Marketing Magazine SG - Jan / Feb 2015 by Marketing Magazine Group

MARKETING MAGAZINE SINGAPORE EDITION

THE ART & SCIENCE OF CONNECTING WITH CONSUMERS

SINGAPORE

JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2015

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ED’S LETTER ................................................................................................................................................................................................................

Elizabeth Low, Deputy Editor elizabethl@marketing-interactive.com Rezwana Manjur, Senior Journalist rezwanam@marketing-interactive.com Editorial – International Matt Eaton, Editor (Hong Kong) matte@marketing-interactive.com Production and Design Shahrom Kamarulzaman, Regional Art Director shahrom@lighthousemedia.com.sg Fauzie Rasid, Senior Designer fauzier@lighthousemedia.com.sg Advertising Sales – Singapore & Malaysia Johnathan Tiang, Senior Account Manager johnathant@marketing-interactive.com Trina Choy, Senior Account Manager trinac@marketing-interactive.com Jocelyn Ma, Account Manager jocelynm@marketing-interactive.com Grace Goh, Account Manager graceg@marketing-interactive.com Advertising Sales – International Josi Yan, Sales Director (Hong Kong) josiy@marketing-interactive.com Events Yeo Wei Qi, Regional Head of Events Services weiqi@marketing-interactive.com Marketing June Tan, Regional Marketing Executive junet@lighthousemedia.com.sg Finance Evelyn Wong, Regional Finance Director evelynw@lighthousemedia.com.sg Management Søren Beaulieu, Publisher sorenb@marketing-interactive.com

A conversation about the future of marketing is always interesting. It throws up new ideas, lends a fresh perspective and reaffirms certain age-old truths. And it is exactly what I experienced putting this special edition together where some of the local industry’s experts share what they think the future of marketing is. It is fascinating to see the tectonic shift in consumer behaviour and how technology has reshaped our lives and, at the same time, it is somewhat disappointing to see some brands, by and large, not being able to keep up. Of course, there are leaders – there will always be, but a vast majority of the brands are still laggards. Sceptical about digital, they are only just beginning to dip their toes into the medium so as an industry we have a long, long way to go. Measurability still remains a concern. While digital promised that, its ever-changing nature has made understanding and choosing the right metrics very difficult. A direct correlation between marketing and the bottom line of a company still remains a distant dream, at least for a majority of the brands. Digital is not just another way to market a brand; it has fundamentally changed the way businesses operate. Therefore, it requires more than just hiring a few digitally savvy people in the marketing team.

It is about re-engineering the entire approach to brand building. The task can be daunting, and thus the tendency to get flustered, only natural. What often happens as a result is that brands tend to forget the basics. You will, in this edition, see how marketers describe their vision of the future of marketing – each very different from the other, yet a common thread runs through them all. The need to be mindful of the basics, to be consumer-centric and treating digital just as you would treat any other medium and tying it all into an overall cohesive brand strategy. I don’t want to give it all away here. Flip the pages and enjoy the edition!

Photography: Stefanus Elliot Lee – www.elliotly.com; Makeup & Hair: Michmakeover using Make Up For Ever & hair using Sebastian Professional – www.michmakeover.com

Editorial Rayana Pandey, Editor rayanap@marketing-interactive.com

THE FUTURE OF MARKETING: WHAT WILL CHANGE AND WHAT WILL NOT

Tony Kelly, Editorial Director tk@marketing-interactive.com Justin Randles, Group Managing Director jr@marketing-interactive.com

Marketing is published 12 times per year by Lighthouse Independent Media Pte Ltd. Printed in Singapore on CTP process by Sun Rise Printing & Supplies Pte Ltd, 10 Admiralty Street, #06-20 North Link Building, Singapore 757695. Tel: (65) 6383 5290. MICA (P) 180/03/2009. For subscriptions, contact circulations at +65 6423 0329 or email subscriptions@marketing-interactive.com. COPYRIGHT & REPRINTS: All material printed in Marketing is protected under the copyright act. All rights reserved. No material may be reproduced in part or in whole without the prior written consent of the publisher and copyright holder. Permission may be requested through the Singapore office. Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in Marketing are not necessarily the views of the publisher. Singapore: Lighthouse Independent Media Pte Ltd 100C Pasir Panjang Road, #05-01 See Hoy Chan Hub, Singapore 118519 198755 Tel: +65 6423 0329 Fax: +65 6423 0117 Hong Kong: Lighthouse Independent Media Ltd Unit A, 7/F, Wah Kit Commercial Building 302 Des Voeux Road Central, Sheung Wan, Hong Kong Tel: +852 2861 1882 Fax: +852 2861 1336 To subscribe to Marketing magazine, go to: www.marketing-interactive.com

Rayana Pandey Editor

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16 THE FUTURIST: WHAT IS YOUR MANTRA FOR DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION?

20 UP, UP AND AWAY WITH THE MILLENNIALS

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STILL A TOUCH ‘MAD’ BUT NOT FOR LONG

THE FUTURE(S) OF B2B MARKETING

GETTING UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL

COMMUNICATE … OR DIE

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IT’S TIME FOR THE MAD MATH MEN

IDEATE, INVESTIGATE, INITIATE, INTEGRATE

GETTING CLOSER TO THE CUSTOMER

MARRIED FOR GOOD

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THE FUTURIST LIVE!

PR ASIA

B2B MARKETING

FOUR TIPS TO BECOMING “2015 MARKETER OF THE YEAR”

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THE CHANGING FACE OF MARKETERS

DO YOU HAVE THAT KILLER EDGE?

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NEWS

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WANT MORE BREAKING NEWS? SCAN THE CODE TO FIND OUT WHAT’S GOING ON IN THE INDUSTRY.

Keeping your ‘failures’ In a fun initiative, Red Bull launched a new activation in Singapore to give “wings to consumers’ dreams and aspirations in the coming new year”. Every year people make resolutions around new year’s – however, these resolutions are seldom kept – so Red Bull decided to witness failures, year after year. This campaign is now LIVE and will continue to generate resolutions into the new year.

An express solution DHL Express, the world’s leading international express services provider, launched a new service option for comGateway customers. The service offers customers the choice of collecting their parcels from their preferred DHL service point at Cheers and FairPrice Xpress outlets across Singapore. The new service option will be rolled out in phases over the next six months with the ﬁrst phase being just in time for the holiday season.

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A reshufﬂe Singapore Press Holdings (SPH) reorganised and renamed its two newspaper divisions. The proposed changes took place in January. The English and Malay Newspapers Division was renamed the English/ Malay/Tamil Media group. The Chinese Newspapers Division was renamed the Chinese Media group. There was no change to the stafﬁng and leadership of the two groups and in the various newsrooms and subsidiaries, said the company.

A power house Asia Square launched a regional ad campaign in time for Christmas. Developed to drive enquiries for its ofﬁce space, this is a continuation of its campaign which has been running since September last year in various print mediums. The original ad ran with the message: “Asia Square is the place where corporate power is centred in Asia.” The campaign was conceptualised by ManghamGaxiola. Members only club At a time where retail businesses are struggling to ﬁnd their footing, NTUC FairPrice is debuting a new members-only format in Singapore. NTUC FairPrice launched its Warehouse Club, closely following the model of Costco. “As a co-operative, one of FairPrice’s objectives is to help moderate the cost of living in Singapore and we have remained committed to this social mission,” said a spokesperson.

Staying current David Ketchum, the former president of Bite Asia Pacific, revealed his latest venture, a new breed of consulting services that aims to help marketers drive more value from data, contacts and content. Current Asia launches with a team of five experienced consultants who will initially focus on the Hong Kong and Singapore markets, but with a view to expand across the region. A new future After the fairly public firing of two of the company’s three senior managers, Alphabet Media, publishers of FutureGov magazine and producer of the FutureGov series of events, underwent a restructure. The company merged its events and publishing teams which is now led by founder James Smith. Ten events staff will leave the company, Smith told Marketing , while two new events have been added to its calendar this year.

Fresh partnership F&N Foods (Dairies), a subsidiary of Fraser and Neave, appointed marketing communications agency The Alchemy Partnership as its creative agency on record for a series of products from F&N Foods – namely F&N Magnolia, F&N Fruit Tree Fresh and F&N Nutri Tea. Gale Choong, marketing manager for F&N Foods (Dairies), said: “As we were approaching 2015, we were looking for a partner who understands the complicated world of FMCG.”

Handling turbulence Singapore Airlines ﬂew into slight turbulence in the Australia market last month when its business class tickets were sold for economy price from a Saturday to Monday, out of the Australian market. First reported in the Australian press, tickets costing $SG6,615 were sold for as low as half the price. A SIA spokesperson conﬁrmed this to Marketing saying the company was taking immediate action to rectify it. Cautiously festive Festive Crime Prevention is the latest campaign from the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) aiming to raise public awareness of scams that are especially prevalent during the festive season. MHA collaborated with Clear Channel and media agency Universal McCann Singapore for the creative executions at selected bus shelters in Singapore. The objective of the campaign is to educate the public of the common scams in Singapore.

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NEWS

Fit for a king Brahim’s Holdings Berhad (BHB) under its subsidiary Brahim’s Trading Sdn Bhd and Quantum Angel Sdn Bhd is making an investment of RM95 million in the Malaysian and Singaporean franchise of Burger King. The investment sees the brand’s equity being acquired 100% by BHB. Marketing wise, BHB aims to have a “more effective execution of marketing promotions” and “create more innovative products”.

A Quantium leap E-commerce logistics provider Quantium Solutions, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Singapore Post, acquired Australian-based parcel delivery company Couriers Please Holdings. The acquisition is for A$95 million and complements SingPost’s push into e-commerce logistics in Australia. Wolfgang Baier, group chief executive ofﬁcer of SingPost Group, said this was in line with SingPost’s vision to be the regional leader in e-commerce logistics. Limited luxury Luxury beauty brand SK-II unveiled a limited edition line of its iconic Facial Treatment Essence through a campaign. The essence is created in collaboration with emerging digital artist Po-Chih Huang. The campaign, created by Leo Burnett Singapore, was rolled out entirely across SK-II’s digital platforms, including YouTube, its brand site, Facebook and iVideo as a three-minute ﬁlm featuring a captivating performance piece by renowned Japanese dance troupe ENRA.

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New portals MediaCorp launched two new portals –MediaCorp Berita and MediaCorp Seithi – catering to their respective Malay and Tamil news and current affairs consumers. These portals provide a wide range of information regarding news and developments within Singapore and the region. Android and IOS apps will be available later in March for the portals. The portals are updated in real time.

A new defence Aeronautics, space and defencerelated services ﬁrm Airbus Group appointed Publicis APAC as its new creative agency in charge of Airbus Group’s marketing and communication strategies in Asia Paciﬁc. The appointment follows a pitch. Thorsten Moellmann, head of international communications for Airbus Group, expressed his anticipation to work with Publicis Thailand and APAC towards increasing the image and reputation of Airbus Group in the region.

A new courtship Courts settled its media pitch with a new agency, giving the business to Starcom MediaVest. This sees the end of the more than decade-long relationship with Maxus. Jasmine Seow, marketing director for Courts Singapore, told Marketing: “It’s standard industry practice to review partnership arrangements from time to time, and like most, we keep an open mind about working with new agency partners as we believe this could give rise to new ideas and ways of working.”

Remaining noisy Park Hotel Group extended its relationship with creative agency, noisycrayons. The collaboration is centred on the deployment of digital engagement activities targeted at social media and tech-savvy travellers in Singapore and the Asia Paciﬁc region. Reappointed as the social media agency for the group, noisycrayons continues to direct, develop and manage the hotel group’s online campaigns on key social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram.

Mapping it out Search engine Baidu is investing in Uber and allowing Baidu Map and its mobile search app Mobile Baidu users to connect with Uber drivers through these platforms. Robin Li, CEO and chairman, said: “We are delighted that we can work together with Uber to help meet this demand. We are also excited by this strategic partnership between a Chinese company and an American ﬁrm.” Strategy in place Kimberly-Clark appointed OgilvyOne its regional digital agency. Conﬁrming the appointment to Marketing, Gaurav Gupta, marketing director of ASEAN for Kimberly-Clark, said the appointment was for the ASEAN region. “OgilvyOne will be responsible for creating strategic integrated digital marketing plans for our key brands in these markets. OgilvyOne is aligned to K-C’s digital vision for our business and was selected following a multi-agency pitch process.”

Knowing things inside out Media agency MEC Singapore was appointed to manage the Singapore Tourism Board’s “Singapore: Inside Out” international programme that celebrates Singapore’s 50th year of independence in 2015. Singapore: Inside Out presents an invitation to rediscover Singapore as reimagined by some of the talents shaping Singapore’s contemporary creative culture, giving rise to content for a digital campaign on both paid and earned platforms to further fuel the celebrations.

Venturing out Singaporean app developer Carousell ofﬁcially launched its app in Malaysia predicting the mobile commerce in that market is set to grow. This comes after the company ﬁrst began its marketing efforts in Malaysia in January 2014. According to a statement from the company, the app has received an encouraging response with young Malaysians who form a majority of the early adopter community.

Cautiously festive Festive Crime Prevention is the latest campaign from the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) aiming to raise public awareness of scams that are especially prevalent during the festive season. MHA collaborated with Clear Channel and media agency Universal McCann Singapore for the creative executions at selected bus shelters in Singapore. The objective of the campaign is to educate the public of the common scams in Singapore.

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NEWS

A kid with a new toy Mattel Barbie appointed FCB Shanghai to lead its creative account in Mainland China. FCB Shanghai is providing brand strategy and creative services focused on content creation and social media management, culminating in a major relaunch for Barbie in 2015. Feiwei, chief creative ofﬁcer at FCB Greater China, said: “Barbie wants to lead the way with the perceptional and behavioural change.”

A ﬂuid relationship Fluid struck up a partnership with Protocol Global Consulting, a Sydney based company, to better serve Australian brands looking to enter China and help Chinese companies attract consumers in Australia. The two will combine their skills to facilitate access into and out of the China and Australian market. Protocol CEO Adrienne Bateup-Carlson said the two companies shared a commitment to unlocking opportunities in the region.

HOW MUCH DOES THAT COST?

JUMPING ON THE VANWAGON

The Spa Esprit Group spent about SG$100,000 on its The Grand Beauty Hotel van. The van was parked at various locations from 8 October to 30 November 2014. The group claims to be the fi rst to come up with the concept of a mobile retail store about three years ago, when it brought the STRIP Mobile

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to the streets. The idea came about in an attempt to reach a wider audience, much like a road show, but in a slightly different format. A spokesperson from the team told Marketing the concept had worked well over the past few years and several other brands had also made similar attempts over the years.

Becoming more Relevant Publicis Groupe acquired content marketing ﬁrm Relevant24 (R24). R24 is aligned with Starcom MediaVest Group (SMG) and immediately plugged in as the real-time content infrastructure to the current SMG content solutions businesses, said Publicis in a statement. R24’s niche is creating ads or content in a day or less, depending on what happens in the news. Publicis did not reveal the cost of the deal.

