel favourable towards brands with contextually relevant messaging. Social media consumers are discerning about ad adjacencies and brands must make sure that their ads are contextually relevant. While 67% of consumers hold social media platforms responsible for ads appearing near unsafe content, it is equally important that brands take the onus and direct their agency partners to help them align with what’s relevant and avoid unsuitable content. A key aspect of this is working with a trusted media quality partner,” said Laura Quigley, SVP for APAC at IAS.
Meanwhile, Shaina Teope, regional editor of MARKETECH APAC, said, “When it comes to knowing what effectively draws consumers to a particular marketing campaign, it’s always the little things that matter. Because when they are taken care of, objectives of brand awareness and brand favourability come as a natural progression. This report helps break the puzzle out of delivering in-feed ads by looking into what consumers think of this format.”
Singapore –MARKETECH APAC, the digital media dedicated to the marketing and advertising industry in APAC, will be presenting a webinar this 6 April 2022, to discuss the latest trends in social advertising today.
Over the last two years, the social advertising landscape is transformed, giving birth to a new set of trends as well as forming new demands among consumers of social media. With this, MARKETECH APAC, in partnership with Smartly.io, aims to circle marketers back and uncover the present opportunities in social advertising in the region today through the webinar, ‘Social Advertising Trends in APAC 2022’, and identify the vital and proven strategies to recalibrate brands’ social advertising approaches to the current trends.
Participating in the panel discussion will be David Lim, VP of marketing of HappyFresh, and May Ling Chan, chief marketing officer of KFC Malaysia. Said marketing leaders will be discussing the focal points of the new social media advertising: what makes social media advertising fail, what are the pain points of delivering this type of advertising, and how important branding becomes in driving performance.
Meanwhile, Stewart Hunter, director for customer success for APAC at Smartly.io, will be presenting on the key trends in social advertising in the Asia-Pacific and how brands should respond to them.
“The social media landscape is ever-evolving, and what worked in 2021 may not work in 2022. From our annual survey with top CMOs, it’s clear that advertisers this year must juggle a constantly changing mix of social platforms, content formats and talent. Advertisers will need to embrace automation and new ways to communicate their message to consumers. Doing both will allow them to effectively drive multi-platform campaigns, with increased emphasis on video and UGC. We are excited to share some of these trends in our upcoming webinar, and provide some tips to help advertisers and brands in APAC get a head start and win in 2022, ” said Hunter.
Meanwhile, Shaina Teope, regional editor of MARKETECH APAC, said, “Social media pre-pandemic and now amid the pandemic have become two entirely different things, and in the most nuanced way. In these times, we need a consensus among marketing leaders on what has changed, on what has become the key opportunity and challenge, and how we can be further prepared on what’s to come next in this area.”
Join us in this webinar on 6 April 2022 at 11:00 am SGT. Secure your spot HERE.
This month, we saw how the community is eager to have a better year in marketing, with a slew of our What’s NEXT contributor pieces coming out on the list.
We launched What’s NEXT last December 2021 as a collection of thought leadership by marketers in the region in order to better equip the marketing industry with future-proof strategies for 2022.
This month, three of our top stories are all marketing leaders who shared their insights on various domains in marketing such as conversions, social advertising, and the metaverse.
Meanwhile, in the part of Southeast Asia, a tech-forward coffee brand emerges as one of the top for launching its new in-app delivery service in Singapore.
Coming out on the list is Charlotte Ward’s insight for What’s NEXT, the director of Agnes media. In her piece, she talks about the various ways brands can have better conversions this 2022.
In an interview with MARKETECH APAC, Ward shared that the very first step in generating more conversions is analytics.
“The very first step which is extremely important is for the brand to review the analytics, and really understand their customer journey,” said Ward.
“What people are engaging with, what are they converting on, what pages are driving the greatest results on-site – really getting a full understanding of the first interaction through the last interaction, and identifying where [are] these drop-offs, or if something’s working really well, “ she further shared.
