Tag: Vase.ai

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia – Around 57% of consumers in Malaysia plan to be more cautious with their spending in the next six months–yet still show a greater interest in spending and rewarding themselves. This is according to a joint research by Omnicom Media Group Malaysia (OMG Malaysia) and AI-driven research firm Vase.ai.

According to the report, low and medium-income consumers – categorised by their household income of those less than RM4,000 and those averaging between RM4,000 to RM9,000, respectively – reward themselves through functional spending, e.g eating out, groceries, homecooked food, and food delivery. 

The research also found that this contrasts with the spending habits of high-income consumers–those that earn more than RM9,000–who focus on vacations, entertainment/leisure, and electronics.

It is also worth noting that rising living costs could potentially impact consumer spending and lead brands to wonder about their sales growth in the coming months. According to the research, only 23% of low-income consumers feel confident about their financial well-being in the next six months compared to 44% of high-income consumers.

Moreover, trust and brand confidence were the primary influence of brand stickiness across all three consumer groups, the research found, followed by the brand offering the best value. Meanwhile, low-medium consumers tend to stick with a brand if it is easy to find and use, while high-income consumers gauge based on brand familiarity.

Additionally, social media platforms and e-commerce marketplaces are now present in the entire consumer purchase journey, unlike in the past where they were mainly in the top and bottom of the consumer funnel. Shopee, Shopee Live, TikTok Shop, and TikTok Live are gaining popularity and surpassing Instagram, the research found. Meanwhile, adoption for Facebook Marketplace remains low.

In terms of essentials, groceries and eating out are the top two essential items consumers spent on, followed by toiletries, homecooked foods, and household cleaning products. Spending has increased on essentials in the past six months, the research said. This category of items has become a priority for consumers due to their affordability, promotions, and discounts.

For semi-essential categories, consumers mainly spent on clothing and skincare items, followed by healthcare, entertainment/leisure, and cosmetics. Spending in this category has remained stable, with reductions in cosmetics and toys. Purchases in this segment are driven by their value for money, durability, and high-quality.

Lastly, electronics and vacations were the most common expenditures in the non-essential category and overall, the spends focused on premium quality and items that reflect personal taste. That said, 24% of consumers surveyed have not spent on non-essentials in the past six months. Spends on luxury accessories, fitness equipment, automobiles, and designer clothing have also reduced, marking a shift towards prioritising necessities over discretionary items.

Kiron Kesav, chief strategy officer at OMG Malaysia, said, “While there have been various reports regarding the economic uncertainties, rising prices and consumer confidence in Malaysia, we wanted to understand the finer nuances of the consumer sentiments and deduce what to expect in the immediate future. Leaning on the AI-driven insights gathered in the research, we unravelled a sense of how Malaysians from various walks of lives mitigate the financial uncertainties while also finding avenues to reward themselves. It also sheds light on the pockets of opportunity that the brands could capitalise on while they themselves navigate these times of uncertainties.”

Meanwhile, Julie Ng, CEO and co-Founder at Vase.ai, commented, “Amidst the economic uncertainties this year, our joint report provides vital insights into consumer spending trends. It highlights the need for brands to adapt their marketing strategies to meet changing consumer behaviours influenced by economic challenges. The report stresses the significance of crafting relevant, well-positioned, and innovative brand messages to engage a more spend-conscious audience. We hope that this can help inspire brands with practical strategies to succeed in a fluctuating market.”

Singapore – MARKETECH APAC, in partnership with Vase.ai, recently gathered marketing leaders in the region to shed light on how brands can refine and fortify their brand and consumer insights strategy.

On July 27, brand and agency heads from Accenture Song, BigPay, Popeyes, and Vase.ai shared a space in the webinar ‘Consumer Insights Power-Up 2022’ to discuss how they are best leveraging consumer insights to deliver marketing and advertising that cuts across consumers. 

In the keynote presentation, CEO of Vase.ai, Julie Ng, revealed the ‘magic formula’ that materialises consumer insights into smart business actions. She also shared how to identify ‘signal’ from ‘noise’ in a goldmine of data that is available today, as well as the key ways to effectively gather these ‘signals’. 