On the hunt Mars launched a global media pitch which is also set to affect its Southeast Asia business. In Southeast Asia and China, Publicis Groupe’s Starcom has been handling its media planning and buying duties. Globally, Starcom has been on the Mars business since 2010. The company hopes to appoint a single media agency and this change is in line with its “existing global advertising agency structure”.

A safe bet BMW Group Australia reappointed incumbent creative agency Ogilvy to its marketing and advertising account following a closed fourway pitch in September for both the BMW and MINI brands. The scope of work includes abovethe-line, below-the-line, digital and POS for both the BMW and MINI brands and their respective dealer networks. BMW Group Australia has a long standing relationship with Ogilvy, with the agency originally appointed to the business over 20 years ago.

A long-term engagement IBM is extending its partnership with WPP. This new strategic partnership includes a seven-year US$1.25 billion services contract for IBM to transform and manage WPP’s global technology platform. With this agreement, IBM will provide a service delivery and technology platform to enable WPP to innovate new digital services that will be run and managed with a global hybrid cloud infrastructure.

More than a sweet tooth Candy brand Skittles partnered with creative agency BBDO Toronto for its latest video that was directed by Conor Byrne. Fashioned as a mockumentary, the video “Struck by a Rainbow”, follows the story of a man who is entirely covered in Skittles. This happens after being struck by a formidable rainbow. The video ﬁrst debuted on Skittles’ ofﬁcial YouTube page on 7 December. Having a heyday JWT acquired a majority stake in independent New Zealand digital agency Heyday. John Gutteridge, CEO of JWT Australia and New Zealand, said: “Critically there is a very clear alignment from both Heyday and JWT on how we need to ready ourselves for tomorrow and the long term. The two businesses have quite different skills, allowing the group to deliver broader, faster, deeper and better solutions to existing clients.”

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NEWS ANALYSIS

KEY MEDIA TRENDS FOR 2015 With the average Asia Pacific user now spending more than seven hours daily on their television, computer and other mobile devices, 2015 will be a crucial year for brands and retailers looking to keep pace in today’s multiscreen environment. SingTel Advertising, a media platform under Group Digital L!fe, which offers integrated digital advertising solutions, analysed up-and-coming advertising technology and attitudes from local marketing professionals, and emerged with insights for the coming year that signal a definitive move towards agility marketing. Anthony Shiner, SingTel Advertising’s chief revenue officer, said: “A personalised experience is now a prerequisite for consumers when they decide to connect with brands. Digital and mobile media have created a different, more elusive consumer with ever-changing short-term thinking and who live across multiple screens. “The brands of 2015 will need to persist with an integrated marketing approach, have ever more consumer data and be agile – shifting and adapting to meet the specific needs of individual consumers in real-time.” Shiner predicts four key trends for 2015: 1. Television advertising’s new-found relevance In 2014, television evolved into an allencompassing category: one that streams internet video content on computers and mobile devices, as well as broadcasts ondemand entertainment via set-top boxes and connected TVs. Sensing the platform’s renaissance, local marketers have indicated a desire towards increased TV ad spend in 2015, largely fuelled by the coming of age of TV audience targeting, as well as the pay-TV industry’s shift in focus, from “media-selling” to “audience-selling”. With new technology, buying TV ad space to target generic audiences has become an outdated approach. It is now possible to aggregate TV data and draw deeper consumer behaviour insights. These insights can then inform TV operators’ programming decisions to attract more viewers, create new segmentations in real-time based on consumer viewing behaviour, and provide niche audience targeting options for advertisers. 2. Wearable technology will become the fifth screen 2014 saw gadgets such as the Microsoft Band, Sony SmartWatch and the Samsung Galaxy Gear watch range start to make their way into customers hands.

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While some may dismiss wearable technology as a passing fad, others acknowledge its game-changing potential – the ability to utterly disrupt the modern business world and possibly become the “fifth screen” after TVs, PCs, smartphones, and tablets. Marketing professionals in Singapore, especially those in the healthcare industry, expect that in the next five years, integrated advertising strategies will evolve to prominently include wearable technology. “Wearable technology is at the heart of just about every discussion related to the internet of things and the new capabilities pervasive connectivity can bring,” Shiner said. “A recent market research report from Mind Commerce LLC estimated that global spending on wearable devices will grow from US$9 billion in 2014 to reach US$218 billion in 2019. In the next few years, we expect consumers of all profiles will come to rely on wearable devices and the data they generate. “Designed to be worn close to the body, these gadgets can be used to monitor vital signs and movement. This presents businesses with opportunities on two levels. First, to create applications on wearable devices that collect and analyse data to understand consumers better, and second, to create personalised content that can engage consumers on their wearable devices.” 3. Analytics gets even more advanced In line with 80% of marketers expecting mobile to become the most powerful marketing tool in Singapore by 2015, brands have already adopted unifying data management platforms such as Lotame, which enable data from digital and mobile brand interactions to be analysed as a whole.

According to local marketing professionals, 2015 will see them continue to pursue the holy grail of advertising technology: the ability to store, aggregate and make sense of large data volumes collected from multiple sources in multiple formats. After unifying data from digital and mobile brand interactions, the next step will be the integration of both location-based data collected from “data-points” across Singapore, as well as return-path data from pay-TV set-top boxes. “Imagine a local pub where football fans congregate to watch the Barclays Premier League (BPL) every Saturday evening. Collectively, the fans’ mobile phone data would provide insights into the number of people visiting the location during that time, and their profile in terms of age and gender,” Shiner said. “During half-time, a fan might then navigate online on his mobile phone to purchase a Liverpool jersey. Cross-platform data, collated and automatically coded to ensure anonymity, will then indicate the BPL programme incites a certain online browsing or purchasing behaviour. “As a result, a Liverpool jersey retailer can optimise out-of-home ad placements and location-based mobile ads to target the right audience in the right place and at the right time.” 4. Everyone needs a marketing technologist Research and consulting firm Gartner predicted that by 2017, a company’s chief marketing officer would spend more on technology than its chief information officer. Marketing is rapidly becoming one of the most technology dependent functions in business. Almost all marketing professionals indicated their organisations are looking to hire a person or vendor who can align marketing technology with business goals, serve as a partner to IT, and also evaluate and select relevant, usercentric advertising technology tools. “Moving forward, the most effective marketer in a multi-screen era will be the marketing technologists, the individuals with digital marketing DNA and technology acumen. “They will be in the perfect position to influence how user-centric advertising strategies can be developed and applied. Many brands, especially those from the FMCG industry, requested ‘marketing technologisttype’ of strategy counsel from us in 2014. “We’ve responded by hiring a team of data scientists and integrating them with digital advertising experts, ensuring that the ‘marketing technologist’ is not a role confined to one person, but is a mindset across our company and the entire industry.” .

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NEWS ANALYSIS

THE SECRET SAUCE OF MCDONALD’S MARKETING POWER What is it about McDonald’s that has kept the brand going for so long, and how does it keep bouncing back? Ambrish Bandalkul and Andrew Davy write.

Despite facing a number of recent challenges, data and experts suggest the McDonald’s brand will once again hold strong in the long run. So what is it about McDonald’s that has kept the brand going for so long, and how does it keep bouncing back? We asked branding experts what they thought was the secret behind the McDonald’s brand. “They’ve played the monolithic brand card very well,” said Nick Foley, president of SE Asia Pacific and Japan, at Landor Associates, a brand consultancy. Marketing spoke with Foley and Charlie Cookson, strategist at Landor Associates, to find out some of the reasons behind the brand’s longevity. It becomes clear that even with the current negative associations circling the brand, it continues to hold its own in a highly competitive category. The fast-food giant has faced a series of PR challenges recently, including the food scandal with meat supplier Husi Shanghai in China. But has the media backlash been fair? “I think they’re unfairly labelled … and because they are a very mass market brand they can easily be a target,” Foley argued.

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According to Landor Associates’ “Brand Asset Valuator” (BAV) – an online survey of consumer likes and dislikes about brands – McDonald’s is still holding strong against competitors in key markets across a number of areas, including “relevance”, “knowledge” and “esteem”. Look at the charts below. “It’s unusual to see a brand with this kind of global footprint that has been around for this long with these levels of relevance and differentiation,” Foley said. So how do they do it? McDonald’s branding success and longevity boils down to what Foley calls a “restless progression”. About 10 to 15 years ago the brand’s key selling point was its consistency and what Foley calls the “quarter pounder pricing principle” – the same products and American style were available in every store. Now, the game has changed and McDonald’s has shown it’s able to make the switch to increased innovation and adaptation.

“They’re not afraid of being innovative and that’s really worked for them” he said. A key area McDonald’s must focus on, as indicated by Landor’s BAV survey, is differentiation from competitors by continued expansion of offerings. McCafé, first launched in Australia in 1993, is one way the brand did exactly that. According to McDonald’s’ 2001 Annual Report, the “McCafé coffee concept” is designed to allow customers to “enjoy premium coffees, cakes and pastries – all at a value price compared with typical coffeehouses” and to “have a cosmopolitan atmosphere with distinct adult appeal”. The McCafé brand has developed to the point that from 2015, McCafé-branded bagged coffee beans will be sold in US retail stores in

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NEWS ANALYSIS

The great comeback kid McDonald’s has indeed remained relevant across more than 30,000 restaurants in 120 countries. Lawrence Chong, CEO and co-founder of design consultancy Consulus, believes “the secret sauce of McDonald’s marketing power is the company deeply understands the idea of globalisation”. Chong told Marketing he sees McDonald’s as “the great comeback kid”. Many people in the past have dismissed McDonald’s, but time and again, it has always found a way to make a comeback by being ready to discard an earlier doctrine in terms of thinking in product and messaging. Chong explains: “They make great efforts to localise their offerings and messages by paying close attention to the ground. For example, McDonald’s does not even sell its signature product in India – you won’t find beef burgers in their restaurants because cows are considered sacred.” Maintaining this balance between consistency and diversity is the key to McDonald’s continued strengths, according to Andrew Hipsley, SVP and chief brand officer for McDonald’s Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa. It comes down to the brand’s “think global act local” approach, Hipsley said in an interview with Marketing. “For example, in Asia we serve a bigger range of spicy products and generally more chicken options, in India no beef and a bigger range of vegetarian options, Halal in Muslim markets, and chicken and rice in lower socio-economic markets.” According to Hipsley, enhancement of the company’s existing strategic global “plan to win” “will focus on affordable and convenient, relevant and differentiated menu choices, a modern and relevant restaurant experience and being a positive contributor to the local community”. Over the next 18 months, McDonald’s is embarking on a rebranding campaign focused on building customer trust through transforming its service, marketing and operations. For example, “web and mobile ordering for

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BAV in action. USA QSR category

Percentile Rank

Interpreting pillar patterns

100

92 79

55 43

McDonald’s

Applebee’s Differentiation

McCafe

Relevance

Chipotle

Esteem

Knowledge

Source: Landor Brand Asset Valuator, USA Adults 2014 Q1 segment

BAV in action. China QSR category Interpreting pillar patterns

Percentile Rank

partnership with Kraft. It will be marketed as a premium product. Foley said: “I think it’s got really hard. That’s why with their brand architecture they have brought in things like McCafé because it allows them to have a slightly different conversation with their target audience … you would not be scoring that level of relevance (on the BAV test) if you do not have menu items that cater to a wide variety of needs.” Adds Cookson: “They seem to have their finger on the pulse. They seem to know what’s happening at any one time.”

81 61

45 29

28 17 McDonald’s

KFC Differentiation

McCafe Relevance

Esteem

HaidiLao Knowledge

Source: Landor Brand Asset Valuator, China Adults 2014 segment

delivery will play a big role in transforming our customers’ experience before, during and after their visit”, said Hipsley. Recent efforts as part of the overall strategy to combat brand difficulties, include the launch of the “Our Food Your Questions” campaign in America last month. Pioneered in Canada, it also remains a major programme in the Australia and New Zealand markets. Aimed at increasing food transparency, the campaign invites customers to ask any questions about McDonald’s food over social media. It opened with consumers asking questions such as, “Is there ‘pink slime’ in a Chicken McNugget?” “Are there worms in your beef?” and “Why doesn’t your food rot?” “It’s about embracing your negatives and turning them around into positives in a brand

sense,” Landor’s Cookson said. This approach to transparency indicates McDonald’s is not afraid of tackling the big issues head on to remain relevant and keep the conversation going with consumers. While fearlessness and adaptation are crucial for survival, McDonald’s’ core principles remain the same. “The success of our brand so far has been the result of our relentless focus on brand relevance and brand consistency – built on our founder Ray Kroc’s legacy of “QSC and V” (or quality, service, cleanliness and value),” Hipsley said. This relentless focus on balancing adaptation and innovation with consistency has ultimately kept McDonald’s relevant across many markets over the years.

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9/2/2015 7:43:25 PM

NEWS ANALYSIS

THERE IS NO ASIA If the challenge is developing marketing talent for Asia: Forget Asia, it doesn’t exist. STAND’s Jonathan Sanchez writes.

The constant babble of conversations floating down the brook of leadership development is endlessly focused on developing Asian talent. I had the privilege to work in global communications roles in three continents, and for the best part of 15 years, this has been the perennial question: “How do we develop Asian talent?” What if we applied that sentence to “European talent” or “American talent”? It just would not stand up. The Asia construct we

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work within today as marketing companies is a bloc created in the early days of advertising with formidable companies such as JWT creating “outposts” in far-flung markets to help brands develop and market their products. These regions, much like the artificial construct of “Africa”, now stand to cause more harm to marketing companies, their clients, their products and the communities they serve. As they taught me, wisely, at Unilever, there is no global consumer. People live in villages,

towns, cities and countries. The definition of Asia (which in itself is contrived: Asia Pac, SEA, Asia ex-Australia, Asia, including South Asia, etc) by itself is nonsensical. It is time for marketing businesses to think local and act global. Moreover, this applies to business en generale. A prime example of this is the personal care market. To put it bluntly, global advertising campaigns, perhaps with the exception of Dove (which let’s face it, is a bit long in the tooth)

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NEWS ANALYSIS

simply fail to connect in differing cultural markets in Asia. A hair care commercial beautifully shot in the Philippines will not work in Thailand. Thai women do not want to look like Filipino women. Multinational companies are desperately averse to localising content. Why? The answer is simple: cost and brand control. However, by retaining this myopic view on what their brand should signify, they miss the single biggest benefit their consumers could give them: “I know this is for me.” We live in a me world. Me is where I live: my family, my needs, my aspirations. If we continue to homogenise how we speak to the “Asian consumer”, we risk losing all. And it’s well known that a number of global FMCG companies are currently struggling against domestic powerhouses, losing margin and market share. How did we get here? 1. The post-colonial hangover The Asia construct is a post-colonial hangover. However, a brief context is crucial here. Asia was created by largely western interests as a command and control mechanism to allow trade to move in, work in natural resource extraction and in return (in some instances – albeit limited) introduce social welfare and some form of representative government and legislation. Historically, it was one bloc of markets with ownership of resources, labour and a history of effective trade. Asia is a Euro-centric construct of an “owned” region. Some might say opened up, some might say pillaged by old friends, ergo the East Asia Company, the Dutch East India Company and others. 2. Consolidated financials reporting It is over-simplistic and somewhat lazy for companies to continue to report their financial results as “Asia”. It is convenient; it represents billions of the “bottom of the pyramid” communities who are slowly evolving into a rising middle class (the greatest growth opportunity). However, we have to be cautious about what “middle class” means from a global development perspective (Euro-centric definitions are often redundant here). This does not mean owning a Toyota, a small business or a big house. In this context, middle-class is mostly defined as a “living wage”. As such, to report returns on Asia in its entirety is fundamentally at best simplistic and at worst patronising. Is Japan the same as Myanmar? Of course not, but they are all seemingly in what we call Asia.

