Roundtable Archives - MARKETECH APAC

Manila, Philippines – The use of artificial intelligence (AI) in marketing strategies has become a defining characteristic of the modern business landscape. AI is transforming how brands interact with consumers, enabling relevant and personalised marketing campaigns, data-driven decision-making, and enhanced customer experiences. And yet, as beneficial as it seems, many are just only starting to explore AI adoption in their strategies. The question is: are marketers in the Southeast Asia region, particularly in the Philippines, ready for these new technologies?

In light of this, MARKETECH APAC invited top Philippine marketing leaders for a roundtable event to share their insights on AI in marketing, and how they’re implementing AI across their marketing strategies. What resulted was a lively and positive outlook on how marketers in the country can move forward as an industry that embraces AI technologies as part of its DNA.

Marketing leaders who attended the event include:

Blessie Cruz, AVP/group head – marketing at 2GO Group Inc.
Benjamin Quiroga-Rivera, managing director, APAC at Emma Sleep
Greg Anonas, international wine and food marketing director at Emperador Distillers, Inc.
Erik Kristofer Riola, marketing director at Firefly Electric & Lighting Corporation
AR Polinar, marketing deputy director at Flash Express Philippines
Rochelle Vandenberghe, chief marketing and digital business officer at FWD Insurance
Brian Augustine Reyes, digital marketing lead (performance marketing lead) at Lalamove
Kat Costas, SEA e-commerce marketing lead & country marketing head at Levi’s
Andrew Guevarra, head of brand marketing and communications at Malayan Insurance
Pocholo Garcia, head of digital & e-commerce at Malayan Insurance
Albet Roble-Buddahim, chief marketing officer at PRIMER Group of Companies
Munmun Nath, chief marketing officer at UnionDigital Bank

Opening with a keynote address by Konrad Feldman, co-founder and CEO of Quantcast; AI-powered technologies have empowered marketers to gain invaluable customer insights, personalise experiences, and optimise campaigns for unprecedented success. Drawing attention to AI’s ability to analyse vast amounts of data in real time, Feldman also underscored its transformative impact on customer segmentation, targeting, and predictive modelling. Moreover, his presentation delivered a compelling case for embracing AI in marketing as an indispensable tool for unlocking untapped potential, driving growth, and shaping the future of customer engagement and brand success.

“AI is math, not magic. Technology when combined with human ingenuity and creativity really can be magic. AI machine learning can improve everyday advertising experiences for billions of consumers, they can help marketers get better return of investment, they can help content producers capture good revenue for producing original content,” he said.

Feldman also added, “The complexity of everyday tasks has grown with the market and many folks still follow the same processes for planning activations in the past, albeit with nicer tools, but more and more time is spent using these tools, and… lots and lots of levers and dials to check on and constantly adjust, and the technology has made the marketer the computer.”

On the benefits and challenges of using AI to for marketing

The attending Philippine marketing leaders also shared their insights on the status quo of AI in marketing and how brands could better use and benefit from it.

Malayan Insurance’s Pocholo Garcia, shared that they use AI to empower their customer experience (CX) strategies.

“[AI] is primarily for CX, at least on my end, and that’s not just in terms of getting people to convert, because that’s just step one. We want the whole experience of choosing us [as their insurance provider] to be smooth for everyone, not just for clients but also for the people on the inside,” he said.

Meanwhile, Lalamove’s Brian Augustine Reyes explained how AI has been integral in improving efficiency, productivity, and data-driven decision-making for brands and marketers alike.

“As someone who handles the day-to-day performance optimisation, AI can really give you more time to do the strategic thinking part instead of just… identifying the right audience [and] thinking up creatives. AI also gives the advantage of creative optimisation, developing what kind of communication is effective for your audience to improve your metrics,” Reyes said.

Meanwhile, PRIMER Group’s Albet Buddahim explained how the versatility of AI can be beneficial on the e-commerce side of things, and further reach untapped databases.