Moderated by MARKETECH APAC’s Regional Editor Shaina Teope, the Country Marketing Head of BigPay, Jia Nina, and the Marketing Lead of Popeyes for APAC, Tanushri Rastogi, delved into a panel discussion in which each shared how their brands are uniquely building up and implementing their brand insights structure. In this panel, audience learnt how brands from fintech and F&B breathe life into marketing intel and realising it into campaigns that not only persuade consumers into action but also into products that elevate consumer experience.

To cap off the fruitful discussion, the webinar saw a fireside chat between Vase.ai’s Julie Ng and Neeraj Gulati, partner at Accenture Song. The two talked about how to develop an insight-driven marketing campaign, and how targeted and strategic consumer insights, in the end, help to ensure ROI. 

The webinar drew 153 marketing professionals out of 424 registrations. The attendees came from a variety of industries, including consumer products, telecommunications, tech, retail, banking, transportation, and consulting, and most hailed from the markets of Malaysia, Philippines, Indonesia, and Singapore. Those who took part were from companies Astro, Beiersdorf, Boost Holdings, Globe Telecom, Heineken, J&J, L’Oréal, PETRONAS, Porsche Singapore, redONE Network, Rustan Commercial Corporation, Smartfren, Smartone, U Mobile and many more.

Shaina Teope, regional editor of MARKETECH APAC and also moderator of the panel, commented, “Marketers are in a continuous challenge of transforming an intangible but crucial asset as marketing data and shaping that up into something that would be deemed beneficial for consumers and revenue-generating for brands. This industry discussion is important because expert minds from the brand and agency side are given the platform to share tried-and-tested methods in doing just that so that brands need not start from the ground up.” 

Julie Ng, CEO of Vase.ai, remarked, “Many marketers know that consumer insights are important to drive growth, but not many know where to begin and how to elicit tangible and relevant results from consumer research with minimal resources. I hope my presentation not only answered these questions, but also inspired a growth and agile mindset: build a consumer insights system, not a consumer insights project because a system is something we will keep using, iterating, repeating and improving for our competitive advantage.”

Meanwhile, on the partnership with MARKETECH APAC, Ng commented, “Honestly, this is the first stress-free webinar I have partnered up with. I could focus entirely on preparing my presentation without worrying about everything else – project management, advertising and promotion, ensuring quality webinar attendance, and most importantly, transparent communication – because I trusted MARKETECH APAC would deliver. And deliver they did.” 

On-demand access to the webinar is now available. Get your access HERE.

Singapore – One of the boons of the digital age is the wealth of data we’re able to obtain in our hands. In the marketing world, data is the air by which campaigns breathe, but now that insights collection is not as difficult as it was before, the constant matter that baffles us is – how do we actually make sense of all this information? 

This is the focus of MARKETECH APAC’s upcoming industry discussion – ‘Consumer Insights Power-Up 2022’. In partnership with Vase.ai, the webinar aims to help marketers and brands in Southeast Asia effectively translate their marketing intel into smart campaign actions and strategies.

Together with some of the brilliant leaders in marketing in the region, we will be delving into a discussion that puts the doubt and uncertainty we’ve been harbouring to the fore when it comes to our consumer insights business in the aim to provide appropriate solutions. Get answers to questions like how do you mobilise marketing insights? How do we turn them into agile marketing? How do we build a brand insights structure that would weather unforeseen crises? 

To be held virtually on 27 July 2022 at 2 pm SGT, the marketing experts that will be joining us are Jia Nina, the country marketing head of BigPay for Malaysia; Neeraj Gulati, partner at Entropia; Elya Eusoff, GM of MSL Malaysia; and Tanushri Rastogi, the marketing Lead of Popeyes for APAC. Each of them will be sharing their insights into every crucial part of insights mining in marketing such as transforming the data at hand into actionable insights and developing an information structure that would help weather any crisis, may it be brand-related or economic.

