Marketing Leader Archives - MARKETECH APAC

Singapore – Online delivery platform foodpanda has announced the appointment of Jaslin Goh as its new vice president of marketing for APAC.

Based in Hong Kong, Goh will be taking over from Anna Znamenskaya, and will be reporting to John Fang, CEO of foodpanda.

In her new role, Goh will be heading the regional marketing function and will be working closely with local marketing directors to drive growth and brand love across Asia.

Taking up this role with over 20 years of experience, Goh was previously the chief marketing officer for mobile payment service PayMe at HSBC, heading the marketing, design and customer experience functions.

Prior to that, she also held senior marketing positions in HSBC’s Wealth & Personal Banking function, WeLab, and Shangri-La Group.

Speaking on her own appointment, Goh said, “I’m super excited to join the Foodpanda family with its unique blend of Tech x qcommerce x F&B across 11 strong and flavorful markets. Food reflects the soul and unique idiosyncrasies of each market. I’m proud to become part of a business where we bring food and people together, through technology, yet in a grassroot, grounded way and is the glue for the cultural fabric for Asia’s best cities.”

Sydney, Australia – Australian customer engagement platform Komo Technologies has recently appointed data-driven marketing specialist, Simon Rollenbeck as head of marketing.

In his new role at Komo Technologies, Rollenbeck will play a key role in shaping Komo’s brand position, demand generation and overall GTM (Go To Market) strategy, leading the company’s global marketing efforts to accelerate growth in Australia and the USA.

A data-driven B2B SaaS marketing expert with a passion for technology, Rollenbeck brings with him more than eight years of leadership experience, in positions across start-ups and Fortune 500 companies.

Specifically, Rollenbeck comes from Mozaik Play, where he was chief marketing officer. In a previous role, he also headed up the marketing team for Expedia’s corporate travel division in the Asia Pacific region and managed a high-performing regional marketing team with a focus on growth and customer retention. He has also worked at Willow, where he was director of digital & demand marketing.

Speaking on his new role, Rollenbeck said, “I am beyond excited to join the incredible team here at Komo Technologies at a time of tremendous tailwinds and momentum behind the company. Establishing a direct customer relationship is crucial for brands to stay relevant now more than ever, especially amid evolving privacy regulations, marketing limitations and an ever decreasing attention span.”

Meanwhile, Joel Steel, CEO and co-founder at Komo, commented, “Simon’s strategic expertise and experience in the B2B SaaS marketing space are pivotal for advancing Komo’s brand, demand generation, and Go-To-Market strategy. Simon’s passion for creativity and forward-thinking aligns perfectly with our company’s culture, and we are excited to see the impact he will have on our global growth strategy.”

USA – Global digital experience management platform Sitecore has recently announced the appointment of Kathie Johnson as its new chief marketing officer, wherein she will be leading marketing for the platform based out of the firm’s headquarters in San Francisco.

Prior to her appointment, Johnson served as the chief marketing officer of Talkdesk, where she led the firm’s marketing organisation through a transformative growth period, taking the company from 66th place in the Forbes Cloud100 list in 2019 to 8th place in 2022 and 2023.

As Talkdesk’s first CMO, Kathie helped the organisation create and launch a vertical approach, expand into new countries in EMEA, APAC and Latam, and extend the product portfolio.

In her 25 years in the industry, Johnson also worked at Salesforce, where she was the senior vice president of marketing, as well as the vice president of marketing for Salesforce’s Commerce Cloud.

Speaking on her own appointment, Johnson said, “I am excited to join Sitecore because of its innovative technology that is a true game changer for CMOs and CDOs who seek to differentiate their companies through superior digital experiences.”

“Sitecore is a leader in its space and continues to innovate by prioritising a roadmap focused on SaaS-based, cloud native tools built on composable architecture. I am thrilled to be part of Sitecore’s journey and look forward to working with our customers, partners, and employees around the globe,” she added.