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“There are many markets in Asia and each one will stand for something different, sometimes oppositional. Until corporates break the mould, invest in local talent, respect and respond to local needs, their very existence remains unsustainable.” Jonathan Sanchez – managing director and co-founder of STAND Limited

3. Neglecting cultural capital Driving talent into these markets takes deep insight, deep connection and deep understanding of what makes each market tick. Here is an example from training I undertook on subconscious bias. The word ambition in Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines carries a negative meaning. This destroys the community and team ethic in these markets, where individual ambition is second to group success. If your first hiring question is, “what’s your ambition?”, you will probably lose the candidate. 4. Trust deficit in local leadership Finding the right local talent to run individual markets is substantially more important than MNCs looking to import regional leaders. Companies need to evolve to create collaborative, equitable and representative leadership teams across Asia, where all voices and cultures are observed and respected. 5. Denying cultural diversity Simply dropping global marketing campaigns into “Asia”, dubbing and continuing to make foolish patronising changes, will offend communities and drive away loyalty. For example, Unilever Indonesia is identified as Indonesian by most of the population. The company has spent more than 80 years pushing back against the global mother ship to build local brands with local experience and local talent, while never deviating from Unilever’s global vision, values and purpose. What this boils down to is two words, and a shameless plug (would you expect anything less?). The following two words are exactly what STAND represents. Cultural capital The fusion of a global organisation that invests heavily in local talent, empowered to defend local needs, insights and influences, alongside global capabilities, is the only way to build credible human capital development throughout “Asia”. STAND believes the five rules for hiring marketers in “Asia” should be:

Do they fundamentally understand the company’s global vision, goal and growth agenda regardless of where they are based in Asia? Do they have deep local knowledge and the courage to push back when they believe campaigns, activations and advertising will fail to connect with local cultural morès? Have they lived, breathed and experienced the market or have they spent too many years living, studying or working overseas to return as a virtual foreigner in their home country? Do they have a point of view and believe their work can influence positive change for their country? Finally, are we genuinely attracting new blood? We have markets in Asia with substantial and growing competing domestic brands: this is the new competitive set. Are we pulling from the right talent pools or continuing the historic churn of employees, simply rotating from one MNC to another? In conclusion there is no Asia There are many markets in Asia and each one will stand for something different, sometimes oppositional. Until corporates break the mould, invest in local talent, respect and respond to local needs, their very existence remains unsustainable. Markets deserve better, communities and cultures deserve better and tomorrow’s local talent deserves, at the very least, equal recognition and reward afforded to incoming outsiders on expensive and isolationist expatriate deals. It is time to dispose of this “Asia” construct, think country and communities, moreover respond to each market’s diverse needs and work towards establishing long-term sustainable growth programmes that stand for what matters: not where brands are born, but where people live. Jonathan Sanchez is the managing director and co-founder of STAND Limited, a consultancy business for leaders in business, politics and sustainability, based in Bangkok and Singapore.

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6/2/2015 9:13:58 PM

OPINION: AD WATCH/WEB WATCH

Craig Mapleston Managing director Iris Worldwide Singapore

AD WATCH HOT: POSB Neighbours First

NOT: Nippon Paint odourless

Some of the best brand communications to come out of Singapore in a long time. Authentic stories of Singaporean communities and individuals making a positive difference within those communities. Just like POSB would claim. Beautifully scripted and constructed, these stories have the right mix of interest, nostalgia through a modern lens and feel-good appeal that even the longer content pieces are gripping enough to see through to the end. Lots of respect goes to those who have unearthed these stories and had the strength of conviction to get this approach sold to a historically risk-averse client.

A half naked man sharing a moment with a young boy over a couple of lollypops. Is it just me who finds this a bit disturbing? Sure Nippon Paint has built some equity in the funny looking sumo guy and cutesy kids going to great lengths to overcome paint odour, but let’s look at who we’re talking to here. Kids’ pester power will have little influence on home owners or contractors’ choice of paint. While low-involvement categories need the right mix of functional and emotional messaging, the emotional bit can just as easily be a turn-off to buyers as it can be appealing. Maybe something slightly less creepy next time, Nippon?

Nanda Ivens, CEO XM Asia Pacific

WEB WATCH HOT: virginamerica.com

NOT: suzannecollinsbooks.com

Besides the design looking great, they make it really easy to book a ticket to anywhere in the US with their airline. It starts with a very clear first step, selecting the amount of passengers. There is little room for ambiguity regarding the infant option; where other airlines just mention infant and the unsuspecting booker may think the infant gets its own chair, Virgin makes it perfectly clear the infant will sit on your lap by calling it a lap infant. A simple word that gives the user an immediate understanding of the option. If you pay attention, you will find Virgin America is full of these little gems that would normally go unnoticed because they are so simple. After selecting the guests, you smoothly go into the date selection and fare selection. Very clean, very easy to use. If you want more of a treat, try accessing it through mobile and experience even more ease.

Suzanne Collins is the author of the Hunger Games books, a very successful series that has even franchised into a series of films. Given the fact Collins is a master at storytelling, it is surprising her website is an utter mess. It’s a definite time lapse to 1995 (hello Times New Roman!). The site lacks any kinds of aesthetically pleasing design and elements seem to be placed randomly across the page. From a marketing point of view she is not doing too well either; the high praise for her books gets overshadowed by the prominent display of the book titles, not the rave reviews. The placement of the praise on the right side further makes sure the user does not see it immediately when they enter the site (people tend to focus on the middle column of a page first). Collins should take George RR Martin as an example. His site was of similar design, but after the success of GoT on HBO he has managed to at least make it more aesthetically pleasing (although still far from actually looking nice).

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6/2/2015 9:29:41 PM

DIRECT MAIL CASE STUDY

A GROOVY WAY TO PARTY For popular local party house Zouk, keeping in touch with its young partying audience calls for a welldesigned personal touch. For us at Zouk, we work pretty much like a small boutique agency, where the idea, creative, marketing and execution is all done in-house for all our campaigns. Our objectives of sending the mailer are to share our design thought process, and to communicate how it translates to the eventual set and decor at the club. Our target audience is our base. We don’t use any ATLs for our campaigns, but focus more on social media, word-of-mouth as well BTLs such as EDMS, flyers and magazines. On occasion, we do have on-ground activations or pre-event marketing activities for the respective events. For us, EDMs are the main strategy, and it allows us to work on target marketing and segmentation. However, direct mailers are one of our key channels for marketing. Receiving a physical invite or flyer is part of the whole experience, and therefore, is still very much a focus for Zouk. Each year for Zouk, Christmas Eve is one of the biggest nights for us in terms of showcasing our creative team’s design thought process. It is then translated to an elaborate set where we spend at least SG$30,000 on the ground. It is about creating a visual and audio experience that is over the top when they come for the night. We had worked on the concept of a “steam-punked” Christmas. For this event, the target market is 18 to 45 years old, but it includes anyone young at heart and is able to appreciate design and music.

THE MAIL Objective: To reach out to Zouk’s young audience for its Clockwork Fairytale event.

Idea: Send out a well-designed direct mailer for a more personal touch.

Results: Full capacity for the whole Zouk complex at about 4000 for the event.

Sofie Chandra Head of marketing and events, Zouk

Zouk leans on its beautifully designed direct mailers for events.

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6/2/2015 5:40:03 PM

MARKETING SPECIAL FEATURE: THE FUTURIST

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6/2/2015 9:54:52 PM

MARKETING SPECIAL FEATURE: THE FUTURIST

Photography: Edwin Tan; Digital Imaging: Janice Paglinawan - Lumina (www.animulstudio.com)

Chaos, challenges, customer is king, technology, speed of change, opportunity, rewiring, reorganising, new skill sets, and even newer areas of growth. These are just some of the thoughts that come to mind when pondering the future of marketing. In this special report, read what all of this means for a marketer’s job straight from the horse’s mouth.

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6/2/2015 9:54:56 PM

MARKETING SPECIAL FEATURE: THE FUTURIST

WHAT IS YOUR MANTRA FOR DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION? Everyone now knows digital is a must for your marketing strategy, but the roadblocks seem too many to deal with, or are they? Rayana Pandey in a conversation with Taru Jain, founder of Maxential, finds out.

When Marketing magazine set out to ask marketers what they thought the future of marketing would be, we knew certain themes would stand out – social media, mobile marketing, e-commerce, integration, and so on. Certain trends will only strengthen going forward. Procurement will become more important, the pressures on marketing ROI will continue to grow, digital talent will not just remain in the confines of the marketing department, marketing will have to be a lot more collaborative and the CEO’s mandate will be to steer the company towards being more and more consumer-centric as opposed to product centric. Underneath all the chaos is one common thread – digital transformation, a process which is taking place at varying pace across organisations. While some companies have attained a certain level of maturity when it comes to digital, others are just dipping their toes in this new era which is redefining the way business is done. A recent Forrester study found that while

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“If people ask you to put a million dollars in the third bucket straightaway, it’s risky. You don’t want to be part of risk. No leader wants to take big risk with unknown rewards; but they all want to be seen as investors in innovation. Appeal to this side of them.” Taru Jain – founder of Maxential

74% of business executives say their company has a digital strategy, only 15% believe their company has the skills and capabilities to execute on that strategy. Business leaders don’t think of digital as central to their business because in the past, it hasn’t been. (Chart 1) “A piecemeal strategy of bolting on digital channels or methods is no longer sufficient. Instead, you must think of your company as part of a dynamic ecosystem of value that connects digital resources inside and outside the company as needed to compete,” the study said. Digital technologies can help companies

deliver a “superior customer experience and drive the agility and operational efficiency they need to stay competitive”. Taru Jain, founder of Maxential, is a coach and consultant to senior decision-makers on digital transformation. He echoes what the study above says about the need to dig deeper to truly embrace digital across the entire organisation. There are many moving parts when it comes to digital; and that confounds companies. Based on his experience of helping many organisations on their digital transformation path, Jain has created a framework he calls SPARCS.

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MARKETING SPECIAL FEATURE: THE FUTURIST

“My thinking behind SPARCS is to help leaders understand that they need to ignite transformation, spark a change on multiple dimensions to confidently take their businesses forward in an increasingly digital world,” he says. SPARCS stands for: • Structure • People • Ambition • Revenue mix • Culture • Systems

“Assessing your organisation’s digital readiness, how much do you agree with the following statements?” (8,9, or 10 on a scale of 1 [completely disagree] to 10 [completely agree]) 21%

Our CEO Sets a clear vision for digital in our business

21%

We have the right people to define our digital strategy

19%

We have the necessary technology to execute our digital strategy

15%

We have the necessary people and skills to execute our digital strategy

14%

We have the necessary processes to execute our digital strategy Base: 1,254 executives in companies with 250 or more employees

“To understand the true impact of digital change you need to evaluate it holistically, and not just as a marketing channel,” he says. Quite literally, this means reorganising the way businesses operate, but that’s not necessarily as daunting as it sounds.

Source: Forrester/ Russell Reynolds 2014 Digital Business Survey

“The roadblocks are essentially just speed bumps – it shouldn’t halt the journey digital transformation is.” Taru Jain – founder of Maxential

Forget Big rocks, use the “small” snowball effect Often executives hide behind the fact they are not empowered to change the structure of the entire business. Jain argues otherwise. While some of their concerns may be legit, big organisational changes can start at a very micro level, within the sphere of influence of managers. However, this requires a cultural shift. Take marketing for example. Marketing needs to work closely with sales and IT now more than ever before. Involving the sales team early on in the planning process of an initiative is an example of change that can happen without needing any approval. One marketing team simply started requesting someone from sales to come along to the monthly marketing campaign planning meetings to provide a practical perspective on consumer insights. Within 2 months, the collaboration led to some key changes in the way valuable CRM data was obtained – and led to a measurable lift in the next campaign’s performance. That’s the sort of change, he is speaking about. “You are empowered to make the change. Don’t wait for a sea change in structure,” he says. Reach out and be more collaborative. Digital does not respect departments; it forces you to cut across them. Let’s take another example from the marketing department – campaign thinking, Jain explains. Brands as well as their agencies are fixated on that one big idea. They spend months trying to make that big idea happen, through research and multiple rounds of checking, and then they launch it. Liken it to throwing that big rock down the hill. And then they turn their backs on it, working on the next “big rock” idea.

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Both clients and agencies will only get to know about what that big rock has done perhaps a month (if not more) later when some research results on the campaign’s effectiveness are out. “That’s traditional, old school thinking,” he says. As opposed to that, digital as he explains, enables brands to think in terms of small snowballs – small ideas – which can be tested, observed and learnt from. This also takes care of the budget – an oft-lamented issue of marketers. Here’s a solution, according to Jain. This approach to digital allows marketers to ask for small budgets to work with at regular intervals as opposed to asking for a hefty sum which the top management is generally reluctant to approve. He proposes the fairly popular 70-20-10 investment strategy; invest 70% in what you know works for your brand, 20% on what’s new in the market and you feel could be right; and 10% on something more experimental. And companies can flex these three buckets according to their needs as every organisation’s DNA is different. “But having these three buckets is in itself a mindset change,” he says. “If people ask you to put a million dollars in the third bucket straightaway, it’s risky. You don’t want to be part of risk. No leader wants to take big risk with unknown rewards; but they all want to be seen as investors in innovation. Appeal to this side of them.” So through the course of the year, if I ask you for just $50,000 10 times – and you learn how it’s spent and you keep learning from the results, you will be more willing to spend, he explains. “That’s when you are investing in innovation and not risking money. It’s a different mindset.”