“AI can help us on the e-commerce side. We’re sitting on a 1.7 million email database but the match on Facebook and Google are low. Maybe [AI] can help us find where the rest of these 1.7 million are going in a way where I can drive them to our offers,” he said.

Lastly, Flash Express’s AR Polinar expressed how AI is beneficial in terms of planning, saying, “We use AI for planning and forecasting. It’s really useful for us [in] making sure that our operations are really ready [based on] the data we’re receiving from our partners and customers.”

It is also worth noting that many marketing leaders are also acquainted with more mainstream AI tools, including the generative AI tool ChatGPT.

For Emma Sleep’s Benjamin Quiroga-Rivera, AI tools such as ChatGPT are easy to understand and accessible to use by all, including marketers.

“What we’ve seen particularly with this consumer product, ChatGPT, is just how accessible and easy it is to visualise and sort of ideate creatives, which we found quite fun to play around with,” he said.

Despite the benefits AI has brought to marketers, there are still concerns on whether there are people who are actually capable of using such technology.

This was according to Levi’s Kat Costas, saying, “For us, it’s [about] automation and personalisation… [AI] helps us with the media, in terms of identifying the right segments [and] the right assets that will be served through each of the segments. The big challenge for us is, do we even have the people who can use the technology.”

The negative implications of AI

Despite all of the benefits AI brings to the marketing scene, industry leaders still have levels of uncertainty when it comes to using such AI tools.

Flash Express’s AR Polinar noted that the downside of using AI has been around losing qualitative data upon maximising AI tools.

“One disadvantage would be focusing more on quantity vs quality because of AI. We might not verify the data we receive or not take action immediately. The challenge is to always verify the [data or the] actions of our consumers on the ground,” he said.

For Emperador Distiller’s Greg Anonas, AI still has limited capabilities in exploring unknown marketing territories.

“When it comes to AI–we think it’s a boon to everyone, but it does have some things that it can’t handle. For example, strategic thought and entrepreneurial thinking. What we’re concerned about is, as we move further into AI, we get into things that people have not done before,” he said.

Meanwhile, Erik Riola from Firefly Electric commented that while there are certain negative perspectives on AI technologies, marketers are still open to exploring such tools.

“People tend to focus on the negatives rather than where [AI] could benefit… It is in the understanding, which I feel as a marketer, that we could better use and employ these technologies. But I say that it is a conscious level of optimism because it is still very fresh, at least from the consumers’ perspective,” Riola said.

He added, “All of a sudden now a lot of people are talking about ChatGPT, and as a marketer, you don’t want to be a dinosaur in your industry…you want to learn that technology. And that’s what we are trying to employ today.”

The industry leaders recognised the transformative power of AI in enabling personalised experiences, data-driven decision-making, and improving customer engagement. And expressed the undeniable benefits and potentials of implementing AI in various marketing strategies.

They also highlighted the positive impacts of AI in efficiency, productivity, and creative optimisation–as it becomes more and more accessible for marketers. While acknowledging these, they also raised the concern of limitations such as investments or time, loss of qualitative data, and marching into unmarked territory.

As AI continues to evolve, the future of marketing holds exciting prospects and could redefine how consumers interact with products and services, taking engagement to unprecedented heights.

However, it’s important to note that while AI offers immense potential, Human creativity, emotional intelligence, and ethical considerations still play crucial roles in designing campaigns that truly connect with audiences on a meaningful level. In this journey, collaboration will be key – between marketers and AI systems, amongst industry peers, and with consumers to ensure that the right balance is struck.

Singapore – The industry had a roller coaster ride in 2022. We have witnessed numerous incidents of layoffs from brands in the region and companies that suffered financial losses. However, amidst these challenges, brands still emerged to lock in successes that serve as an inspiration to the industry in transforming uncertainties into strategic opportunities.

In light with this, MARKETECH APAC invited Singapore-based industry leaders to come together for a CMO roundtable to share how they weathered market shifts and industry changes to remain solidified as a brand and as a business. Ultimately, the event aimed to serve as a platform for industry leaders to share their unique experiences and learn from one another.

Said roundtable hosted around 16 marketing leaders across some of the top brands in Singapore and the Asia-Pacific region.