Meanwhile, Steve Tzikakis, CEO of Sitecore, said, “Kathie’s track record as a marketing leader speaks for itself. Her formidable background securing brand expansion and delivering incredible digital experiences will massively contribute to Sitecore’s efforts to disrupt, accelerate and innovate digital experience delivery.”

“Sitecore’s compelling message offering SaaS-based, composable solutions will be greatly aided by this wonderful addition to our leadership. On behalf of Sitecore, we are thrilled to welcome Kathie to our team,” he concluded.

Philippines – Katrina Gonzalez has announced that she has been appointed by digital finance service Coins.ph as its new global marketing director. In an exclusive interview with MARKETECH APAC, Gonzalez said that for her new role, she would be generating awareness for Coins.ph on its operations and future expansions to provide more people with easy access to digital assets and innovations in the Web3 space.

Specifically, she will be prioritizing on educating users on how they can participate in the web3 ecosystem and the opportunities it creates, in a safe and secure manner.

“For web3 and crypto natives, we’ve got a lot of product launches in store to serve their rapidly evolving needs and cater to the various segments of the market spanning crypto traders, Web3 gamers, businesses, institutions, NFT collectors and more. So we want to do these justice by spreading awareness and making these accessible through education, promotions and community engagement,” Gonzalez told MARKETECH APAC.

Prior to her appointment, Gonzalez held key roles in indie Web3 game studios as the chief operating officer of Serriva Labs and the former head of operations of YGG Pilipinas for more than a year.

“With YGG, I was constantly exposed to the community of web3 gamers we served. Web3 gaming made a substantial impact on people’s lives in terms of access to earning opportunities, and their trust in YGG to help navigate this new world and provide education on cryptocurrency and financial management was top of mind. Hearing their experiences, successes, and passion to give back to help others too was an inspiration. I believe I learned more from them than they learned from me and I’m truly grateful for that,” stated Gonzalez when asked about her prior experience in the Web3 industry.

She also possesses a wide array of marketing leadership experience in banking and fintech firms, being the former chief marketing officer as well as the marketing and communications head of UnionDigital Bank and UnionBank respectively.

“At UnionBank, heading the marketing and communications team of the fintech group, this is where I saw a traditional bank evolve into one that was not only willing to innovate but also keen to work with what was then considered competitors – the fintechs. By enabling fintechs and collaborating with them to create solutions for customers, we were able to do more, for more people. At UnionDigital, I was part of the founding team that started the digital bank and learned how to build from scratch with the customer in mind – the underbanked and underserved,” she mentioned when asked about her previous roles in the field of banking.

Speaking on her own appointment, Gonzalez said, “Through all these roles, I’ve been lucky to work in organizations that pushed the boundaries of innovation to provide people with opportunities to uplift their lives – from web3 gaming to financial services. This is why I decided to join Coins.ph as we want to do the same thing in the digital asset space. I’ve learned through my prior roles, that it’s by keeping this mission in mind, day in and day out, that allows us to go beyond to serve the customer.”

When asked about the challenges and opportunities that the fintech industry will face for this year, she pointed out the emergence of fintech alternatives as something that could both be a challenge and an opportunity.

“For quite some time now, fintechs have been challengers to traditional financial services offered by banks and institutions. What we’re seeing emerge is that there are alternatives to fintechs coming from the web3 and digital asset space – from lending, savings and ways to earn – it will be interesting to see how fintechs either compete or collaborate with builders in web3. This is both a challenge and opportunity for fintechs,” she answered.

Gonzalez joins Coins.ph following its cryptocurrency partnerships with UnionBank, Globe, and the Philippine BasketBall Association.

Singapore – Following a slew of recent senior appointments, Bondee has just announced the appointment of Lionel Sim as head of commercial.

In this role, Sim will be managing all corporate partnerships and commercial initiatives, backing Bondee’s efforts to further drive engagement with users and brands across the region.

With a career spanning more than 15 years in digital media and advertising, Lionel has held key roles in global tech firms, including Apple, Tencent, and TikTok, that operate in a variety of markets such as Singapore, Japan, China, the United States, and Australia. His proficiency in English, Mandarin, and Bahasa Indonesia reflects also his cross-cultural competence, which has been instrumental in fostering collaboration with international teams.