“Data is overflowing, but how do we extract the most vital insights and make sense of it all? Having a gold mine of data is one thing, but knowing how to use it to the best of our marketing campaigns is an entirely new challenge. Let this industry gathering of leaders from SEA help you jump into a clear path,” said Shaina Teope, regional editor of MARKETECH APAC. 

Meanwhile, Julie Ng, Vase.ai’s CEO and co-founder, commented, “It goes without saying that the pandemic has underscored one thing: marketers need to be nimble, confident, AND effective enough in responding to ever-changing consumer expectations – even if it means letting go of your previous plans to pivot. What better way to do this than to ask consumers directly what they want whenever you want?”

Ng adds, “I’m excited to share how you can harness the power of on-demand consumer insights to drive your marketing efforts for the second half of the year.”

Join us this 27 July at ‘Consumer Insights Power-Up 2022’. Register HERE to secure your spot. 

This month of March, we had a lot of great developments in marketing, tech, and commerce in the region that made it to the headlines. 

A social commerce startup co-founded by a fixture in the business sector in the Philippines has recently secured funding to move to q-commerce. Meanwhile, in Malaysia, a startup that is an AI-powered self-service platform for marketing insights has also bagged considerable funding.

In the area of communications, one of the leading PR agencies in the region has just named a new creative chief that would take the charge of the Taiwan, Thailand, and Hong Kong markets. Meanwhile, an AI and data company in Asia has just named the leader that would helm its operations in the Philippines. 

Learn more about them here.

Top 4: Malaysian consumer research startup Vase.ai bags 7-figure RM funding

Malaysian consumer research startup Vase.ai secures 7-figure RM funding

To kick off our Top Stories for the month, we have Vase Technologies or Vase.ai in Malaysia announcing their seven-figure Ringgit investment from a funding round spearheaded by Indelible Ventures. The newly-secured capital will be used to jumpstart their 2022 expansion.

In an interview with MARKETECH APAC, Julie Ng, CEO and co-founder of Vase.ai, shared her insights on which area of marketing it’s crucial for brands to have good market research, saying that there are two particular areas.

“We usually advise to look into [these] two areas first. Number one, look into their brand. We have smaller companies come to us and say – I don’t really have a brand. That’s not true. Every company has a brand. If you are a smaller brand, you have to build it into a bigger brand. First thing you have to do is to know where your brand currently is. What’s its status and how many people are aware of the brand,” Ng said.

On the second thing, advertisements. 

“Second [thing], we usually let the client choose, they should either look into their advertisement, and to research whether their advertisement is working because [it] is basically the way for us to get into new customers,” Ng adds.

Top 3: ADVANCE.AI names Michael Calma as country manager for PH 

ADVANCE-AI-Michael-Calma

ADVANCE.AI, the big data and AI company in Asia, has recently named its country manager for the Philippines, industry veteran Michael Calma.

In an interview with Calma, he shared that the company aims to focus on the financial services industry which includes banks, crypto, and even non-banking financial institutions. 

“We looked at the typical customer journey, and identified the friction points, and [also] identified the points there might be security breaches, and then we built our solutions to address those points,” said Calma.

Calma shared that as a fundamental step, they have trained their AI to recognize the slew of Philippines IDs used when consumers apply for banking services. 

He also shared his insights on the growing space of cryptocurrency in the market, which he said is able to have mass adoption through two things: utility and security. 

“Utility means that normal people will have an actual use of that cryptocurrency, and we’ve seen that in play-to-earn…crypto needs to be secure, the channels that offer you access to crypto need to be secure for it to have mass adoption,” said Calma. 

Top 2: Former Ogilvy exec John Koay joins Edelman as regional ECD

Edelman-John-Koay

Landing on Top 2 is the appointment of John Koay, formerly of Ogilvy, as the new regional executive creative director (ECD) in Edelman for Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Thailand. 

MARKETECH APAC conversed with Koay who admits his confidence in assuming the new leadership role. 