Marketing leaders who attended the event include: [Some attendees are not listed here as requested by them]

Rilla Roesell, vice president of marketing at Cialfo
Kean Yew Li, global director and head of Asia Pacific social media and consumer engagement at The Coca-Cola Company
Dawn Lee, director of corporate marketing division at Health Promotion Board
David Harling, managing director at MoneySmart Group
Lavina Tauro, vice president for marketing and country manager at Viu
Kaushal Pilikuli, vice president of ShopCash and loyalty at Wego
Vivek Kumar, chief marketing officer at WWF Singapore
Devendra Shivhare, head of martech for APAC at The Coca-Cola Company
Katharina Pohl, marketing director for e-commerce at Disney
Jason Huan, chief marketing officer at Endowus
Roberta Biandolino, head of brand at foodpanda
Caitlin Nguyen, head of digital and e-commerce at Philips APAC
Emily Ong, head of loyalty at Razer
Triveni Rajagopal, senior director, personal care, and global digital marketing experiences at Unilever.

The session started with Danielle Ong, Head of APAC at MessageBird sharing her perspective on how we all as consumers live in the world of now. Everything we need is available at our fingertips. From food, grocery, transportation, travel and tourism, to financial services and many more. This access to “in-the-now” is transforming every industry and impacts businesses of all sizes. She then shared ideas on how brands can keep up tp this constantly changing customer and the expectations that come with this dynamism. Examples from Grab, Uber, Guzman Y Gomez, Booking.com, Glovo were just some of the many that triggered ideas for CMOs to learn from.

Industry leaders were eager to share how they managed to lock in growth even amidst a downward business climate. For instance, MoneySmart’s Managing Director, David Harling explained how they were able to grow their group business last year, and have now kicked off a process to list at the Singapore Exchange (SGX) through a US$161m reverse IPO deal.

Meanwhile, college application platform Cialfo had a focus on growth and brand awareness in the higher education space in the United States in 2022. Rilla Roessel revealed that they were excited by the awareness gained from the target audience.

Meanwhile, for WWF-Singapore’s Vivek Kumar, the challenges that his organisation faced in 2022 included raising awareness around the rapid degradation of nature and biodiversity. For example, he shared that since the last lunar year of the tiger in 2010 three countries in the ASEAN region have lost all their tigers in the wild. As the apex predator, protecting tigers means protecting the whole natural habitat with its biodiversity. With this pressing challenge, the WWF team came-up with a novel initiative to combine art and conservation to raise awareness on the plight of tigers in the wild and to raise critical resources to protect them. Tiger Trail brought together renowned artists from around the world, leveraging both physical and AR arts, and generated the highest PR values ever achieved by the office.

In terms of his priority for this year, Vivek said that he will be focused on climate change, as one of the most pressing issues facing mankind today. Vivek and his team conceived and launched the first-of-its-kind WWF Earth Hour Summit on 2 March 2023, which brings together the science, policy, and practice of climate change to discuss how society can together move forward to achieve Net Zero carbon emissions. It is an uphill task, but Vivek believes that we must build a shared learning curve towards it since achieving Net Zero is only possible if we act together.

This event was made possible alongside omnichannel communications platform MessageBird and Escomedia.

Creative, brand identity, and automation are just some of the most vital elements within any successfully working marketing strategy and campaign. The first two deal with external execution, while the latter refers to operational efficiency.

In a rare opportunity that gathered Philippine marketing leaders representing diverse industries, MARKETECH APAC, in partnership with Celtra, delved into a discussion on how brands in the market best approach their marketing strategies in the region. In this discussion, we dived deep into what it takes to deliver high-performing creatives and unique brand identity, while harnessing the power of automation to achieve marketing agility.

In the industry event which carried the theme, ‘Visual2Vision: Leveraging Creativity As Your #1 Marketing Performance Lever’, marketing heads from brands Cambert (Pilipinas), Inc., Canon Philippines, Cebu Pacific Air, Decathlon Philippines, dentsu Philippines, foodpanda Philippines, Generali Philippines, and L’Oréal Philippines each shared how they are keeping their brands top-of-mind in a period where digital has accelerated the bar for which brands are deemed worthy of support and favorability.