Speaking on his new position, Sim said, “I’m really excited and grateful to be taking on this role at Bondee, which lines up perfectly with what I’m passionate about. I love building businesses and bringing communities together, and I’m looking forward to forging win-win partnerships that will add value and deliver joy to Bondee users. We are actively listening to customer feedback and embracing the opportunity to work hand in hand with partners to shape innovative commercial models together.”

Meanwhile, Fei Yu, the newly appointed CEO of Bondee, commented, “Lionel brings years of experience in establishing partnerships that drive growth for all partners, aligning perfectly with Bondee’s strategic goals. Bondee is super focused on hiring talented individuals who share our vision, and we believe Lionel will effectively leverage his extensive global background to build highly-valuable collaborations with businesses to drive monetization at Bondee.”

Singapore – Advertising agency McCann Worldgroup has announced the appointment of Shilpa Sinha as the new chief strategy officer of the APAC region.

In her new role at McCann Worldgroup Asia Pacific, Sinha will be taking the reins from former CSO Richard McCabe, and will be bringing her two decades of experience in marketing strategy to the table.

Sinha is an experienced global marketer and strategist with a strong track record working in major markets including India, UK, China and Russia, for agencies including Grey, FCB and Ogilvy. She served as Head of Strategy & Transformation for McCann Moscow before the agency closed its operations in Russia in 2022.

Sinha has also held a unique combination of senior roles in brand management at Unilever and strategic planning leadership at prominent agency networks, bearing experience in building leader and challenger brands across diverse categories, and even winning the first ever Gold Cannes Lion for any IPG agency in Russia.

Ghassan Harfouche, President of McCann Worldgroup Asia Pacific, said, “I’m so excited to have Shilpa move back to our region and know that her global experience and emphasis on effectiveness will add significantly to our client work.”

Meanwhile, Harjot Singh, global CSO of McCann Worldgroup commented, Having worked with Shilpa for six years, I’m thrilled that she is taking the baton. She has a proven track record in key global markets, including regional powerhouses, China and India, and combines creative smarts with rigour and passion. I can’t think of a better person to help our APAC brands earn a meaningful role in people’s lives.”

Speaking on her own promotion, Sinha stated, “After eight years away, I am excited to be back in vibrant Asia, one of the significant growth engines in the dynamically evolving world order. It’s amazing to have the opportunity to move within the McCann Worldgroup family and work on our incredible brands. I’m really looking forward to hitting the ground running.”

Manila, Philippines – Publicis Media Philippines has announced the appointment of Liam Capati as its new chief media officer. In his new role, Capati will focus on accelerating the growth of the media practice and driving consumer engagement for clients of Publicis Groupe.

He recently came out of a four-year stint with technology giant Meta, where he was the head of media for the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Vietnam.

Capati comes with extensive industry experience, deep understanding of critical market trends and developments especially on platforms, and expert capabilities to navigate the evolving new world of media spanning data, social, and commerce.

He started his career with Starcom as a student resident and joined full-time after graduation. With his exemplary work ethic and time-tested skills, he grew through the ranks rapidly in his more than 6 years with the agency.

Speaking on his new role, Capati said, “Coming full circle, I am delighted to be back where it all started – I genuinely look forward to helping build the next era of communications and media in the Philippines together with the leadership team at Publicis Groupe Philippines.”

Meanwhile, Raymond Arrastia, chairman of Publicis Groupe Philippines, commented, “It is great to have Liam back on our team. With his solid background and digital-first experience, we are confident he can effectively harness the power of data and technology in media to deliver the best possible solutions to our clients, brands, and businesses.”

The current agency leads of PGP Media include Miko Manolo, Cat de Leon-Vinuya and Christine Borillo; who will report to Capati and design the future of Publicis Media in the market together.

Singapore – One of the challenges of marketing teams is defending a budget’s suitability to proposed marketing plans. A recent study by professional networking platform LinkedIn revealed that in order to weather this perennial predicament, B2B CMOs, particularly those from the Singapore market, are aiming to become more ‘financially fluent’ in order to prove the value of brand marketing to their CEO and CFO. Such is true for almost all of the chief marketing leaders, 83%, that were surveyed in the market.