Ward said that the next important step is researching and identifying different elements you can test on-site. According to her, these could entail shortening a landing page, changing colours, and testing different ways of communicating their product solution.
What’s NEXT: Why brands must adopt a multi-platform strategy for social advertising
One of our top stories for the month is the What’s NEXT article of Stewart Hunter, director for customer success of Smartly.io for APAC, where he shared the number one strategy on social advertising today: a multi-platform strategy.
In an interview, we asked what he thinks are the various ways brands can communicate effectively today, and he shared, that as a status quo, there are many choices now since there are a lot of channels that consumers are going to today for their digital lives, “looking at their phones.”
“Brand should really follow their consumer, and also adopt a mindset of trying to communicate [with] their consumer in a different way, depending on where they are within their social media, social advertising daily journey,” shared Hunter.
He said that different platforms will require brands to communicate in a different way
“you have to be across platforms, you have to be multi-platform, and you have to think individually about how you’re delivering advertising, delivering effective content on those individual platforms,” said Hunter.
This April 6, Hunter will be one of the speakers in our upcoming webinar, ‘Social Advertising Trends in APAC 2022’. David Lim, HappyFresh’s VP of marketing, and Chan May Ling, KFC Malaysia’s CMO, will be joining the panel.
What’s NEXT: How businesses and brands can thrive in Metaverse
What’sNEXT contributors are on a roll in this month’s top stories. Coming out as our top 2 is the insight of Cheelip Ong, chief creative officer of Lion & Lion, who shared his top pieces of advice on how businesses and brands can jump into and eventually thrive in the metaverse.
In an interview with MARKETECH APAC, he explained further one of the insights he imparted in the piece which is urging brands to move from being corporation-first to community-first.
“Most brands and organizations are conglomerates, they have an official brand agenda and brand purpose to push. But for brands to actually navigate the space on the metaverse wisely, they got to understand that metaverse will be a result of communities coming together,” he said.
Ong further shared that people will gravitate towards their interest points and their passion points and as a result, people in the metaverse will be leading double or triple lives where who you are in reality may not be who you represent in the metaverse because we’re all gonna have our avatars.
“We need to allow brands to understand that you need to hand the power back to the community, to engage the community so that the community can serve your purpose and they can believe your brand purpose and believe your agenda,” said Ong.
Flash Coffee launches new in-app delivery service in SG
For our Top 1 story for the month, we have coffee chain Flash Coffee which partnered with pandago, foodpanda’s on-demand express delivery service, to launch a new in-app delivery service for its Singapore customers.
The brand, which describes itself as a tech-enabled coffee chain, shared how it leverages tech for both on the consumer front and on the back end.
In an interview with Sahil Arora, Flash Coffee’s managing director, he shared, “At the same time that we allow consumers to order coffee for pick-up in 10 minutes, that’s also [a] trickling and [rippling] effect into our back end operations. Our baristas have a little bit more time to prepare drinks when orders are coming in ahead of time.”
Arora said that as peakiness is one of businesses’ biggest challenges, data it receives from the pick-up functionality allows them to know when orders are coming in the most, and in turn, helps them to inform their strategies.
“The most important way that tech is enabling our operations is through the wealth of information that we’re collecting, that we’re able to use and analyse to make smarter business decisions. For customers ordering through our app, we can ask and answer questions like, what customers are ordering in different areas of Singapore, what times of day, [and] typically, what drinks they are ordering,” said Arora.
“Delivery has become a way of life, whether it’s food, groceries, [or] coffee; so I think to be a tech-forward chain, delivery had to be part of the proposition,” he adds.
Watch our exclusive interviews with the brands themselves on the latest episode of MARKETECH APAC Top Stories, now live on our YouTube channel.
Singapore – MARKETECH APAC, the digital media for the marketing and advertising industry in APAC, has partnered with Braze,theglobal customer engagement platform, to launch the industry report on consumer engagement, ‘2022 Customer Engagement Review’, an overarching review of the current state of consumer engagement.