Nothing wrong in being traditional There is a just reason why companies find it difficult to transform. It took 81 years for cinema to reach a billion people; radio took 53 and TV 48 but social media only 4 years. What’s the marketing implication of this? The marketing implication for this is that people have had 48 years of know-how, trial-error, and benchmarks for TV and, hence, there is much comfort in their usage by brands. “But it took 13 years for the web, since Tim Berners-Lee invented it, and it took only four years for what we are calling Web 2.0, to reach one billion consumers around the world,” he says, adding that just like a typical human being, when faced with change at such a speed, companies freeze into inaction. “One of my biggest messages to all leaders is, guys, if you feel like you are frozen into inaction, it is a perfectly natural feeling,” he says. “If you feel comfortable with traditional methods of marketing, it’s for a reason because you have lots of years of comfort doing this; several attributable points of success. And it’s OK to stay in that comfort, as long as you are knowingly signing up to the reality that you can’t live tomorrow in it.” And there are bound to be mistakes and learnings on the way. As opposed to jumping to the conclusion that digital does not work for us, companies will have to take those mistakes in their stride and continue to be open-minded, adaptive and nimble in their quest of being a consumer-centric company. As he says: “The roadblocks are essentially just speed bumps – it shouldn’t halt the journey digital transformation is.” In this edition we will take a look at what marketers think will be crucial for their jobs in the coming year.

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9/2/2015 4:58:34 PM

MARKETING SPECIAL FEATURE: THE FUTURIST

UP, UP AND AWAY WITH THE MILLENNIALS RICK HARVEY LAM Senior vice-president, global marketing Accor Luxury and Upscale Brands

Adventurous, connected and always on the move, the Millennials (aged 16-34) have become priority number one for the entire travel industry. By 2020, they’re set to account for nearly half of the workforce, and are already on track to outspend the baby boomers by 2030. According to the BCG their spending on business flights is projected to reach 50% of the total by 2020 and their leisure travel activity will have a major impact on the travel and tourism industry. Forward-thinking travel and tourism companies can earn the business and loyalty of Millennials by understanding and playing into the unique needs and wants of this generation – in that light it’s essential to understand some of the key characteristics that differentiate millennial customers from their predecessors: Tech-savvy and app lovers – Millennials grew up glued to their smartphones, tablets, iPods and a variety of other electronic devices, making them extremely comfortable and devoted to technology when it comes to travel as they are in other aspects of their lives. Today almost one third of Millennials use a smartphone and 20% use a tablet to book business travel, compared with just 12% for smartphone and 9% for tablet bookings for those 45 to 65 years old. Socially connected – although Millennials tend to place less importance on face-to-face contact than prior generations, they have a strong desire to be actively social, including via telecommunication and, of course, social media. Despite having a strong desire to unplug when staying at a hotel, nearly all millennial travellers (97%) post on social networks and share their experiences while travelling – 73% even do it on a daily basis. In addition, when faced with an issue, Millennials are less likely to complain in person

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and more likely to post critical feedback online, making them true “undercover critics” with a much wider audience and “live”! Due to websites and mobile device applications such as TripAdvisor, for example, hotels are under more inspection than ever to deliver their best service around the clock. Loyalty lovers and company spenders – one of the key findings when looking into the Millennials is their attitude towards work, in respect to “what’s in it for me?”, hence, the significant importance for loyalty programmes and their penchant for spending more of their company’s money. About half of Millennials find loyalty programmes important when reserving hotel stays; and 51% and 48% when booking flights. That’s compared with only three-in-ten for those travellers aged 46 to 65. Business? Leisure? ‘Bleisure’! – the clear separation between business and leisure is getting increasingly blurred nowadays, mainly because of the Millennials. This new generation of travellers have no problem in extending their business trip into leisure. Indeed, almost two thirds of Millennials tack on leisure time to business trips, versus half for 31 to 45-year-olds and 37% for 45 to 65-year-olds. This is highly important for brands in general, especially for hotel brands where business and leisure need to be harmonised and product and services integrated. Given the earlier mentioned trends and insights, let me give you some of the strategies companies, and more specifically travel industry related companies, can leverage to influence and capture these valuable customers that are the Millennials. Digital and mobile first – building a fully integrated digital ecosystem is nowadays a “must have” – driven by the rise of these tech-

savvy travellers. Mobile sales have more than doubled in 2014 compared with 2013 and are expected to reach an astonishing one third of all digital travel sales by 2017. Millennials have come to expect that hotels and travel companies engage them on mobile to book travel and purchase additional offers. Big data has enabled travel companies to gather tremendous information and insights on travellers, figuring out the wants and needs of the Millennial travellers. Investment in CRM is essential, resulting in efficient targeted guest marketing campaigns. The Accor group has recently announced a five-year €225 million digital transformation strategy, which includes a mobile-first customer portal, a new platform for personalising customer follow-ups and service, easier payments (mobile) and online booking tools for business. Make it personalised – brands, digital, loyalty programme, etc … Millennials demand greater value for their time (which has become the new currency) and expect an innovative and immersive experience from their brands. With business and leisure boundaries fading away, Pullman Hotels and Resorts and its “work hard, play hard” attitude responds to the expectations of this new generation of travellers. We came to the fact that hotel guests don’t want to choose between performance and indulgence: they want both. Times have changed, and there is no such thing as a standardised long-term competitive advantage. In today’s fast-paced world, a “continuous” competitive advantage to capture Millennial travellers is more than just a specific product or price – it’s about offering a “cousu main” – a consistent and trustworthy relationship to your customers. Whoever is able to best deliver such a thing will be able to create a competitive gap versus its competitors.

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9/2/2015 4:59:22 PM

MARKETING SPECIAL FEATURE: THE FUTURIST

WELCOME TO THE ‘THIRD AGE OF TRAVEL’ KARUN BUDHRAJA Vice-president, corporate and marketing communications Amadeus Asia

In the 1950s, the jet engine revolutionised aviation, ushering in a new and glamorous era of faster travel that was accessible by the public for the first time. This era was commonly known as the “golden age” of travel. By the 1990s, air travel had become a way of life for the middle class. Airlines flourished, new and exotic destinations were suddenly accessible and overseas holidays became affordable. The advent of the low-cost carrier hailed a new normal, driving competition and redefining travel – now almost everyone could afford to fly. This was the age of the “mass travel”. Now personalisation is having a profound impact on the travel industry. Travellers are becoming increasingly distinctive, travelling further and with more specific reasons, with new channels to express their aspirations for the travel experience. With a smart mobile device in nearly every hand, these travellers are well-informed and demand better service throughout the entire travel life cycle. This has had a huge influence on the players across the travel ecosystem, compelling them to adapt their marketing approach to appeal to different types of customers who are searching for unique and personal travel experiences. This is why the game has had to change and we now find ourselves in a third age – the age of “personalised travel”. As the technology provider powering the world’s leading airlines, hotels, travel agencies, rail providers and airports, Amadeus touches the lives of millions of travellers. We have always considered ourselves a B2B organisation, however, as we move into the age of personalisation we are going beyond simply providing a set of solutions to the intermediary. Instead, there is a role that B2B brands can play in closing the information gap between buyers and sellers, acting more like retailers with the ability to understand and meet unique end

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“THIS IS WHY THE GAME HAS HAD TO CHANGE AND WE NOW FIND OURSELVES IN A THIRD AGE – THE AGE OF PERSONALISED TRAVEL.” customer needs with tailored offerings. After all, it’s all about telling a great story and ensuring the customer is at the centre. Engage the traveller in your story B2B brands are firmly embracing integrated marketing, reaching end-users both directly through paid and owned strategies and indirectly via earned media. At the heart of these strategies is content and storytelling. Of course, for B2C companies this is nothing new, but in the “third” age, travel companies such as Amadeus are rethinking how we engage our audience and the people who – perhaps unknowingly – use and rely on our services almost daily. One way to do this is to create spaces where travellers interact and participate, eventually becoming part of your brand story. The creation of a “two-way value exchange” in a transparent, participatory environment at various points along your product marketing life cycle, will see companies benefit in the long run with increased customer loyalty. Brands must find new ways to fulfil people’s emotional needs Meeting emotional needs leads to brand relationships; meeting rational needs provides the reason to believe. In a B2B2C framework, there is a clear need to meet both emotional and

rational needs. We not only want our immediate customers to engage with us, we want travellers to want to buy from an Amadeus-powered airline, travel agent or hotel. To achieve that kind of brand engagement we need to find a way to tell our story in a personalised tone that resonates with that audience. B2B doesn’t have to be boring and rational. We offer something pretty special to the end customer and want to let them know, through: 1. Storytelling and story sharing: participation comes in many forms and we should create the spaces where consumers can become part of the story. 2. Conviction and commitment: B2B brands must evolve to be inclusive of not only promise, but also purpose 3. Always on and always adapting: Brands can be more responsive by applying a “listen, learn and adapt” approach and engaging in real time By doing this, we can hopefully move away from a purely transactional relationship with consumers to one that is seamless and multidimensional. Next time you travel, be assured Amadeus will be behind the scenes connecting your journey and shaping the future of travel. Welcome to this third age of travel – the age of personalisation.

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9/2/2015 5:00:40 PM

MARKETING SPECIAL FEATURE: THE FUTURIST

STILL A TOUCH ‘MAD’ BUT NOT FOR LONG ANNA BORY General manager, marketing Audi Singapore

Does Don Draper’s world from the famous TV series Mad Men about an advertising agency differ a lot from today’s marketing world? We certainly have a wider range of available media and more complexities to deal with. However, we are still conducting our business in very similar ways to what we used to 50 years ago. Despite the fact we have more data to support our strategies, have become more efficient and targeted in our messaging and have new disciplines such as planning and social media, we haven’t fully been able to adapt the way we do business to the social and technological changes. Let’s start by looking at the evolution of key campaign deliverables. Even though the media landscape grew exponentially alongside the

targeting consumers better. The engineering of marketing through big data is no doubt the future of the marketing industry. However, until we can accurately measure the ROI of all marketing activities, we may be faced with divergent forces pushing us back towards traditional and “safe” media investments such as TV and print to guarantee minimum results. Ironic, isn’t it? It’s almost as if our industry has resisted change despite being at the centre of it. There are numerous reasons for this, but here is an interesting fact demonstrating why change in our industry has happened slower than expected and why it will now be coming faster than we may think. We assumed social behaviours would

“THE TRADITIONAL TVC AND PRINT AD REMAIN TOO OFTEN THE MAIN FOCUS OF CLIENTS AND AGENCIES ALIKE.” service offering in the advertising industry, TV and print still remain the number one priority for most clients and agencies. Of course, we are well aware of the range of media available and their benefits. Clients and agencies have created positions, departments and even stand-alone companies to address this need. However, the traditional TVC and DPS/FPFC print ad remain too often the main focus of clients and agencies alike, making them the largest share of the media budget and leaving other media touch-points underrepresented. Indeed, we are evolving towards a world where we are capable of understanding and

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change with the advent of new technologies. While we have seen the impact in our society, the bulk of consumers in the past decades remained the Gen X and baby boomers, who were born without most of today’s technologies and who therefore, share largely similar media consumption habits. “Gen Y, also known as the Millennials, is the generation that has been impacted the most by technological progress. And they have only just recently entered the workforce and started to have buying power. Research shows that 10,000 baby boomers retire every day in the US* while 36% of the US workforce will be comprised of Millennials by 2014 and

46% by 2020**. This audience will drive a new communication era. Gen Y are born with unlimited access to the world through infinite access to information right at their fingertips. They have access to people via multiple communication platforms. They have access to new and used goods online globally, new destinations through affordable travel solutions and to online education from top schools 24/7. They are generally free thinkers and are willing to change the way things are to improve efficiency. Uber, eBay, Airbnb and crowdfunding platforms are perfect examples of how people are bypassing current systems for practical solutions. They consume media differently. Some of them don’t own TVs anymore, neither do they read physical newspapers or magazines. Information now comes to them and the types of content they are looking for has to be authentic with added value features such as education and entertainment. This development represents a massive shift in the way we do business. We have to juggle between two completely different media and communication strategies based on target audiences; focusing more on traditional media for Gen X and baby boomers while focusing more on content for Gen Y. Content has become a hot topic in recent years; however few brands have actually been able to crack it. We certainly have some of the most interesting years ahead of us in marketing since Mad Men’s era and the creation of advertising. Successful companies will be the ones allowing flexible media budget allocations, embracing new types of content channel distributions and lastly, either bringing on board or developing the right skills internally. I am looking forward to that new age. *The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics ** Study from UNC’s Kenan-Flagler Business School and the YEC

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9/2/2015 5:01:33 PM

MARKETING SPECIAL FEATURE: THE FUTURIST

TRENDS FOR CUSTOMERCENTRED CAPABILITY DEVELOPMENT HAYLEY SPURLING Brand director Brand Learning

The world of work has undergone massive change and so, of course, capability development needs to keep pace. We’re often asked what trends we’re seeing in capability development to help clients optimise their capability strategies with better ways to engage people and deliver their business goals. As minds turn to how to have an everstronger impact in the year ahead, here are three trends that can be applied to your organisation’s capability planning: • Scale: From mass to agile. • Focus: From functional to organisational. • E-learning: From silver bullet to golden ratio 1. Scale: From mass to agile Possibly the most overused term of the decade, agility has moved from being an approach to programming to being a mantra for businesses. Agility, synonymous with speed and efficiency, is vital when the pace of change is rapid. However, capability programmes face a tension between scale, quality and efficiency and organisations are seeking agile approaches to get the balance right. Optimise the organisation design before you develop your programme. We increasingly work with clients on their organisation design and operating model – the who does what. It’s a critical driver of capability, but more than that, it enables a smarter segmentation of capability needs so that programmes can be more relevant and targeted. As a leader of a large B2B company with whom we worked in this way said, there’s no point developing people or skills that won’t be required. Less focus on “mass foundational skills” and more on spiking performance around the big business priorities. Historically, many companies have created multi-topic “essentials” programmes designed to raise the floor of capability levels across the team. Increasingly, companies are focusing on a

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“FIND THE “GOLDEN RATIO” IN YOUR CAPABILITY STRATEGY.” few areas, tied into the big priorities, and going further to build capability to a more sophisticated level. They embrace approaches such as liveaction learning and guided discovery where learning is immediately applied to real issues. At the same time, if companies don’t have a widespread understanding of the basics, we find they need to establish core principles and processes before progressing to a focused approach. There remains massive power in coherent consistent practices. In some markets we’re even doing “pre-foundation” programmes where the foundation programmes, usually developed with more sophisticated markets in mind, aren’t practical enough for less experienced team members. 2. Focus: From functional to organisational undefined While companies still want to spike the performance of specific functions in specific areas, we are also finding a shift to organisational capability development. In line with the greater pressure for fluid, cross-functional ways of working, companies are initiating joined-up capability initiatives which lift customer-centred capabilities across functional divides. This is more than “marketing for sales and HR teams” – this is about ensuring the processes, ways of working, behaviours and skills connect constructively to enable customercentred growth. Pharmaceutical companies are arguably ahead of the curve here – in addition to specific sales or marketing capability programmes, we’ve delivered cross-functionally aligned capability development with the payer, market access, R&D, brand and sales teams.