Roundtable Highlights: Watch the PH marketing leaders share the top insights from the discussion

Authenticity at the heart of the marketing creative

During the discussion, marketing leaders agreed that at the core of any marketing creative is authentic narrative and messaging. Danielle Eleazar, foodpanda’s head of marketing for new verticals in the Philippines, said that it all boils down to authenticity because beyond making sure that any creative asset or communication resonates with the market, the consumer has to ‘understand’ the message.

“As long as that creative consideration lies [in] authenticity, it’s something that really resonates with the consumer,” said Eleazar.

Canon Philippines’ Anvey Factora and Decathlon Philippines’ Jessica De Leon both echoed the said insight. Factora, Canon’s head of marketing communications, e-commerce and retail, said that amongst others, their topmost consideration on the creative side when launching a marketing campaign is building a strong and authentic narrative. Meanwhile, De Leon, Decathlon’s direct marketing lead, believes that a brand’s creative must be “memorable [and] authentic” with tailored messages based on audiences’ needs.

Meanwhile, for L’Oréal Philippines’ Chief Digital & Marketing Officer, Isabel Falco, building the creatives still goes back to whether it’s able to answer the ‘creative brief’ to be done.

“The topmost consideration for the creative is still going to be whether it successfully answers the creative brief or the job to be done,” said Falco.

However, marketing leaders also stressed the importance of balancing the genuine appeal of creative implementation with execution aimed at achieving business goals. It was Factora who said that in tandem with serving creativity, it’s important to make sure that the overall marketing and communications are aligned with the business direction.

“At the end of the day, we will always be evaluated [on] the business results and impact,” he said.

In the same vein, Patricia Bucag, Cebu Pacific Air’s marketing manager, believes that a marketing campaign must, above all, answer to the business need, which in the airline’s case is getting people to purchase.

At a stage where brand awareness is already high for a company such as Cebu Pacific Air, Bucag said the objective of any marketing initiative becomes purchase-led results.

Yet, brands today are struggling to meet the speed for campaigns to be launched across the funnel. Brand marketers don’t have the luxury of time to spend on the design craft for each and every asset while managing prompt campaign launch times. In order to meet the needs for personalised consumer experiences without burnout, marketing and creative teams must be equipped to successfully launch full-funnel campaigns at scale.

Managing the branding identity of international brands

In a world where every impression is a brand impression, the PH roundtable discussion dove into the main topic of brand identity, the umbrella strategy which creative would fall under.

A number of leaders in the discussion represented the PH leg of international brands such as Canon, and as expected, an entity like Canon Philippines needed to be very strict when it comes to the implementation of all things related to creative to ensure the quality reflects the brand at large.

How Canon Philippines remains effective in its strategy, Factora said, holistic planning is key.

“Coming up with a holistic identity is very, very important because Canon is not just operating in a particular segment or in a particular region, we’re operating in different continents in different countries,” he said.

Factora believes that every great campaign remains to be backed up by holistic planning, and by this, he means integrating not just one function in marketing, but including those from, for example, distribution and sales. This is taking into consideration the sales agenda and channel mapping in the overall strategy.

Meanwhile, we also learned how a local arm of a global insurance brand decides on and manages its branding. For Generali Philippines, it’s all about making the brand’s purpose the compass to draw what steps are best suited to deliver its brand identity.

Milca Javier, the brand’s head of marketing, said, “The purpose of everything that you’re doing in terms of the creative [and] in terms of your campaign [is important]. You want to craft something that emphasises or, you know, heavily promotes all elements of your DNA, of your brand DNA.”

Javier raised questions like, “Do we want to evoke something?” and “Do we want to say something to the audience?” So for example, insurance is strong, but then the brand may want to show that it’s not too stiff or that it’s not too serious, and can also invoke fun, so this is where the little details such as typography and brand colour come to make a big difference.