Combining data from the Braze platform, with the results from a survey of 1,500+ marketing decision-makers across 14 global markets, the report unveils macro trends within customer engagement that emerged in 2021, covers how customer engagement has evolved over the past year, and highlights opportunities for improvement and growth for 2022.
This is the second instalment of the annual report, and the latest edition assesses shifts in customer engagement trends over the past year, together with actionable insights on what to expect next year, and how brands can address evolving consumer needs, channel preferences, and privacy concerns. Furthermore, to inform the report, data were analysed from three different sources.
“The events of the past two years have fundamentally altered the way customers approach brand relationships. The bar for consumer expectations is at an all-time high,” said Bill Magnuson, co-founder and CEO of Braze.
Today’s brands are embracing customer engagement and it’s paying off. But as the bar for marketing experiences rises, how can your company keep up? The report breaks down findings across five different industries—financial services, health and wellness, media and entertainment, QSR and delivery, and retail and eCommerce—as well as regional breakouts for APAC, EMEA, and the US. Each industry and regional breakout also features a case study from a leading Braze customer, including Linkaja, The Coffee Club, and Mercari.
Notable findings include insights regarding the continued shift toward zero-party (i.e. shared by users) and first-party (i.e. gathered with user consent) data, the emergence of data management as a top challenge for brands, and the growth of brand confidence in their customer engagement abilities.
“For brands to rise to the occasion, they must focus on establishing a personal connection through customer engagement, and provide seamless communication across their preferred channels and platforms. Companies that fail to provide coordinated, cross-channel customer engagement strategies risk falling behind on business outcomes and revenue goals,” added Magnuson.
Shaina Teope, MARKETECH APAC’s regional editor, commented, “We’ve seen so many changes in the past two years since the pandemic began, and now that the ‘new normal’ has actually become our ‘norm’, we need to prepare ourselves on the challenges and opportunities arising from this new brand-consumer dimension. Overarching industry reports like the ‘2022 Customer Engagement Review’ are definitely a boon. Through this report, we will be better equipped on how to move forward in 2022, since the insights comprehensively look into the past, present, and future landscape of consumer engagement.“
Also included in ‘2022 Customer Engagement Review’ is the Braze Customer Engagement Index, a framework assessing brands in 12 competencies across two key axes—technology and teams—to put forward a model for best-in-class customer engagement. Each brand is then indexed on these factors and distributed across three maturity stages – Activate (least mature), Accelerate, and Ace (most mature). The index revealed overall positive momentum from last year, with many companies increasing their maturity and sophistication across all 12 customer engagement competencies.
Malaysia – Rich in culture with an open and diverse community, Malaysian consumers exhibit a unique set of values and behaviour. To conquer today’s Malaysian consumer in an increasingly competitive market, brands and companies must step up to learn every nook and cranny of what makes this market tick.
The pandemic had been the most significant shift in the market in the past two years. In finding new ways of engagement and gratification, consumers had to adapt, form new behaviours, and consequently, give birth to new trends and patterns.
According to the latest e-conomy report by Google, Temasek, and Bain & Company, there have been three million new digital consumers in Malaysia since the start of Covid. This signals that Malaysians are now recognizing a whole new need and, therefore, will expend their attention and energy on an entirely new space – digital – and more specifically, e-commerce.
Recognizing this, affiliate marketing Commission Factory and MARKETECH APAC have teamed up topresent the Malaysia Market Insight 2022, which delivers to be the extensive one-stop report that brands and industry players can refer to in order to get ahead of the game and win today’s Malaysian consumer – to do the right thing, be at the right place, and at the right time.
“The e-commerce market in Malaysia is large and one of the fastest growing digital economies in SEA. Businesses aiming for successful expansion into the Malaysian market should prepare themselves with cultural and economic insights to help learn about the market and localise themselves. Our report is a great tool for businesses to better understand how to unlock the market’s potential, from both retailer and affiliate partner point of view,” said Amanda Calkins, publisher development team lead at Commission Factory.
The Malaysia Market Insight 2022 combines and makes sense of leading local and regional statistics and insights to deliver a deep dive into Malaysian consumer behaviour and helps companies reach this diverse market in the most authentic and effective way possible.