3. E-learning: From silver bullet to golden ratio Recently, clients replaced face-to-face learning with e-learning wherever possible to reduce people’s learning time and also travel costs. They saw it as a silver bullet. As a consequence, e-tutorials and virtual classrooms were often designed to imitate face-to-face learning – and were limited in their ability to do this well. At the same time, virtual working has been a massive change for companies. People are so familiar with it they don’t notice the interface as much (Lync, Skype, WebEx, etc), predisposing them to more virtual learning – with MOOCs and virtual coaching rising in popularity. Learning professionals have become better at using technology. We’ve also become better at understanding its role – alongside face-to-face – in learner journeys – or indeed learning ecosystems – which draw on multiple techniques over time to support learners for an extended experience, promoting greater embedding of change. E-tutorials, online guides, articles and films are, for example, a powerful enabler of the “guide on side” flipped classroom approach. Virtual reality allows “safe” experimentation and collective learning. Gamification allows scenario-based, selfpaced and competitively measured learning of what can be complex topics. Online communities enable social learning, ideassharing and collective problem solving. Face-toface remains invaluable for challenge, feedback, collective motivation and energy-fuelling, and getting people to believe in the change required. The key is to find your “golden ratio” in your specific capability strategy. That’s the blend that yields the most beautiful results.

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9/2/2015 5:02:55 PM

MARKETING SPECIAL FEATURE: THE FUTURIST

THE FUTURE(S) OF B2B MARKETING ANDREA LIN SVP, Head of marketing for treasury and trade solutions, Asia Pacific Citi

The game changer Digital disruption has been the most influential driver of change to the marketing profession in the past two decades. From mobile technologies and social media platforms to marketing clouds, and spanning the “internet of things” to the “internet of you”, the shift to digital has transformed the way we interact with the world as individuals, communities and organisations – bringing about a global digital consumption culture. Against this backdrop, any discussion on the future of marketing cannot be decoupled from new technology, tools and channels that are becoming increasingly important tactical components of a marketer’s arsenal. Data analytics – whether “big” or “small” – for example, are a fundamental game-changer for B2B marketing. Think about big data as machine-centric (seeking trends, benchmarks and “ah-ha” moments) and small data as people-centric (the essence of design thinking; understanding customer segment needs and motivations). The ability to leverage both types of data to uncover insights will be core to strategic marketing planning, creating value in B2B relationships, and the quality of marketing output. Customer-centricity and the move upstream Digital evolution aside, the pace of growth of most, if not all, industries has predominantly been driven by customers’ shifting needs rather than by advancements in products or technology. Even the most innovative companies, who are category creators or disrupters, succeed because they have invented a new compelling need or want for the customer. This is a simple, but fundamental understanding to have in mind when designing your marketing blueprint. The strategic question that guides marketing today is not, “what else can we do for our business?” but “what else can we do for

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customers?” True customer-centricity requires a rethink of how marketing is organised and how investments are allocated. Here, we can draw parallels from the petroleum industry value chain, which is divided into three major components – upstream (exploration), midstream (processing) and downstream (distribution). B2B marketers can adapt the same framework to identify customer-centric value creation opportunities: • Upstream: Strategy, research, road maps. • Midstream: Infrastructure, platforms, people. • Downstream: go-to-market plans, tactics, activities. Depending on the objectives and sophistication of the marketing function, priorities can be integrated across the three streams – or as more commonly seen with B2B, tilted towards downstream activities. A possible explanation could be that B2B marketing has traditionally been more opaque compared with its B2C counterparts. This is largely a function of the customised solutions-based nature of B2B, and their complex, multi-stakeholder sales environment. Under these circumstances, the most visible aspects of marketing are downstream activities such as events, case studies and white papers. And in a fast-paced competitive environment, the low hanging fruit for companies is to focus on replicating or improving on the market leader’s tactics. Consequently, quantity of tactical activities, implementation of platforms that support new tactics, and process innovations to increase operational efficiency have become common success measurements for B2B marketing. The problem with this is – quantity, technology, and efficiency metrics are easy to replicate by everyone else in the market. As B2B organisations look to become more customer-centric, we will see B2B marketers

moving upstream by offering marketing advisory based on research they have gathered.This can include the shaping of metrics to track the evolution of customer needs and how well the company continues to serve them; as well as pulse checks on whether it has become harder to retain or deepen relationships. Increasing focus on upstream initiatives will undoubtedly improve marketing’s ability to innovate and build true competitive differentiators for the function. The future: Evolving roles, new priorities and expanded impact If we strip away the buzz words and go back to first principles, marketing is the business of promoting and selling products or services. The essence of what we do will not change, but how we do our job and the scope of our job continues to evolve. Rather than the specialised communications focus of the past, the marketer today wears many hats – from strategist, advisor, researcher to product manager (events are essentially products of the marketing function), RFP writer (think award submissions!), business developer (selling ideas internally and externally) to creative director (why not tackle the client experience as mise-en-scène?). The only certainty about the future of our profession is it’s wide and diverse, and it will broaden further. In the B2B space, we will be looking at the future of marketing in relation to the evolution of the different industries and ecosystems in which we operate in. And the trick here, is to plan for your future today, taking into consideration the intersections between marketing, product, sales and client experience to identify opportunities within your company’s value chain – and overlaying adjacencies such as disruptive technologies, data analytics, business model innovation, channels, stakeholder management, and talent recruitment, to capture value – creating impact that extends beyond the marketing function.

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9/2/2015 5:04:48 PM

MARKETING SPECIAL FEATURE: THE FUTURIST

THE FUTURE OF MARKETING STEVE BAYLISS Area marketing director, Asia Pacific and Oceania Energizer Personal Care

The more that things change in marketing, the more the basics matter: insights, strategy, innovation and execution. Access to data has never been better and some could argue there is actually too much data and marketers are being drowned in it. Anyone can collect information these days, but few can translate that information into intelligence and then insights that will unlock growth. Brands and companies that are winning are good at uncovering meaningful insights out of the always-on data stream and being able to then act on those insights in the context of their longer term strategy.

are far more similar than they are dissimilar, particularly among the under-35 consumer cohorts. Men who shave all want a close, comfortable shave and it doesn’t matter if that is in Tokyo, Shanghai, Jakarta, London, Dubai, Sydney or New York. What filters that to local relevancy, and, ultimately sales, is understanding the local cultural context in which a consumer will interact with your brand and the local buying power of those consumers. If you listen to and understand your consumers, you will know this and then be able to act upon it.

“IF YOU ARE REWRITING YOUR STRATEGY EACH YEAR, YOU HAVEN’T YET DISCOVERED THE RIGHT INSIGHTS ON YOUR BUSINESS/BRAND TO BE SUCCESSFUL.” The basics always matter and in packaged goods that starts with a deep understanding of your target consumer and how they interact with your category and ultimately your brand. I’ll argue this is true for all brands and categories, not just consumer goods. The future of marketing belongs to those companies that will continue to invest in and commit to understanding their consumers to the best of their abilities and resources. These insights are the foundation of your brand positioning and your brand strategy. In the hyper- connected world today, needs, motivations and discussions of your brands

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Good strategy is always data and insightdriven and speaks to the long term. If you are rewriting your strategy each year, you haven’t yet discovered the right insights on your business/brand to be successful. Get the foundation right and then build a strategy for long-term success. As a marketing leader, your role is to then ensure your senior management are brought into this strategy and will support it, even when short-term disruptions are encountered. And short-term disruptions/distractions will occur, but good marketing stays the course. Understanding your strategy and sticking to it

also drives your innovation pipeline. For brands and marketing, innovation is the key to the future when it is aligned with your strategy. The future of marketing is about consistency. Consistently executing your brand positioning against your target consumers over time is a key to success. Just because some new medium of connecting with your consumers is created doesn’t mean you change your positioning to fit that touch-point. Adapt your message sure, but keep it true to what you want your brand to mean and be for those consumers. Great brands and their marketing teams are masters of this and understand the value of staying the course over the long haul and not just for this quarter. Brands and the companies behind them such as Starbucks, Apple, Cartier, BMW or even a start-up such as GORUCK understand this and have it embedded in their organisational DNA. Consistency doesn’t mean stagnating, but it means consistently looking for insights to unlock future growth via marketing innovation and product/brand innovation that supports your strategy. In speaking to an executive from a leading research company that measures and evaluates brands, they will tell you that staying on message across all touch-points is what will build your brand over time if delivered against that consumer insight I talked about earlier, and you can engage them in the midst of today’s marketing noise. Consistency in executing marketing means applying the 70/20/10 rule to your budgeting so you can deliver for the current year, but also innovate and test new ways to connect with your consumers so they are buying more of your brand/products over time. Great brands consistently listen to their consumers and measure themselves appropriately against welldefined key performance indicators. If you want to master marketing in the future, then master the basics today.

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9/2/2015 6:27:53 PM

MARKETING SPECIAL FEATURE: THE FUTURIST

THE MOBILE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE WILL FUEL DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION IN ASIA PACIFIC DANE ANDERSON Vice-president, research director and region manager for Asia Pacific Forrester Research

Forrester Research has unveiled its top 10 technology predictions for Asia Pacific in 2015, with expectations that mobilepowered customer experiences will fuel digital transformation in the region. “In a world of ever increasing digital demands and shrinking budgets, CIOs need to be smarter with where they place their bets,” said Dane Anderson, Forrester Research’s vice-president, research director and region manager for Asia Pacific. “Successful CIOs in 2015 will improve collaboration with business leaders to craft superior customer experiences.” For 2015, Forrester’s top 10 predictions and their implications are: 1. Digital transformation will drive technology spending growth of 4.9% Seventy nine per cent of organisations consider improving the experiences of technology empowered customers as a high or critical priority for their business in 2015. While 57% of businesses across the region see the rising expectations of customers as the number one reason to spend more money on ICT purchases in 2015. 2. The majority of companies in Asia Pacific will be unprepared for digital disruption Although powerhouses in China such as Alibaba and Haier Group are leading the regional charge to digital business success, many local and regional companies still don’t understand what it takes to build a digital business. Regional organisational inertia will be the biggest hurdle to digital transformation in 2015 and Forrester expects Asia Pacific organisations to be complacent to the growing wave of global digital business houses crashing in their backyards. 3. China will be the epicentre of digital innovation Fuelled by its massive digital population, a lack

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of legacy approaches and well-funded digital behemoths, China is set to become the world’s largest e-commerce market by 2015, with market gains of $315.3 billion in online sales (B2C and C2C). China’s social media arena is also developing at lightning speed with 95% of metropolitan Chinese online adults using social media today. 4. ‘Digital India’ will encounter stubborn roadblocks The Indian government’s $17 billion ambitious “Digital India” programme has the potential to be a game changer for the country. While Forrester applauds the Indian government’s programme to transform India to a digitally empowered knowledge economy, it predicts the programme will face key ground-level challenges in terms of infrastructure operations and standards and the lack of technology management involvement. 5. Mobile business will lag accelerated smartphone adoption By the end of 2015, Forrester expects 36% of adults in Asia to own a smartphone – ownership ranges from a high of 86% in Singapore to 44% in China and a low of 23% in India. However, few companies will be ready to serve these technology empowered customers on their smartphones in their moments of need. Mobile will remain small in terms of ad spend. 6. Organisations will move beyond rudimentary enterprise mobility In 2015, Forrester expects to see a significant number of small, medium and large businesses across Asia Pacific begin to embrace hybrid tablet/laptop devices as a start of their enterprise mobility journey. A growing proportion of forward-thinking businesses in Asia Pacific will begin to examine their employees’ mobile moments and those who succeed will think customer mobility, not enterprise mobility.

7. Customer experience – bridge for CIOCMO collaboration In 2015, regional CMOs will become increasingly aware of their technology limitations and the drag the lack of proper planning on integration, application management, security and compliance will place on their marketing agility. At the same time, CIOs will shift focus from back-end IT systems to customer-facing business technology. 8. Asia will turn to mobile messaging apps for customer engagement With more than one billion users combined on WeChat, LINE, KakaoTalk, Viber and WhatsApp, Forrester expects regional organisations to increasingly turn to mobile messaging apps for customer engagement. Forrester expects mobile messaging to begin siphoning ad spend away from Facebook, especially for price-sensitive businesses in Asia Pacific that increasingly question the platform’s effectiveness. 9. Apple Pay will dislodge the mobile payments gridlock In 2014, Forrester’s prediction was the mobile payments landscape in Asia Pacific would remain riddled by fragmentation. This is expected to change in 2015 as Apple Pay’s technology will accelerate payments and enable new customer experiences. In particular, China and Australia will run ahead with Apple Pay on mobile. 10. Customer insights and big data analytics will sprawl 2015 will be the year of increased fragmentation for big data as reliance on analytics spreads within and across organisations. Spending on analytics will increase by at least 10% across the region, but a shrinking proportion of this will be visible to the IT budget. Marketing teams will take the lead to seek data-fuelled improvements in customer engagement.

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9/2/2015 5:07:52 PM

MARKETING SPECIAL FEATURE: THE FUTURIST

GETTING UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL MIKE KING Retail manager, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia IKEA We all know that digital is here, but what next? The future is about getting personal. The ability to know who your customer is the moment they walk into the store; anticipate their individual desires; send a personalised message with a real-time offer that has been tailor-made for each individual; and assist them with their shopping journey the way they want it, wherever they need it. We expect a shift in focus from driving content to digital devices to looking at the people who use them and how they use them. Harness data we collect through multiple touch-points, not merely to analyse and finetune engagement campaigns, but to truly understand customers. To move beyond segmenting audiences to building relationships with individuals by knowing when they need us at the right time for the right things with the right messages. We will have the ability to recognise a customer and understand their history on every channel in which we meet them, whether it is with a sales co-worker at a service counter or within a digital platform. We will deliver personalised offers and content in all channels. We want to understand people’s desires and proactively support their product and service needs. Our future customers expect to be in the driver’s seat at all times and that they can trust the data we hold on them. We will lose people the moment they feel trust has been violated so we must always be clear that the ambition is to develop “mutually valuable relationships”. We can make this vision a reality with a CRM platform that truly puts the customer in the centre. Marketing can no longer look at fragmented conflicting data in silos. We need to have the ability to collate and connect all traces of data a customer leaves in their interactions with the brand in one place – and generate actionable insights. This will require major investments in IT solutions, market modelling

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“THE FUTURE IS ABOUT GETTING PERSONAL. THE ABILITY TO KNOW WHO YOUR CUSTOMER IS THE MOMENT THEY WALK INTO THE STORE; ANTICIPATE THEIR INDIVIDUAL DESIRES; SEND A PERSONALISED MESSAGE WITH A REALTIME OFFER THAT HAS BEEN TAILOR-MADE FOR EACH INDIVIDUAL; AND ASSIST THEM WITH THEIR SHOPPING JOURNEY THE WAY THEY WANT IT, WHEREVER THEY NEED IT.” tools and people. Building deep competence in the area of analytics to plan and execute more personalised marketing and communication will be a significant competitive advantage for

an organisation to be relevant for its customers. An integrated CRM platform of the future must cover a broad scope – from tracking and following up on sales leads to creating and delivering tailor-made customer experiences.