“When it comes to this responsibility of leading the creative charge of three cities, it really doesn’t feel unfamiliar to me. Although these countries speak different languages, it is important to know that there is a universal language of creativity,” he said in the interview.

As a piece of advice, Koay also shared that brands must continue to look at themselves – are they only selling ‘stuff’ or being more responsible in terms of how consumers consume their messages. 

“With the rise of metaverse and NFTs, people started interacting differently. They are meeting up in metaverse, and that is the new kind of thing we are part of. Changing times of the world [need] new ways of communicating. Technology opened up more avenues given the restrictions we had,” said Koay.

Koay also believes that above all, brands must simply strive to stay relevant

“Even as a brand or agency, you need to understand what your audience is going through because you want to give them a reason to give you their attention,” he said.

Top 1: PH social commerce startup SariSuki moves to q-commerce with latest US$7.1m funding

SariSuki bags US$7.1m funding, to expand to quick commerce

In a bid to further improve and amplify the local quick commerce scene in the Philippines, local social commerce startup SariSuki has managed to raise US$7.1m in its latest funding. 

The company is led by Brian Cu who is ex-Grab country head. 

In an interview with MARKETECH APAC, Cu shared about the startup’s two different business models that aim to serve two different consumer groups: one that looks for value and the other convenience.

“It’s all built on the foundations of a single supply chain in a single logistics [and] warehousing infrastructure. The reason why we decided to present the two different business models on top of that foundation is because you have certain individuals in the market that look for convenience, and an agent model will not deliver that convenience. At the same time, we also have a group of users that are looking for value, and they’re okay to forego that convenience. But they will purchase in larger amounts if the price-quality ratio is correct,” Cu explained.

He also added that the agent-based model allows them to offer products at lower prices in a sustainable way.

“We believe in a community agent model [which] allows us to do next-day delivery for products that have lower-than-supermarket prices in a sustainable way,” Cu added.

When asked about what lies ahead for the future of q-commerce, he said, “I do think quick commerce is here to stay as a general trend. As long as you can keep pricing and things in quality at the very fresh and acceptable standards, [as well as] speed that just adds value to the whole experience,” he stated.

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Watch our exclusive interviews with the brands themselves on the latest episode of MARKETECH APAC Top Stories, now live on our YouTube channel.

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia – Vase Technologies or Vase.ai, a Malaysian consumer research technology company founded in 2015 to answer the lack of flexibility in traditional market research firms, has announced a seven-figure ringgit investment to jump-start their 2022 expansion. The new round of funding was spearheaded by Indelible Ventures, along with their existing investors.

Vase.ai is an AI-powered self-service platform that provides companies with fast and reliable insights into consumers, markets, brands, products, and more to reinforce their marketing and product decisions.

Julie Ng, CEO and co-founder of Vase.ai, said, “Our platform helps companies make better and smarter decisions when it comes to marketing and product decisions. The investment and support from a partner like Indelible Ventures will help us significantly as we enter a new phase of growth. We look forward to a long partnership with them as we continue our mission to make consumer and market insights more accessible to the millions of brands in ASEAN.”

As a technology startup, Vase.ai utilises its proficiency in AI to produce swift, high-quality market research at an affordable price. Vase.ai’s ability to bring all digital data points and insights that a company requires to make informed decisions provides their clients with real-time analysis that is not usually available to most brands. The tech startup has worked with leading brands in ASEAN and run over 600 projects for clients, including high-value brands namely Digi, Carsome, IPG Mediabrands, Systema, TNB, and RinggitPlus.

The investment from Indelible Ventures will be allocated towards geographical expansion and enhancing the AI technology behind the Vase.ai platform.

Meanwhile, Kevin Brockland, managing partner of Indelible Ventures, comments on their investment in Vase.ai, saying that Vase.ai provides a high value-add solution in an exciting space that taps into the fact that consumer insights and habits are changing faster than ever before.

“They have the technology, know-how and a great track record in the region, so we know our investment will further accelerate their, already impressive, regional growth. We’re excited to be working with a strong founding team and look forward to seeing them grow the business even further,” Brockland said.