This report is specially designed for e-commerce retailers that want a snapshot of the Malaysian market. It is also suitable for brands wanting to venture inside the Malaysian market and those currently operating in the market itself; moreover, the report looks at the Malaysia affiliate and partnership landscape.
The report is divided into two main parts: ‘Malaysian Values’ and ‘Shopping Habits’. ‘Malaysian Values’ guides not just local but also international brands to be culturally aligned with the market, while ‘Shopping Habits’ looks at the main themes of Malaysians’ consumption preferences.
Some of the top values that Malaysians hold dear are ‘Face’, the value of appropriateness; the importance of group considerations – collectivism over individualism; and also the strength of ‘social hierarchy’ where age, education, as well as the assets one possesses determine how one treats another.
On ‘Shopping habits’, the report tackles how Malaysians are weighing their options online vs offline and how cross-border e-commerce is growing massively in importance to the market. The report also discusses seasonality as a constant vital feature of Malaysian shoppers’ journey, with the country inherently having a multitude of holidays in a year.
MARKETECH APAC’s Editor Shaina Teope comments, “With the fast changes this pandemic, consumers’ needs and demands have become more nuanced, begging for a more granular approach from brands. This is where the importance of targeted and overarching reports like the Malaysian Market Insight comes into play. The report takes a 360-degree view of the Malaysian consumer, looking at the values and culture shaping him, and how this affects the way he lives out his consumption patterns.”
Manila, Philippines – MARKETECH APAC, the digital media for the marketing and advertising industry in the APAC region, has recently inked a partnership with the Communication and Media program of Centro Escolar University (CEU), one of the highly respectable universities in the Philippines, to officially groom media and communications majors for the professional world through a special internship program.
Joven Barceñas, the founder of MARKETECH APAC, and who is in fact, a proud alumnus of the university, has officially signed a Memorandum of Agreement (MOA) with the university on 2 February, to onboard media and communications students into the company and have them foray into their professional experience.
Present in the virtual signing are Ricky Rosales, program head for Communication and Media at CEU Manila; Marietta Alvarez, the program head for Communication and Media at CEU Malolos; and most especially, Dr. Maria Rita D. Lucas, the dean of the School of Education, Liberal Arts, Music and Social Work at CEU; and Dr. Ma. Cristina D. Padolina, CEU’s university president and chief academic officer.
Lucas said in the virtual event that the university is always glad to witness students come in full circle – from graduating to the university, establishing their own endeavours, and then coming back to their roots to give back the school that moulded them; just like what Barceñas has presently done.
“And then finally helping us with the goal that we have of forming and moulding our students to be quality and ethical communication practitioners,” said Lucas.
Barceñas, who founded MARKETECH APAC in the middle of the pandemic in 2020, shared, “When I launched MARKETECH APAC in 2020, there were so many aspirations and dreams that I thought of and planned. And one of them is to reach out to my alma mater, Centro Escolar University and offer internship opportunities to Escolarians and be instrumental in their professional development as they prepare to embark on a new and exciting chapter of their lives.”
“Today is an exciting moment for me as the founder of MARKETECH APAC as this partnership allows me to contribute to the skills development of the new generation of communication and media professionals in the country,” added Barceñas.
Padolina, CEU’s university president, shared how she has seen the internship experience becoming a substantial credential in undergraduates’ curriculum vitae and therefore expects the new partnership with MARKETECH APAC to be more than just an academic requirement, but a genuine source of professional development for students.
Padolina comments, “It’s very good to partner with somebody who is from CEU because we know that you know the philosophy of CEU, [and] you know the values that we want to cultivate. So we’re very confident that you would be able to give a very good experience to our students so that it’s not [just] something [that is] a line in their CV, but it really is a strong contribution to their entire experience and to what they bring to their profession.”
Rosales, meanwhile, shared how timely the partnership is, especially since during this period, classes are still implemented virtually in the Philippines, which makes it much more challenging to deploy students for their internship program.