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9/2/2015 5:09:15 PM

MARKETING SPECIAL FEATURE: THE FUTURIST

COMMUNICATE … OR DIE GREG CLAYTON Managing director Kadence International

Those reading this article will have (at least) one thing in common – we all work in the marketing industry, different disciplines maybe, but all unified by the professional imperative to be effective communicators. As the proliferation of our communication media continues, you’d be forgiven for thinking that communication is becoming easier. But you’d be wrong. Effective communication is more challenging than ever (as many people seem intent on proving!), precisely because there are so many messages competing for our audiences’ attention – whether that’s our colleagues, customers or the broader public. To break through the clutter, communication needs to be brought into the very heart of every business, ensuring all communications (both outbound and internal) support a clearly defined brand identity. And beyond just having an effective corporate comms police, all customerfacing staff need to assume responsibility. So, let’s explore what makes up communication. Simply, there’s message and delivery. Substance and style. A “what” and a “how”. And both require equal consideration when generating effective communication. So a few ideas to help communications throughout 2015: First, and obviously, let’s hope you have a message. While I’m sure we can all think of exceptions to this rule, it’s not generally advisable to embark on communication without having something of substance to convey. So please, be the rule and not the exception. With your message in mind, you now need to consider how you’re going to communicate it – and you need to answer a couple of simple questions to help support this decision. • What outcome do I want from this communication? Have clarity of purpose. • Who is my audience and how do they best absorb information? Show empathy. And then you need to consider the execution.

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“MAKE COMMUNICATION A WAY OF LIFE FOR YOUR COMPANY .” •

•

• •

Remember the overarching objective of any execution is to aid transmission and comprehension of the message. Ensure clarity. Consider what tone is required. Formal, irreverent, sales-oriented, indirect? Be versatile. Remember your tone needs to reflect your brand – a natural extension of the personalities and philosophies that are behind it. Be credible and authentic. Choose your media delivery carefully. Social, email, printed collateral, video, PowerPoint? The existence of more platforms doesn’t excuse you scattering messages over as many as possible – assess which ones will be most effective for your audience. Be selective. Make your communications stand out. Experiment, take risks and be creative. Above all, remind yourself the platform and style used to convey the message should complement your message, not overpower it. Be subtle.

And now, the real challenge – doing this consistently and ensuring the whole organisation delivers high standards of communication at all times. Only once everyone is actively contributing to the vision of outstanding communication can your brand become legitimately renowned for it. • Be aware of the range of touch-points that you have with your customers – email, phone, CNY card, sales visit, point-of-sale, after-sales interaction … you’ll need to

•

develop guidelines for visual, audio, tone, maybe even dress code – but develop and apply a unifying framework across each of them. Understand that even the most functional day-to-day communication can be leveraged to elevate your brand image. Remember that every interaction is an opportunity to impress (or not …). Treat internal communication with as much attention as anything customer-facing. Get into good habits. Make communication a way of life for your company and share your best practices and successes. Create an internal lexicon. Provide best-practice examples, but allow self-expression within them. Your communications have to continually evolve and improve – remember that Darwin chap? Empower your team to develop your corporate voice over time.

The human capability to communicate so richly is what truly defines our species from others, and we at Kadence believe this information era makes effective communication a crucial driver of any organisation’s ongoing competitive advantage. We therefore invest heavily in all of our communication, making a particular effort to deliver our research findings in an immediately accessible fashion. Research is our discipline, but our communication is what makes our proposition unique. What’s your discipline, and how will you improve your communications to propel you through 2015?

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9/2/2015 5:10:20 PM

K-S_Storytelling_Full Page Advert_210114_v6 (with Dubai) v2.pdf 1 13/1/2015 11:24:32 AM

CMY

Whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s your story? From ancient mythology to modern day theatre, campfire tales to ad campaigns, storytelling has always been used to communicate ideas and provoke creative thinking.

At Kadence International, we believe in the power of a good story to communicate research findings, capture attention and inspire insight. Contact us to learn more: t: +65 6372 8710 e: singapore@kadence.com w: www.kadence.com

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MARKETING SPECIAL FEATURE: THE FUTURIST

THE DEATH OF TRADITIONAL AND DIGITAL MARKETING RAHUL ASTHANA Marketing director, baby and child care, digital and e-commerce, Asia Pacifi acific Kimberly-Clark Corporation

Digital marketing is dead. Long live integrated marketing in a digital world! When I started work at the beginning of this century, marketers looked at marketing according to what they had been trained in, that is, “traditional” marketing – whether TV, print, radio, in-store and PR or this new, confusing thing called digital. Marketers also looked at all these touch-points discretely and the primary task was to generate trials. This thinking gave rise to 360-marketing, which had a successful run, but in my opinion

she gets her entertainment, browses for and purchases products and comes back to share her opinions about the experience. Therefore, at Kimberly-Clark, we believe we need to engage with her in her world, at touch-points where she is most receptive and with content that is most meaningful. So, we brief our agencies in an integrated manner and expect them to come back with ideas that are medium neutral and a recommendation on the media channels before we look at executions. We think of an integrated approach that

“BRAND FANATICS DON’T JUST BUY PRODUCTS BECAUSE THEY ARE GREAT, BUT BECAUSE OF THE ENTIRE EXPERIENCE AND WHAT IT TELLS THE WORLD ABOUT THEM.” has run its course. Now, in the middle of the second decade of the century, with the astounding proliferation of different media as well as technology and content providers, the way to think about it is integrated marketing. There are three aspects of integration we need to recognise. First, the most obvious one is the consumer today lives in a digital world, so we should not be thinking of digital as something she spends her time with part of the day before going to the “real” world. Her world is digital – this is where she goes for information, where she makes and interacts with friends, where

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looks at data analytics as a way of identifying real consumer insights; drives consumer engagement through relevant content delivered to the consumer through multiple media; continues the relationship through CRM; invites the consumer to browse via search; buy our products through e-commerce and advocate for us through social. Second, there is the integration of the product and its marketing. Consumers no longer buy products or brands – they look for experiences and a narrative. Brand fanatics don’t just buy products because they are great,

but because of the entire experience and what it tells the world about them. This can be true of any category, including seemingly mundane categories such as laundry and baby care and marketers need to understand the experience the user is buying into when she purchases their category. Finally, and most excitingly, consumers are no longer satisﬁed with being broadcast at by brands. Social media has given them the means to participate in the conversation and they expect to be listened to. Companies that do not recognise this are increasingly being seen as out of date and out of touch. At Kimberly-Clark, a key expectation of our commercial programmes is we drive consumer participation and we have had many successful examples such as Kotex in Malaysia, Huggies in Singapore and Depend in the US. What doesn’t change though? Consumer understanding is still so important. We still need to understand the real consumer insights that can help unlock the category value for us and overcome the barriers that are stopping us from achieving our objectives. However, there are new and exciting ways of getting at this insight – it can be through analysing large amounts of data that is freely available, through neuroscience techniques that tell us what the consumer is really thinking versus what she is saying, in addition to more traditional methods. Content is, if anything, more important. The amount of content needed has increased exponentially and brands still need to partner with agencies to generate this content. What needs to change though are the traditional processes of generating briefs and executions and getting approvals that are too slow and time consuming for today’s content requirements. Agility is going to be key and brands that recognise this will succeed. This is an exciting time to be a marketer and I look forward to the future.

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10/2/2015 10:03:12 AM

MARKETING SPECIAL FEATURE: THE FUTURIST

4 TIPS TO BECOMING “2015 MARKETER OF THE YEAR” AMBRISH JAIN Vice-president, worldwide marketing brand integration Lenovo

A search of top trending marketing topics today will result in programmatic buying, content marketing, social media, big data, native advertising and mobile marketing, among others. While all these – individually and collectively – have dramatically reshaped the landscape of marketing in 2014, they also tend to overshadow the core objective of marketing. If marketing has one goal, it’s to influence and change consumer behaviour. More often than not, it’s to influence a consumer to become favourably inclined to a brand, resulting in switching brands (competitive conversion) or driving a desire to purchase a new category. It can also be to change consumption habits – a shampoo-selling mastermind took the standard “lather, rinse” and changed it to “lather, rinse. Repeat”. Brilliant, pure genius! Marketing can also influence people’s behaviour towards social good. Interestingly, some of the most successful campaigns recently have been social-cause related. “Earth Hour”, “Dumb Ways to Die”, “Ice Bucket Challenge” and the “Bentley Burial for Organ Donation” have either won or been worthy of Cannes gold/platinum Lions. Thus, the key common ingredients of any successful marketing campaign are consumers (understanding, insights), compelling message and experiences, and effective efficient delivery that engages the consumer when and where they are most receptive. The consumer landscape has dramatically changed over the past few years with the explosion of mobile (primarily smartphones), internet and social media. Consumers are far more willing to experiment with products and brands as the amount of information and online reviews makes taking a chance less risky. The consumers today – conditioned by mobile and powered by the internet – are always on (explosion of online content, social media); want it now (a one-second delay in an e-commerce page load-up can cost millions in

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lost sales); and expresses freely (four out of 10 people repost photos, reviews). It has, thus, become more challenging than ever to authentically connect with today’s consumer, and accordingly, trust is at an all-time premium. Today’s marketers must engage in a consistent, respectful two-way dialogue with their target audience. Make no mistake, the customer and fan experience has evolved into one driven by engagement and “shareability”. Outlined below is my list of four tips to help jump-start your journey towards becoming “2015 Marketer of the Year”. 1. Reinvent the traditional marketing model mindset Most successful marketers are moving away from “broadcasting marketing messages” to publishing stories and useful content”. Consumers want and are willing to engage with brands which add value to their life. Charmin has developed an app called “sit or squat” which directs consumers to the cleanest bathrooms when they are away from home. Nike has the “Nike+ running” app to help runners achieve their goals. These efforts provide valuable tools to consumers, and in so doing, create a positive association with the brand. 2. Creativity (big idea) matters While the explosion of video content has created challenges to reach consumers among the noise, it has also created a significant opportunity from a storytelling perspective. Admen are no longer limited to a 30-second TV spot. The top viral video ads have an average length of one to two minutes. These top video ad campaigns (e.g. Old Spice’s “Smell like a Man, Man” and Volkswagen’s “Van Damme’s epic split”/“the Force”) are generating more than 50-70 million views, with a significant part being “earned”

media. Is your brand name up there? If not, ever wondered why? There is an old adage in advertising agencies – “clients get the work they deserve”. Are you sufficiently challenging, inspiring and taking risks with your agencies to come up with great creative work? 3. Digital and social media amplification In a consumer participatory economy, marketers have to address two key questions from a consumer perspective. Why do I care (is the work relevant, engaging)? Why will I share (need to create value for them and their network)? Leo Burnett uses its PLAY (how do we engage and keep them engaged?), BUY (how does participation encourage sales?), SHARE (how and why will people share?) engagement model to create compelling work. Some examples: • Fiat Brazil Vem Pra Rua • 7-Eleven Slurpee BYO Cup Day 4. Embrace technology and a “mobile first” approach in storytelling In a world where consumers are rarely separated from their mobile phones, brands are learning to leverage them in creating delightful and surprising experiences as illustrated in this example by E-Mart Korea. Brands are leveraging technology in developing highly engaging brand messaging. Some exemplary examples include British Airways (#lookup outdoor campaign in London) and Dunkin’ Donuts Korea (flavour radio campaign on metro buses and outdoor). Top hockey players “skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been”. Marketers will have to hone that skill to effectively engage and influence consumer behaviour by leveraging programmatic buying, big data and real-time analytics, content marketing and a whole host of tools available in their armoury.

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10/2/2015 3:45:13 PM

MARKETING SPECIAL FEATURE: THE FUTURIST

THE CHANGING FACE OF MARKETERS ABDUL RAHIM BAWA Vice-president, insights and analytics, Southeast Asia MasterCard

What’s a bad personality trait for a marketer in this era? Being anti-social! A decade ago, things were very different for me as a consumer. I had a trusty Nokia 3310. Even though I could only use it for phone calls, text messaging and the occasional snake game, it worked perfectly and suited my needs at the time. Now, I have an iPhone and every aspect of my mobile experience has changed. I do more video chats, and use WhatsApp for instant communication. Instead of “snake”, I play motion-sensor racing games. Our daily lives are influenced by technology and it has changed the way we live, interact and, most importantly, consume information. Marketing has always been about how marketers interact with their consumers by either creating simple messages or experiences. While the process is still the same, the way we interact or create experiences has changed considerably. Consumers are now more aware of their preferences and how they would like to consume information. Marketing has to step up to the challenge with innovative ways to influence consumer behaviour and interact the way consumers want it to. What about the marketers themselves? Well, most of them are still playing catch up. There are basically five key traits the marketer of the future should have. 1. Renewed focus Who are your customers and how do they like to communicate? Knowing and having this level of focus will help move the needle for the marketing of tomorrow. Traditionally, marketers have tried creating noise to attract the attention of the crowd and then persuade them to become customers. What they forget is that a crowd has traits, but customers have personalities. So the future marketer will need to move from a crowd view to a customer view. At the end of the day, we

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“A CROWD HAS TRAITS, BUT CUSTOMERS HAVE PERSONALITIES.” need to act in a way that truly customises the experience for them. 2. Insights-driven marketing A future marketer will be numbers-savvy. As a marketer, you have to upgrade yourself as you are expected to make sense of all the information and numbers thrown at you. While insights have always been a part of marketing, there has been a huge shift in how that data is collected, and how insights are generated and consumed. Surveys have always been the most common way to know the pulse of consumers. But with social media now, it’s all real-time data. Marketers will need to work alongside data scientists and other media agencies to understand the market and build a strong base for the future. 3. Loyalty pays “What percentage of my business is from repeat customers?” We have all been asked this question and I hope every marketer knows their numbers. The marketer of the future will need one more metric to be successful – the customer for life. With increased competition and noise, marketing will not be able to reach and influence the right set of customers. Loyal customers are the ones who are most likely to advocate for you and share their positive experiences. These are the people who will have conversations and who will help drive positive sentiments about you. So there should be more emphasis on engaging and rewarding the loyal customer.

4. Budget: Digital —> traditional 15 years on, digital marketing is finally seeing traction in terms of spending. However, there is still many a marketer who favours traditional media over digital and puts all their budgets, figuratively speaking, in one basket. The future is highly skewed towards digital spend. A good digital marketing execution is not cheap and with budgets shrinking every year, there will be limited media you can invest in. Most companies in the near future will have a higher share of their marketing budgets set aside for digital media. How quickly you can adapt will determine your success. 5. Click-through rates —> click-through revenue In the end, it’s all about the business profit. Future marketers will be judged not only by the traditional marketing metrics such as click-through rates, but also by click-through revenues. Marketing drives the business. To have the budget for engagement, you need revenue. A $100,000 engagement with a click-through rate of 50% will not mean much if the revenue driven was $10,000. Apart from that, know what you are driving through marketing. Is it brand value or actual revenue? This will serve as the key metric that you will be judged against at the end of a campaign. To conclude, the future of marketing is determined by how marketers adopt and adapt to change. So upgrade your bullock carts to jet planes and buckle up because the world is moving at a million miles an hour.