The study showed that around two-thirds (64%) of senior B2B marketing leaders in Singapore expect marketing budgets to grow over the next year. Things have been looking up thus far for said leaders, where research shows they have the support of the business, with 7 in 10 CFOs from B2B organisations in the market feeling optimistic about marketing’s ability to drive revenue in the year ahead.

More notably, local B2B marketing leaders shared that one of the top priorities for this year is to champion bolder creativity in their campaigns with the aim to improve mental availability amongst consumers (48%).

“B2B marketers in Singapore have been navigating the current climate with agility. They have demonstrated the importance of winning mindshare through brand building to business leaders, and they are also now making strides to explore leveraging Generative AI to increase efficiency and boost creativity,” said Matt Tindale, head of enterprise of LinkedIn Marketing Solutions for Asia Pacific.

“As the business landscape continues to evolve, B2B marketers will lead the way in creating memorable, best-in-class brands, and contribute to their company’s growth in the months and years ahead,” added Tindale.

LinkedIn’s ‘The B2B Marketing Benchmark’ is a study of nearly 2,000 senior B2B marketing and finance leaders from organisations across the globe, which was conducted ahead of the 2023 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.

Simultaneously with the release of the report, LinkedIn has also recently launched new B2B marketing solutions, which amongst others, will be leveraging the adoption of generative AI. The fresh roster of tools includes ‘AI-generated Copy Suggestions’ and advertising solutions such as In-stream video ads, thought leader ads, and conversation ads.

Said launch also introduced the ‘CMO Scorecard’, which is a new measurement program through its consultancy, B2B Edge. This aims to help B2B marketers on the platform benchmark their creative impact and media performance against competitors.

Sydney, Australia – Media agency Initiative has announced the appointment of Danielle Galipienzo as head of Impact to lead its purpose-led consulting division. The appointment comes as the agency continuously develops the department, expanding from pro-bono partners to include paid services and impact consulting open to all clients.

She will be responsible for looking upon opportunities where Initiative can do its role of helping employees, clients, media partners, NFPs and other businesses to positively amplify the impactful work they’re doing. She will also create impact campaigns supported by a team across Initiative nationally.

Galipienzo will retain her role as the agency’s client director. Working with Initiative, she has been a very intergral part in strategising the ad spaces and running campaigns of its clients.

Sam Geer, national managing director at Initiative, describes Galipienzo as a genuine market leader, and her experience and passion are evidences that she can lead Initiative’s impact division into its growth.

“We are in a unique position in our industry thanks to the resources, skills, and influence that we have. This new role will help me do my best work where I can effectively drive change in culture, for our clients and the industry,” Galipienzo expressed.

This year, Initiative has also appointed David Cook as its head of marketing and IQ.

Now more than ever, there is no excuse for marketing teams to not understand, or be able to react quickly, to adding customer value and driving commercial revenue. Not only are there more metrics than ever to work with (possibly part of the problem, rather than being the solution), but technology that’s rapid and inexpensive now exists.

At a time of increasing pressure on marketing budgets, every marketing director, CMO, or functional marketing leader should be putting customer insights and measurement at the top of their ‘we need a plan for this’ list for 2023.

But of course, this is easier said than done. With data and measurement being a cross-functional effort with analytics, insights, marketing research and technology teammates – how can marketing lead the way in being more agile and achieving more success?

In my experience as a CMO for a global organization with 90 marketers responsible for 100+ markets – our ‘unlock’ was agile marketing. Whilst not a new concept, McKinsey defines agile, in the marketing context, as “using data and analytics to continuously source promising opportunities or solutions to problems in real time, deploying tests quickly, evaluating the results, and rapidly iterating. At scale, a high-functioning agile marketing organization can run hundreds of campaigns simultaneously and multiple new ideas every week.”

I like to define it simply as a mindset of experimentation and team collaboration – with your customer deciding if your hypothesis is right.