“[We were asking] where will we partner during this time that we will have a virtual OJT (on-the-job training). We don’t want to you know, compromise our students with other companies that [don’t] have [a] purely online [setting] during this time,” said Rosales.
Over the past two years, the pandemic has transformed the consumer, the brand, and the advertiser. The absence of physical interactions created a ripple of massive changes that have either brought sectors down to their knees, or proved to be a boon for others.
If anything, the upcoming year is presenting a better promise for business as social restrictions further ease down and travel reopens. But despite this remains the challenge of unearthing and uncovering who the consumer will be – What will please him and what will fall off his radar?
MARKETECH APAC, the digital media who itself was born in the mid of the pandemic, aims to take the intimidation off the new year and instead help marketers focus on the potentials for innovation through the thought leadership series, ‘What’s NEXT’.
What’s NEXT is a collection of expert insights by marketing leaders which aims to present predictions and insights on forecasted trends in 2022 and help future-proof brands’ strategies coming into the new year.
“As a watchdog and a dedicated content hub for the industry, we know how fluid trends in this part of the world could be. Metaphorically speaking, we want to hold marketers’ hands and be with them as we step into a new chapter in this global situation, and see how the pandemic – now endemic – will change the way brands and consumers interact with each other,” said Shaina Teope, regional editor of MARKETECH APAC.
The series which ran from December 2021 to February 2022 gathered marketing leaders coming from different domains to present ideas on how to stay ahead of the marketing game this 2022.
Check out the full line-up of insights by marketing leaders under the series:
In the recent webinar by MARKETECH APAC on the future of digital marketing in the Philippines, AirAsia PH’s Head of Marketing Allenie Caccam; Anvey Factora, the head of marketing communications, e-commerce, and retail at Canon Philippines; and Mark De Joya, chief operating officer of Max’s Restaurant – all agreed on one personalization strategy that would remain constant in relevance no matter what the changes the new year will bring to the market and the consumer.
It’s now no question that any platform or tech that help push brands’ digitization further is worth being the centerpiece of brands’ marketing strategies. Don Lee, the managing director of CMS provider Magnolia for APAC dug a little deeper on how DXP, specifically a composable DXP, can best help brands not just adapt to the changes in the consumer today, but how such type of platform can
Travis Teo, executive director of adtech adzymic, shared the different possible hindrances that are keeping brands from providing optimum digital creatives – and deep dived on the root cause of all of them.
In this read, Shellie Vornhagen the CXO at CX platform Emplifi, enumerates the ways CX is going to transform itself as newer trends firm up in the market in 2022, such as social commerce, conversational chatbots, and most especially, metaverse.
In the pilot article under the series, we roped in Loyalty & Growth Leader Henry Christian to talk about how on-demand businesses, which has surged in need among consumers during the pandemic, can leverage their present demand to deliver highly-retaining and -converting loyalty programs.
Who better to share insights on forming the best content marketing strategy coming into 2022 than a marketing leader from leading Asian news publication South China Morning Post. Its Regional Sales Director for APAC Darryl Choo shared how brands can refresh their content marketing strategies, imparting helpful insights on how to successfully work from internal process to delivery.
We have become mobile-first even before the pandemic struck, but with stronger demand for fast and on-demand shopping experiences by the consumer, the mobile platform is now opening up more greenfield opportunities for brands to explore and innovate. Check out the thought leadership piece by Karam Malhotra, global VP at SHAREit Group.
When Google earlier announced that it will be phasing out cookies by 2022, the advertising community was brought to a standstill, suddenly overcome by the urgency to re-calibrate ad targeting strategies Then the community had some kind of dejavu when this was further delayed to 2023, providing a breather but at the same time asking of brands and advertisers to do better in their preparations. Let this insight on cookies by Cheetah Digital’s Billy Loizou, further add to your cognizance on dealing with a cookieless digital environment as there is no such thing as overpreparation.