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9/2/2015 5:14:37 PM

MARKETING SPECIAL FEATURE: THE FUTURIST

KEEPING UP WITH MOBILE: WHAT TO WATCH OUT FOR IN 2015 ROBERT WOOLFREY APAC managing director Millennial Media

The mobile industry has progressed at unprecedented rate. Driven by changing patterns in consumer behaviour, the rapid evolution of the industry continues to challenge all of us who work in this space every day. Mid last year, I wrote about the trends and themes that were emerging in Asia Pacific that mobile advertisers needed to keep an eye on. These included a boom in mobile video engagement, a ramp-up in algo-centric buying and selling, and a greater focus on measurement and attribution. Over the course of the past eight months, these three themes

All this excitement exists for good reason. And mobile marketers have even more to look forward to as mobile, in particular, lends itself to programmatic buying because of its unique targeting options. Automated trading is becoming extremely important to the efficiency and scalability of our industry, as well as a vital part of brands’ digital strategies. Asia Pacific can’t afford to ignore this trend. Chief among the programmatic concerns are brand safety and the threats that a misplaced ad could pose to corporate brand-building. In 2015, the conversation

“ JUST LIKE ANY OTHER MARKETING PLATFORM, RELIABLE AND CONSISTENT MEASUREMENT IS KEY TO DRIVING INVESTMENT INTO MOBILE.” remained high on the agenda. Here’s how we, at Millennial Media, picture them shaping the mobile landscape in 2015. 1. Marketers will try to figure out how to make programmatic work for them Programmatic buying has become the industry’s hottest buzzword. Interest in automated trading has increased and investment poured in from all sides in 2014. Magna Global recently forecast that programmatic ad buying will reach $33 billion globally by 2017. That’s over 200% growth in only three years.

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around programmatic will evolve to tackle this issue, and more brands will explore premium programmatic and choose private marketplaces (PMPs) in order to achieve scale in brand-safe environments. 2. Mobile video will boost engagement, while cross-screen targeting closes the sales loop This year, we’ll see brands focused on making sure good content is delivered to audiences in the right context. Network capabilities across Asia Pacific are improving, and increasingly, sophisticated devices are available at lower

price points. Video will be one of the most discussed topics. Where TV advertising has proved that video can be a powerful way to tell a story, mobile enables brands to go one step further and have consumers physically interact with an ad to take immediate action, delivering engaging experiences. As brands work toward targeting consumers in more personalised ways, they’ll utilise crossscreen strategies to better understand their consumer’s journey. Brands will ask how they can become more strategic with mobile in 2015, as audiences use many devices at different touch-points across the day – and, increasingly, in tandem with each other. 3. Accountability in mobile will rise Just like any other marketing platform, reliable and consistent measurement is key to driving investment into mobile. As the use of crossscreen strategies and automated trading increases, brands – armed with better quality data and improved capabilities – will be able to use increasingly sophisticated methods to determine the success of any particular mobile campaign. In 2015, more brands will ask their agencies to track specific mobile measurement metrics, helping them determine the path to purchase for their consumers and to understand them better. This will open doors for more comprehensive and tailored campaigns better suited to consumer preferences, as well as a better understanding of ad effectiveness on the platform. Mobile’s rise as a preferred marketing medium for brands has been phenomenal. In 2015, mobile will continue to push marketers to rethink the way they approach marketing. I’m personally very excited to be a part of this change and am looking forward to 2015 being a landmark year for the digital and mobile industry.

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9/2/2015 5:15:53 PM

YOU ONLY HAVE 4 SECONDS ... to capture attention and win hearts and trust from the people you meet. What skills do you need to be able to do just that? TESTIMONIALS Joel Bauer has brought the art and science of persuasion to a whole new level. His remarkable technologies will amaze even the most dedicated of skeptics. Tony Robbins, Speaker & Life Coach

Joel Bauer has a level of impeccable perfectionism that I’ve never witnessed anywhere else in any other speaker. He’s the master’s master. Mark Victor Hansen, Author of Chicken Soup for The Soul

LEARN FROM THE MASTER COMMUNICATOR This is the ultimate training for professionals who want to take persuasion and influence to a whole new level. As the best selling author of “How to Persuade People Who Don’t Want to be Persuaded”, Joel Bauer is well versed in the art of influencing others, differentiating oneself in positive ways, and making an impact where it counts. He has been featured in Wired Magazine & the Wall Street Journal, and has appeared on ABC, NBC, CBS, MTV and CNN TV shows. Joel’s techniques are incredibly applicable to the business world. Anyone who can negotiate effectively and successfully will be in a position to generate massive gains and massive transformation. In this special one day training Joel will impart his knowledge and skills to business professionals in Singapore looking to improve all aspects of their negotiation skills, be it for sales, marketing, human resources or procurement, or simply to make powerful and lasting first impressions. Having trained over 830 of the world’s leading speakers, trainers, coaches, authors and businesses, this is one master communicator you do not want to miss!

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For Singapore registered companies, get 60% rebate under the Productivity and Innovation Credit (PIC) scheme.

10/2/2015 11:17:27 AM

MARKETING SPECIAL FEATURE: THE FUTURIST

A MOBILE-LED FUTURE ROHIT DADWAL Managing director Mobile Marketing Association, Asia Pacific

In this hyper-connected world, mobile is changing the way people interact, make decisions and live. From diapers to beauty products, athletics and cars, a mobile-first strategy is fast becoming the norm in marketing teams across the world. This exponential growth and the rapid adoption of mobile are key to driving innovation in marketing. The proof is in the pudding. Some of the industry’s most successful campaigns that we have seen in recent years – creative, innovative and effective – have been built around mobile.

with more than eight million unique users in a short span of six months and witnessed a significant increase in spontaneous awareness for all three brands associated with the channel – Wheel, Ponds White Beauty and Closeup. Initiatives such as these excite me about the future of mobile marketing. However, as the conversation in our industry shifts towards how we can further build capabilities for leveraging mobile within the ecosystem, it is important to gain an understanding of how mobile is set to evolve in the future.

“FROM FULFILLING COMMUNICATIONS NEEDS, MOBILE IS NOW INTEGRATED INTO OTHER ASPIRATIONAL TECHNOLOGY INNOVATIONS.” Especially as more and more companies see the need to cut through the clutter and be as close to the customer as possible. And nothing gets you closer to the consumer than mobile in this day and age. Hindustan Unilever’s most recent awardwinning initiative in India – the Kan Khajura Tesan – is a fine example of the power of, and the opportunity that mobile provides brands, as well as consumers. A mobile platform based on “missed calls” enabled the organisation to engage with consumers for up to 15 minutes at a time with relevant entertainment content, interspersed with advertising by the company’s brands. With more than 24 million calls and counting, the organisation has created a bond

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For the Millennials and consumers of this generation, mobile is no longer technology. They are already growing up with the device in their hands and usability – not technological specifications – is of greater importance. This prompts a shift in the role of mobile – and we will continue to see this evolve in the future. From fulfilling communications needs, mobile is now integrated into other aspirational technology innovations, including wearables, droids, retail channel marketing, outdoor media, and the list goes on. Entertainment will drive the need for the increased capabilities of mobile, fuelling the options and varieties available to consumers. Beyond that, we are also going to see other technologies such as cameras, personal

computers and tablets soon adopting and including mobile feature sets. In no time, we will be connected and consuming content in ways that we had never imagined. This will encourage the purchase prices of devices to drop further, especially as consumers adopt more than one device – large-format for entertainment; small screens for basic communications needs. This also lends itself to an opportunity for global content makers to be in tune with local culture and nuances in order to increase digital engagement with their consumers. The challenge, however, lies in investment, infrastructure and more importantly – insight, as education is key. But wherein lies the biggest opportunity for mobile in the future? When the focus moves from consumers to the betterment of the people; when mobile is leveraged for a higher purpose – to facilitate human consumption and social welfare, especially in geographies where traditional media has no reach. Mobile is the ideal channel to distribute messages related to social issues, including healthcare, education and sustainability. It is critical to the progress of a community, especially due to the personal nature of the device. Organisations such as the WWF are already noticing the positive impact that a mobile-first engagement strategy is making to their efforts. Many others are not far behind. As we enter the new year, I am convinced mobile will continue to push marketers to rethink the way they approach marketing and engage with their brand’s consumers. I urge them to use data to better understand the needs and wants of their target audience, as well as new-age technologies to engage with consumers more effectively. Together, I am confident we will drive innovation and build capabilities for success within the industry.

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9/2/2015 5:16:42 PM

MARKETING SPECIAL FEATURE: THE FUTURIST

DO YOU HAVE THAT KILLER EDGE? MARCUS CHEW Senior vice-president and head of strategic marketing and communications NTUC Income

It is very tempting to write something on digital and social media when asked about the future of marketing. But those phenomena, as game-changing as they are, are commonplace today and no longer amorphous things of the future. As they stand today, however, digital and social media are mere platforms for communications. How these platforms evolve into future trends is very much dependent on users – possibly even the next generation of users – and thus, it is akin to gazing into a crystal ball when trying to predict the next big thing. If trends are not predictable, then the constant will be the key to the future of marketing. The concepts “constant” and “future” may appear to contradict each other as the world obviously doesn’t stand still. But identifying the “constant” works very well in an unpredictable scenario – in this case, the constant that exists is the edge in your communications. The future of marketing is really about the edge in your communication messaging and you may not need to go very far to find the answer as to why there is a need for this edge when looking at the future of marketing. Just look at the youth today. They represent the future and there’s something about their way of life that didn’t exist before in previous generations such as social currency, status, recognition – and the need to be seen living their life the way they do. Being young today is much tougher now than in the past and when you study the social strategy of the most “popular” youth or influencers, it is all about cut-through and having an edge in their communications – or, in this case, their postings or their status updates. After all, everyone uses the same social media platforms and has the same social currency, so they need to stand out and get

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their message across to their audience (that is, their friends). The study of their communication techniques – such as special privacy settings, distinct style of photography, provocative writing – can help marketers shape their communications as they seek ways to break through the clutter. Now, link this back to marketing. Everyone is talking, but the one that has the edge in his or her message execution – like what the youths are doing today – is the one that will get noticed and the rest will fade into background noise. The work for marketers, therefore, has become far more complex as a result. Gone are the days when you create one key visual and apply it across different platforms. Moving forward, there is a need to tailor different creatives for different platforms as each of them caters to different levels and different types of “noises”. This poses a challenge as budgets are not getting larger, while the media market continues to fragment further. So having an edge in your messaging becomes ever more critical in tackling these challenges. This then shines the spotlight on individual marketers which, in my point of view, exposes the fact that the end product is only as good as the marketer’s raw ability. The conversation on what defines “edginess” can be easily delegated to the marketing agencies, but we all know it’s the marketers themselves that control what gets to see the light of day. Thus, it is important for them to possess the skill of intuition to collaborate with the agencies to decide on what this edge is and deliver it. This is not restricted to just the creative idea, but also in media planning where marketers rely on reach and frequency numbers for their marketing mix. But with digital platforms being more and

more a mainstream medium today, and with TV rating points dropping and print circulation shrinking, the future of media planning will begin to shape up differently soon. But it hasn’t happened dramatically yet. In a small city such as Singapore, it is easy for us to take the first step towards foregoing the R&F numbers and use experience and intuition to execute our media mix. By simply taking the plunge, it just might give you an early mover advantage of creating the edge before it becomes the norm. Research is another area which can be replaced by intuitive decisions moving into the future. There are categories that use lots of research to find out insights about their consumers, but do bear in mind that all your competitors are doing the same and the insights are probably not going to be very different. This means the end product will end up similar and lack differentiation. This can be seen especially in the food category where you always see a group of families and friends enjoying the same old product. As Albert Einstein once said: “The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery. There comes a leap in consciousness, call it intuition or what you will, and the solution comes to you and you don’t know why.” Intuition leads to imagination and delivers cutting-edge communications. So the future of marketing is not about what the next hot platform is or what the next game-changing app is. The future of marketing is really about the skills marketers need to possess to navigate the unpredictable media trends generated by that next hot platform or gamechanging app. It’s all about the intuition marketers need to possess to survive the ever-changing media playground.

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9/2/2015 5:18:37 PM

MARKETING SPECIAL FEATURE: THE FUTURIST

SOMETHING OLD, SOMETHING NEW, SOMETHING BROADER, SOMETHING TRUE ALVIN NEO Chief marketing officer, Integrated Healthcare Holdings/Parkway Pantai

In a world in constant dynamic change, the shape of marketing and the role of marketers is undergoing tsunami-like change – or is it really? The answer is … not a simple one, but certainly one we as marketing leaders have to decipher and embrace. Something old Surprise, surprise … in the future, the mission of marketing remains largely unchanged – focus on customers and delight them. Social platforms, mobile apps, big data and the like – they are incredible tools that are changing the way marketing can be accomplished. But at its core, the goal remains the same – you’ve got a brand and you’re trying to solve a consumer’s problem in a way that makes them want to buy your brand. This means it still starts and ends with the customer. It means deep insight – and empathy translated into a relevant compelling proposition remains critical. And it means creatively getting to a powerful “big idea” is even more important than ever in an increasingly cluttered and fragmented environment … to have our marketing efforts embodied in something bigger, ideally iconic and purpose-driven. Something new Our customers are continually changing the way they access, consume and share information and make decisions – fuelled by the advent of technology, primarily digital and mobile devices. They now live in an omni-channel world where the conversion funnel has become radically different. They now live in a world where their options and choices have proliferated. They now live in a world where their voice and opinions can be heard and amplified across the globe via social media. No longer is it enough to bash consumers over the head with super-high media weights with your messages, because if they don’t care they can easily tune you out.

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“INCREASINGLY, EVERYTHING WILL BE MARKETING’S JOB.” The good news? Likewise there are a mass of new technologies and platforms available to marketers – to access, analyse and act on data, to engage people wherever and whenever 24/7. These tools and channels (and that’s essentially what they are) really raise the bar especially for marketers trained in the more traditional or classical approaches. Now we have entered the age of brands as publishers and content creators, as conversation facilitators and community builders, as data-driven marketing engines; and evolving from a primarily campaign-driven quarterly cycle to include always-on, real-time access and engagement. And importantly, even smaller companies or brands or from industries without large P&G or Coke FMCG-sized marketing budgets, are now able to potentially achieve strong impact. This is because now a brilliant idea cleverly seeded can leverage the crowd to get the word out at relatively little expense. The playing field has levelled significantly. Something broader Increasingly, everything will be marketing’s job … and marketing will be everybody’s job. Marketing has moved from being mainly A&P at the “front of the funnel” to being influential through-the-line. It is touching so many more parts of the company now …. service, IT, operations, etc. For example, big data and technology are clearly revolutionising marketing; and the customer experience has become an important marketing tool – being a key trigger of social media engagement and sharing, We will need to market as an eco-system.