While you can go ‘all out’ and adopt traditional ‘Agile’ processes like scrum masters and rigid sprint planning, in my experience, it is better to ‘steal with pride’ the parts of ‘agile’ that address your core problems which cause to reduce your effectiveness, vs simply adopting a process for the sake of it. Is your key issue speed to market? Is it putting the ‘customer voice’ into your decisions? Is it fear of getting things wrong? Digging into the heart of this will help determine which parts of agile are going to be most useful for your team.

Once you’ve decided how agile you might go, there are three pillars to agile marketing I recommend you put a plan in place for.

People
People, and a growth mindset, are a critical part of ‘working with agility’. And it’s not just the marketing department that needs to have a solutions-focused, collaborative, and curious approach to make things work – but they should take the lead. Engage your full marketing team first to get them excited and committed to getting the ball rolling before reaching out to your wider network of teammates.
Process
Agile doesn’t mean doing lots of stuff really fast, and hoping it works. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. Agile process has many deliberate ways of ensuring only the most important and useful things are done. And the things that aren’t are deprioritised or stopped. Whether that is daily stand-ups to ensure the team is working on the same thing and having the same latest information, retros to improve the next time, or tools and systems to track tasks and workflow – they are all there to ensure less of your time is on the ‘how’ and instead can be put into the ‘what’ (that’s the fun marketing stuff!).

My main tip here is to find your ‘process champions’. I’ve found there are a surprising number of them in marketing and having them lead and coach others through change is a great way to ensure full team alignment and support.
Customer
Getting your internal system humming is a great start. But to be truly agile, you need customer data, insights, and feedback to inform your strategy and implementation. With an agile approach, you need that input to be rapid and regular. There are a few ways that brands can do this effectively, each with its own pros and cons.
- Your own customer panel or ‘green room’: your own panel is great for getting deep expertise from a group of ‘super-users’, and it can also drive engagement and loyalty. However, if you’ve had a customer panel before, you’ll know they are quite a bit of work (and cost) to maintain, and they may also not be representative of your entire customer base.
- Focus groups: running focus groups is great for in-depth and qualitative feedback. They allow for exploration of topics and can generate new ideas. The downside is that they are typically slow to organise (and expensive) and again the group of 6-8 people may not represent your target market well enough.
- A/B tools: tools like Optimizely or testing tools within Meta and TikTok’s Ads Manager platforms are great for getting live, quantitative results. They do, however, assume a level of existing knowledge or experience with the elements being tested to know they appeal to and motivate your customer to take action. What does this mean? Unfortunately, ‘garbage in, garbage out’, is a key risk here. If your creative or message is not appealing in its individual elements, no matter of creative arrangement is going to fix that.
- Testing and insights platforms: specific online platforms are now available to provide rapid customer feedback on your messaging and campaign ideas. These tools often run as short surveys or user tests via access to a large pool of participants to help businesses make data-driven decisions. The downside is that many use databases or panels of respondents which can make it harder to reach hyper-localised areas and audiences based on behaviours and interests (rather than demographics alone).

Some audiences are also simply slow and expensive to reach. One platform that has overcome this is Stickybeak, which uses social media-powered targeting and recruitment to gain rapid feedback (effectively tapping into 4 billion people globally). Starting from a few hundred dollars per survey or test, the platform is changing the game for how many APAC marketers get insights early and frequently into new product and campaign development, specifically testing messaging and creative concepts.

My recommendation for running a truly agile marketing approach is to adopt an online testing and insights platform across your wider team to have regular, directional feedback from your target customers to inform execution. Without this, speed to market will be very difficult to achieve as too often debate, meetings and differing opinions stall delivery. Or worse, the wrong messages and creative have thousands of dollars invested into them and achieve poor results.

In summary, implementing an agile approach (vs ‘Agile’) is critical to improving marketing effectiveness. I encourage you to make a start by going on a discovery journey and reading articles and testing different tools to find out how you can implement improvements of your own.

This article is written by Anna Henwood, CEO of Stickybeak.