David Harling, the managing director of MoneySmart, touches base on the state of growth marketing now that we are about to navigate a digital world without cookies. His top piece of advice – brands may want to lessen dependence on acquisition as this will start to cost more in the efforts to scale.
Metaverse is now taking the digital world by storm, and marketers are at a great position to leverage this platform to turbocharge brand engagement – but how does one start? Cheelip Ong, Lion & Lion’s regional chief creative officer, shared how metaverse can be the implementation ground for other emerging trends in marketing such as NFTs and gamification
Of course with the surge in digital activity this pandemic tags along the supercharged growth of digital finance. Superapps in SEA is leading the way with financial services, becoming the anchor by which consumers can have a brand as top-of-mind across all services. UM APAC’s Elizabeth Shie and Abygayle Brani share the ways fintech marketers can leverage its growth this 2022.
According to Stewart Hunter, the director of Smartly.iofor customer success in APAC, each social media platform has grown to serve a different role in the funnel, posing a challenge to the brand message and format in various platforms. Hunter shares why brands must start adopting a multi-platform strategy for their social advertising and where to begin in their efforts.
Whether you’re an online retailer, a startup with a valuable B2B product, or an entrepreneur selling your expertise, CRO could be the key to a bigger profit margin in 2022. Charlotte Ward, the director of Agnes media, shares her top three pieces of advice in achieving greater conversions.
In narrowing the gap between commerce and consumer, big brands are moving from a publisher model into an e-commerce one. Sven Lung, CEO of Green Park Content, takes a look at some of the best case studies of previously launched shoppable content initiatives and shares how brands can successfully deliver said efforts on their own.
What’s the next phase of influencer marketing? We’ve seen the power of influencers in brands’ marketing in the past period, and now, we need to prepare for what’s to come next in this area. Ace Gapuz, CEO of Blogapalooza, shares what she believes the 5 forces that will drive influencer marketing forward – including the phenomenon that will start streating content creators as individual media companies.
How has the pandemic changed the youth? In this insight, Lesley John, the MD of Virtue for APAC, shares the consumption and lifestyle changes that have occured among Gen Zs and Millennials in the past two years, and shares how brands can get under the skin of this cohort moving forward in the pandemic.
BNPL services have increased in adoption in the past year with the pandemic seeing a surge of consumers jumping into digital consumption. Moving forward in 2022, Jeremy Wong, head of strategic partnerships at Atome, shares the ways BNPL is expected to evolve, and what retailers can do to leverage its power in enabling sales among merchants.
As consumers become more conscious about their impact to society, they have grown to demand more accountability from the brands they consume. Mel Panabi, business director of Red Havas Philippines, shares on what has become of this new resolve and how brands must act in accordance to this new value-laden consumer behavior.
Virtual events are here to stay, and it’s time we step up these online interactions beyond standard online meetings and gatherings into something more powerful. According to Cathy Song Novelli, SVP for marketing and communications at Hubilo, it’s about creating a supportive ecosystem to enable innovation among event marketers.
Ride-hailing services is no longer a luxury and the pandemic has further pushed for its value with the recurring limitations on social interaction. Ryde’s CEO Terence Zou and PR Lead Katrina Adrianne takes a look at this transformation over the past two years and shares what we can expect from the industry as we move forward in 2022.
When food aggregators cushioned the downward growth of dine-in during Covid, it has gradually stepped up from being an afterthought to becoming F&B players’ top business model. KFC Malaysia’s CMO May Ling Chan reviews the current opportunities and challenges as brands further strengthen their strategies on food aggregators.
Connected TV (CTV) and over-the-top (OTT) has overtaken the linear TV experience over the past two years. Laura Quigley, SVP for APAC at IAS, talks about what has been these changes in media consumption and the opportunities that lie for advertisers and publishers in programmatic technology.
If you are a marketing leader and would like to share your insights and predictions under the series, email us at [email protected].
Last 2 December, MARKETECH APAC, in partnership with Adzymic, gathered marketing leaders from top brands in the Philippines to discuss the future of personalization in marketing in 2022.