Ultimately, she said, the buy-in of the branding must come from within before it can even be accepted by the general consumer.

“It’s really valuable that Generali Philippines, the colleagues that I have within the company, know the importance of the brand [and] the brand identity,” she said.

“It’s very, very important that all of the people within Generali Philippines are buying into [our] brand identity. This is the core and we have to stay true to our core,” Javier added.

On the other hand, Cambert Pilipinas’ Jenny Arcellana, its head of marketing, shared about how, overall, marketing strategies, including putting branding identity in place, have evolved through recent years. Arcellana said it’s the influencers and the content creators of today that have been the biggest change.

“So it’s still the same, you know, you have to drive awareness [of] your brand, you have to tell your audience what the brand is, [and] your product – why would it appeal to them, to the target market,” said Arcellana.

But that the change, she said, has been with how you promote the brand and the media available. As a leader in trade marketing, Arcellana commented that amidst these changes, availability and visibility in trade are still very important because a product that cannot be seen cannot be sold.

“But of course, you have to talk to the right person to whom your brand or product is relevant to,” she said.

The power of automation in building personalisation in marketing

Realising creative and branding initiatives cannot be discussed without talking about the role of automation in their development. With a wide range of tools and marketing tech platforms at marketers’ disposal, the matter isn’t whether to utilise what but how to strategically harness these enablers to deliver a brand’s marketing strategy best.

The marketing heads were in unison to say that personalisation is what is made possible by automation–and at scale. Isabel Falco, L’Oréal Philippines’ chief digital & marketing officer, said that there are many different ways to communicate a product’s relevance to a consumer and automation helps in creating many different versions of a creative or marketing campaign to find what is best fitted to a specific audience.

“We really see the value-add of having the capability to automate, [enabling] us to [do] A/B [testing] at scale,” Falco explained.

The power to automate tedious design tasks speeds up time for marketers looking to amp up their creative testing roadmap. With tools like creative automation, brand marketers can iterate and update their highly-customised creatives independently without losing time on manual updates for individual creative versioning. By allowing teams the freedom to produce creative variety at ease, marketers can get campaign refreshes out of the door and initiate the purchase journey quicker.

For Mako Chaves, dentsu Philippines’ MD and Head of Media, one of automation’s top benefits is being able to gain and firm up the ‘audience understanding’, which he believes is the foundation of all great campaigns.

“It all boils down [to] one thing, which I think is consumer truth. And at the heart of every campaign that we do at dentsu is about deep consumer understanding,” said Chaves.

He added, “Without every campaign latching onto a deep consumer insight, I think everything will fall, everything will not be genuine and everything will not be authentic.”

Meanwhile, Decathlon’s De Leon wanted to emphasise how automation eventually gives way for the team to have a seamless and smooth working process.

She said that just like being a brand for sports, efficiency and performance are important to them and utilising the tools that are available makes it possible to deliver personalised and targeted ads to customers.

“Automation really empowers the team to be able to clearly see their next steps and to be able to analyse what’s working and what isn’t…automation allows us to be able to make the work not just efficient, [but] also sustainable for our future customers,” stated De Leon.

In the PH-focused industry discussion, while marketing leaders shared their customised approaches to creative, brand identity, and automation, common themes remain such as balancing ingenious creative campaigns with business-oriented marketing communications. Marketing leaders have also spoken that although brand identity is the main responsibility of the marketing team – effective branding that resonates with consumers is one that is developed and integrated through the cooperation and buy-in of other functions within a company – proving that belief in the brand identity must emanate from within teams, empowered by tools that aid brand governance.

Amidst marketing leaders lending their views and thoughts on external execution, the brand and agency heads also shared what role marketing tech like automation play in bringing marketing campaigns home. While leaders cited different areas of marketing they see automation being the most beneficial, they all agreed that essentially, it’s the ability to deliver targeted and tailor-fit campaigns to consumers that makes it easy for brands to achieve marketing excellence.

Roundtable Highlights: Watch the PH marketing leaders share the top insights from the discussion

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.

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.”