Moderated by Marilyn Romero-Ventenilla, senior director for communications and marketing at Teleperformance Philippines, the panel roped in Allenie Caccam, head of marketing of AirAsia Philippines; Anvey Factora, the head of marketing communications, e-commerce and retail at Canon Philippines; and Mark De Joya, chief operating officer of Max’s Restaurant.
Data – leveraging it to learn and adapt to the nuances of the consumer – this is what all marketers agree as the sureshot personalization strategy that will sail brands in the right direction, no matter what the changes will be in 2022.
Factora of Canon Philippines said in the panel that planning way too ahead would turn counterproductive to the situation at hand since the consumer is rapidly changing in tandem with the fast shifts in the pandemic. Coming up with multiple strategies then would be the best approach.
“I think the best approach or strategy is to come up with multiple strategies that you can realistically activate in this constantly evolving world that we all have right now because at the end of the day, if you plan in advance, maybe a year, it may not be as effective as it could be in the next three weeks or two weeks because of all the lockdowns happening, because of all these pandemic variants coming into the picture,” said Factora in the panel.
When the pandemic struck in 2020, Canon Philippines greeted a boulder of a challenge with the creative and imaging industry being one of the badly hit industries. Since local travel came to a halt and events all pivoted to virtual, there had been less reasons for people to buy and invest in imaging products.
Caccam of AirAsia Philippines, on the other hand, shared what the airline industry had to deal with in order to retain consumers amid shut local and international travel. Being a highly regulated sector, Caccam shared that answering to multiple stakeholders became a top challenge for AirAsia. Aside from thinking of ways to keep the airline in consumers’ top-of-mind, it also inevitably carried the responsibility to build up the confidence of travelers as travel gradually reopens.
“So when the pandemic hit, everything was constantly changing; from safety protocols to travel regulations, imagine the coordination that needed to happen for us to personalize our marketing efforts. It was definitely a challenge.”
Max’s restaurant, a well-known local F&B brand in the Philippines, meanwhile, was thrust fast into digital transformation during the pandemic. Its COO Mark De Joya on the panel shared that from being an analog brand, it has become something that is very much reliant on digital fulfillment.
Leveraging data acquisition in 2022
With the consumer now becoming more unpredictable due to the rapid changes in lifestyle, it demands brands be more granular and targeted in their approaches; and marketing leaders agree that this can be achieved by continuously obtaining real-time data.
Caccam said, “I think personalization based on data will help us offer the right product at the right time [and] at the right price. So this is hard but by listening to customer pain points from different channels and combining it with data trends, I think brands can stay relevant.”
Moving forward in the pandemic, consumers would be zeroing in on brands that bring greater convenience considering the inevitable distress the current situation is causing them. With this, Caccam also believes being a one-stop-shop for customers would be a crucial determinant of how they choose what brands to trust.
“So it’s really creating that personalized trust and being a one-stop-shop for your customers especially because I’m in the airline industry and you know our product is basically really good service, so I think that’s one personalization strategy that I would stick with coming into 2022 which is a recovery period for our industry,” said Caccam.
This is also something that De Joya agrees with, especially that Max’s is part of a larger group together with local and franchised F&B brands.
“Personalization comes from having more and more parts to stitch together and with the array of brands we have, covering separate cohorts and different territorial strengths [has grown in importance],” said De Joya.
De Joya adds how the current times present a good opportunity to experiment combining brands, or for that matter, services together in order to create a new value for consumers.
“We have such a great opportunity here to blend our brands together and make sure that if I’m not eating Sinigang today and I want to eat pizza tomorrow, and I want donuts on the weekend, [we] are able to blend together the branded offerings,” said De Joya.
De Joya further comments, “So our definition of personalization here is understanding that there is more to life than the dish in front of you or the particular dish that we’re craving. It’s an integrated ecosystem of different brands which leads to several service platforms that we had to come up with…just to be able to make sure that we’re all able to offer that variety.”
While on the maturity of data acquisition, De Joya says, “I think [data] is something that we have truly invested many resources into. We really [are] able to identify the nuances in the behavior of our customers now not just the basic stuff like frequency, recency, [or] basket size but even trying to get the nuances [such as] what sort of dishes do they favor [and] what are the cross-brand usages that they have.”
With this, Factora agrees, “Data remains to be king when you [personalize] campaigns. You have to understand really how your customers are, how the data would be helpful to that campaign. I think the best approach in terms of creating a holistic strategy towards personalization is number one, properly understand your data. Having the right platform is important [together with the] right message and right channel.”
The panel was part of the webinar What’s NEXT: Digital Marketing in the Philippines which was held last 2 December 2021. Register here to gain on-demand access.
———
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.
Manila, Philippines – The pandemic has turned the way brands engage with consumers on its head. With people cooped up in their homes, digital has not only become the platform to deliver creative and interactive experiences but has become the channel that answers best to consumers’ bounds and capabilities in a physically-challenged environment.
The question now is what’s next for digital marketing? How do we go from here and what future trends in digital marketing must brands set their eyes on?
With a brand new year fast approaching, MARKETECH APAC, the digital publication dedicated to the marketing and ad industry in the Asia-Pacific, is launching a webinar for the Philippines that aims to give brands a headstart on the next big thing in digital marketing and what marketers and advertisers can do to stay on top of the game in 2022 and beyond.
Gathering an esteemed group of marketing leaders from top Philippine brands AirAsia, Canon Philippines, and Max’s Restaurant, the webinar ‘What’s NEXT: Digital Marketing in the Philippines’aims to present a future-oriented conversation on digital marketing strategies with a unique perspective from the Philippine industry.
The panel which includes Allenie Caccam, head of marketing at AirAsia Philippines; Anvey Factora, head of marketing communications, e-commerce and retail, of Canon Philippines; and Mark De Joya, chief operating officer of Max’s Restaurant, will be discussing the state of personalization, the heart of every creative and strategic digital marketing implementation, in the new normal and the next.
The panel discussion will be moderated by Marilyn Romero-Ventenilla, senior director for communications and marketing of Teleperformance Philippines.
Romero-Ventenilla commented, “In today’s world where physical distance does not mean customers and brands need to be socially and emotionally distant from each other, seamless interaction and meaningful personalized experiences will be key. Innovations around digital marketing will allow organizations to deliver services and interactions tailored to the needs of the market anytime, anywhere.”
The said marketing leaders will be going back to the ‘why’ of personalization and trace it from there – which personalization strategies work best for Philippine consumers and what comes next for the future of personalization. Most of all, leaders will be unraveling the best practices and fitting plans of action for brands to adapt to these foreseen changes.
Travis Teo, the co-founder and executive director of adtech Adzymic, will be giving a presentation on the role of technology in delivering engaging creatives and how to best harness present advancements in adtech for optimal campaign performance.
Teo commented,“The programmatic media space is one where audience targeting can be highly specific, and campaign performance determined by the richness of data available for machines to learn and improve. To thrive in this environment, it is important to consider using adtech to scale up on creative personalization and format variants for testing and optimization. We look forward to discussing some of these creative strategies with the Filipino marketing community at our upcoming forum.”
Meanwhile, Shaina Teope, MARKETECH APAC’s regional editor, said, “Digital is now deeply ingrained in consumers’ lives and while brands and marketers have at this point penetrated the interactive platform, the question to be answered now is, what should brands do next to stay within digital consumers’ radar? This industry conversation aims to help firm up their foresight into 2022 and beyond.”
‘What’s NEXT: Digital Marketing in the Philippines’ is open to all marketers and advertisers looking to get actionable insights and expert guidance on how to future-proof their digital marketing strategies this 2022 and beyond. The webinar is also dedicated to any brand eyeing to enter and win in the Philippine market.
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.”
We use cookies to improve your experience and to analyse our traffic. To find out more, please click here. By continuing to use our website, you accept our Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions. Cookie settingsACCEPT
Privacy & Cookies Policy
Privacy Overview
This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these cookies, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may have an effect on your browsing experience.
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.