The implication is we need to organise in such a way that starts to break down the traditional silos in the business and take an enterprise-wide approach. What we will see though is a more conscious effort to bring disparate groups to the table to learn how to collaborate across screens, channels and moments of truth to deliver one experience to customers wherever they are in the life cycle. Something true As marketing continues to morph, the hard truth is that everyone of us will have to adapt and change, and the right mindsets and skill-sets will be key. Radical change requires significant growth in knowledge, skill, and competency. Essentially marketing has to unlearn what we’ve learned to date so we can master the new tools to engage with and solve the consumer’s problem in more effective and efficient ways. Mindsets: Particularly challenging for older and traditionally trained marketers, it will come down to the willingness to learn the new ways, to have the big picture about what’s required and the commitment to actuate change. Conferences, books, learning from smart subordinates, hiring expert consultants … there are a multiplicity of ways to grow, but it must be a personal priority. Skill-sets: Building teams which can handle not just conventional ATL/BTL, but also digital, and increasingly data analytics and content development. Superior leadership, strategy and changemanagement skills: Critical in order to manage the growing and significant integration required between technology, operations and marketing

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9/2/2015 5:19:39 PM

MARKETING SPECIAL FEATURE: THE FUTURIST

5 RETAIL PREDICTIONS FOR 2015 MASAYA UENO Director, Rakuten Asia, Head of business development and country manager, Singapore

As growth in mobile commerce continues to fuel overall spend online, e-commerce sales are estimated to rise by 20.1% by the end of 2014, exceeding US$1.5 trillion for the first time globally. In Asia Pacific, the overall B2C e-commerce market has almost doubled from US$300 to US$525 billion in the past two years, while e-commerce revenues in Singapore are expected to hit US$2.99 billion by the end of 2014. Even with the rate of growth set to slow slightly in 2015 globally, retailers are expected to see e-commerce sales rise by 17.7% to US$1.77 trillion as the market matures. Asia Pacific is expected to contribute the lion’s share at US$680 billion, with revenues for Singapore looking to grow to US$3.5 billion by the end of 2015. As savvy retailers broaden their horizons to further drive growth, next year will provide rich pickings for retailers that make the right moves and embrace new and targeted strategies to win the hearts of consumers. So how will the global retail industry develop over the next 12 months? Cross-border commerce presents opportunity and risk The growth of cross-border commerce looks set to accelerate in 2015 as global marketplaces give consumers the chance to buy from retailers anywhere in the world. This paves the way for merchants to access overseas markets and expand internationally, offering the opportunity for significant growth, particularly in smaller markets such as Singapore. Retail experiences to drive consumer loyalty The once separate worlds of retail and entertainment have firmly collided. Consumers today want to buy into a brand experience that reflects their lifestyles – on and offline. To achieve this, retailers have attempted to diversify their offerings, but often in silos with services existing separately.

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As we enter 2015, retailers are bringing these distinct offerings together under one roof, online and on the high street. Not only will this empower retailers to provide consumers a seamlessly connected experience, but it also unleashes an enormous opportunity to crosssell and strengthen customer loyalty across the entire retail and entertainment ecosystem. Nurturing closer relationships between merchants and consumers is key to growing a marketplace that offer shoppers an experience that’s focused on discovery and entertainment. Merchants need to take an omni-channel approach that combines the convenience of online discovery, with more tactile in-store experiences. In 2015, more brands will be offering in-store promotions encouraging shoppers to explore their online stores, while digital communications may contain a call-to-action that drives foot traffic into physical stores. Taking this holistic approach will help drive home a stronger brand message for merchants. Social shopping is entertainment Social media is playing an increasingly pivotal role in the shopping journey, influencing both product discovery and purchase decisions. Moving forward in 2015, advanced online marketing techniques will be increasingly important to capture consumers’ mind share, involving a wider spectrum of social channels beyond Twitter and Facebook to applications such as Viber and Pinterest, which inject even more interactivity and richer content. With consumers discovering things to purchase as they share images and curate collections of things they like, retailers are presented a huge opportunity to make shopping a more entertaining and engaging experience. M-commerce continues to gather pace As more consumers make the shift from desktopbased shopping to discovering products and

making purchases via mobile devices, retailers can no longer afford to ignore changing consumer behaviour. In 2014 it’s estimated that mobile shopping generated US$1.1 billion worth of revenues in Singapore alone. Meanwhile, “mobile-first” is also catching on across APAC where online users are accessing the internet only via mobile. As these trends gather pace, Rakuten is expecting more retailers to invest in mobile retailing and marketing next year in a bid to capitalise on the fast-growing m-commerce segment. This will, in turn, drive greater adoption of omni-channel commerce, as businesses seek to deliver a seamless experience across multiple platforms. With an 80% smartphone adoption rate Singapore is ripe for the continued growth of mobile commerce. Apple’s entry into the phablet market with the iPhone 6 Plus and the launch of other phablet flagships such as the Samsung Galaxy Note 4 will help drive the adoption of mobile shopping in Singapore as well. Intensified competition across all levels Attracted by a lucrative US$680 billion regional e-commerce market, competition is expected to be relentless in 2015. Besides the local players, their regional and global counterparts are rushing to have a share of the pie, either by setting up a shop or investing in the local market. As a result, it is imperative for existing online merchants to up their game using technologies such as data analytics to gain invaluable insights. Armed with consumer behaviours and market trends, businesses can differentiate their offerings and develop effective strategies. Speciality online stores in Singapore that have a unique offering will also continue to attract a loyal following of shoppers willing to spend on quality products. While the competition makes it harder for e-commerce businesses to succeed, it also promotes innovation and creativity that can benefit the entire industry in the long term.

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10/2/2015 9:56:06 AM

MARKETING SPECIAL FEATURE: THE FUTURIST

IT’S TIME FOR THE MAD MATH MEN ANTHONY SHINER Chief revenue officer Group Digital L!fe, SingTel

“Technology is a glittering lure. But there’s the rare occasion when the public can be engaged on a level beyond … if they have a sentimental bond with the product,” said Don Draper in the iconic TV series Mad Men, centred on advertising in the 1960s. Marketing contemporaries would echo Draper’s statement that sentimental bonds, as a prelude to sales conversions, are a necessity. However, the lack of technological know-how causes them to resemble old-school mad men who insanely push products without an adequate understanding of their audiences.

prospects and customers. From here on, every attempt to engage or target an individual must be user-centric and personalised, based on an understanding of the history an individual has with the brand. Therefore, the ability to store, aggregate and make sense of large data volumes collected from multiple sources in multiple formats will be key. As digital and e-commerce increasingly supplement traditional touch-points, the importance of mastering marketing technology will grow. In fact, Gartner predicted that by 2017, a company’s chief marketing officer will spend

“EVERY ATTEMPT TO ENGAGE AN INDIVIDUAL MUST BE PERSONALISED.” In today’s digital era, sentimental bonds can be created by reaching the right customers with the right message at the right time. 2014 saw the shift of consumer attention to digital devices and them growing accustomed to personalised experiences. A personalised experience is now a requirement when consumers engage with brands, be it offline or online. Coincidentally, the TV series will air its final episode in 2015, a year where technology is set to become the enabler of personalised experiences and the centrepiece of every marketing strategy. We are now at a time where marketers need to be highly analytical – math men, if you will, or marketing technologists – who track real results and insights in real-time, instead of just drinking scotch and coming up with a big creative idea that may not work. While some may rage against the machine and question the irony behind turning to technology to achieve greater personalisation, the truth is, software will become the primary means of engaging

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more on technology than its chief information officer[1]. More importantly, a marketing team’s choice of software, how to configure and operate it, along with how creatively it’s applied, affects how the brand influences its audience and how the audience perceives the brand. Understandably, the challenge of effectively managing all this technology is daunting. As marketers look to unravel the complexities of marketing technology, here are some tips that can help them cope and thrive. Embrace advanced cross-channel measurement solutions Just because consumers spend more time on mobile does not mean they are spending less time on other channels. In line with consumer behaviour on multiple platforms, eMarketer predicts that in 2015, worldwide media ad spending across the board will rise by an additional 6% from US$558.68 billion in 2014[2]. This includes not just mobile, but TV and outdoor advertising as well.

Brands have already adopted unifying data management platforms which enable data from digital and mobile brand interactions to be analysed as a whole. However, further cross-platform competence will be required. After unifying data from digital and mobile, the next step will be the integration of location-based data collected from “data-points” scattered geographically, return-path data from pay-TV set-top boxes and additional data from wearable devices. Invest in marketing technologists Next, marketers can’t possibly take advantage of a data stream if they are perpetually drowning in it. Investing in marketing technologists is essential. Engage a vendor who can align marketing technology with business goals, serve as a partner to IT, and also evaluate and select relevant, bespoke software projects to develop unique customer experiences. Marketing technologists will develop datadriven personas, employ intelligent targeting, incorporate an understanding of the customer journey and utilise cross-channel measurement solutions. They will be in the perfect position to influence how user-centric advertising strategies can be developed and applied. As Draper might add: “People tell you who they are, but we ignore it because we want them to be who we want them to be.” Through their behaviour on various channels, consumers are already sharing their personal narratives and preferences with marketers, in the form of data. We are at the threshold of nextgeneration customer interactions. The management, application and integration of analytics and algorithms can no longer be ignored. It’s 2015 and it’s time to get rid of the Mad Men paradigm, and to replace it with the math men mindset. [1]

Gartner Webinars. By 2017 the CMO will Spend More on IT Than the CIO. [2] eMarketer. Worldwide Ad Spending Q4 2014 Complete Forecast.

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9/2/2015 5:23:29 PM

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10/2/2015 11:17:47 AM

MARKETING SPECIAL FEATURE: THE FUTURIST

GETTING CLOSER TO THE CUSTOMER CHANG SENG HOCK Marketing director, Southeast Asia and Oceania Sony Mobile

A marketer’s job used to be simpler – you considered product, place, promotion and price, and the idea was if you got them right, the consumers would come. But the digital revolution has created a very different world. Place, for example, is no longer a physical construct as more businesses go online and mobile. Price is arguably less of a determinant for purchase behaviour than the perceived value of the product, and let’s not forget that Facebook reached millions of users without much of a promotion strategy. Catalysed by the digital revolution, consumers today have become increasingly empowered, sophisticated and highly connected – they increasingly demand content and information that is not only personalised and relevant, but also easily and immediately accessible at their fingertips. Today, it is less about the product than the experiences it promises to deliver; and you can now engage a consumer anywhere – online, in-store or through mobile – but it needs to be contextualised and relevant. To successfully engage this new breed of consumer, brands need to be more compelling in their storytelling, and demonstrate a better understanding of their consumers, down to the individual level, and all in real-time. Today, we enjoy levels of engagement with our consumers like never before: we are responding to them on social media in real time, and harnessing insight into user behaviour to be more relevant to them – for example, understanding their motivations and concerns, and highlighting how a particular product caters to that based on features and specifications. At Sony, content marketing is also a big focus. Our recent “Photo Academy” campaign sees leading photographers around the world deliver tips and tricks to help users get the most out of their smartphone cameras. Users are then encouraged to apply these tips and submit their own photos in a global contest, making this

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“BIG DATA HOLDS HUGE POTENTIAL, BUT IT DOESN’T AUTOMATICALLY MEAN BETTER MARKETING.” a more participative and engaging campaign overall. We are closing the gap with consumers, but we can do better. The future of technology will largely be about getting closer to the customer, and technology will help us achieve that. Big data holds huge potential for marketers, but it doesn’t automatically mean better marketing. The data itself is less important than the insights it can deliver. Big data can tell us today who our customers are, where they are, what they want and how they want to be contacted. It can also shed light on what influences customer loyalty, and how you can keep customers coming back for more. At Sony Mobile, we’ve been working at geotargeting – a virtual way to set the geographic boundaries that will trigger a specific action for users within the area. For example, at the recent Sony Festival event in Singapore, this feature was used to prompt Xperia Lounge – Sony Mobile’s proprietary entertainment and lifestyle application – users who were in the proximity of the venue received notifications that informed them of the event occurring nearby. This is exciting, but there is potential to take this much further. Data comes in many layers and in many forms, and the ability to aggregate and analyse the data and then make immediate decisions on it is invaluable. This insight, coupled with the pervasiveness of mobile technology, allows for customer communication to be more

pinpointed and compelling, and makes it easier for consumers to take immediate action. Brands that do this effectively stand to achieve a different level of intimacy with their customers. One way in which Sony has utilised big data analytics is by tapping into social influencers. The amount of big data generated through social networks and digital channels gives us fresh sources of customer information that can be used to better capitalise on peer-to-peer relationships. Through data analytics, we are able to identify topic-based influencers by different product categories and identify specific buyers. Through tailored marketing campaigns, we augmented the natural influence those buyers already had with their network of friends in order to get those friends to buy along with them. Big data can also be used to make the offline retail experience a lot more engaging. By combining data on the customer’s location with past behaviours, brands have an opportunity to deliver engaging, highly personalised content to the customer in the store itself that transforms the shopping experience. That said, while the consumer landscape will continue to evolve and, with it, marketing practices, what will remain the same is the need to focus on the consumer and to deliver products that make a difference in their lives. At Sony Mobile, we take customer feedback very seriously, and use it to understand what experiences we can offer to smartphone users in the areas they are most interested in.

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9/2/2015 5:27:21 PM

MARKETING SPECIAL FEATURE: THE FUTURIST

MARRIED FOR GOOD JULIE WOODS-MOSS Chief marketing officer Tata Communications

CMOs and CIOs need to be aligned and work together for business success through customer gain. This has been quite a topic of discussion among the marketing and technology circles recently. Gartner predicts that by 2017 the CMO will have greater control of the IT budget than the CIO as user-driven content and applications, socialisation of the enterprise, mobile apps, big data and cloud adoption continues to surge at a rapid pace. While the CMO’s role traditionally focused on advertising, sales and brand-building, the rapid growth of the internet brings social data

customer satisfaction and business success. Building a new relationship takes time, patience and relies on understanding the other’s perspective. Here are two key lessons we learned at Tata Communications in building alignment across marketing and IT. Understand the lingo: For the marketing team, understanding the IT vocabulary is paramount towards building a successful relationship. In the long term, this will help align strategy, mobilise resources and avoid a complete disconnect between background

“SINCE THE USE OF BIG DATA TO DRIVE MARKETING WILL INEVITABLY DRIVE DEMAND IN COMPUTING POWER AND STORAGE, A NEW DYNAMIC HAS EMERGED BETWEEN CMOs AND CIOs.” and mobile data onto the CMO’s agenda – to understand and cater to the needs of the increasing number of smartphone and tablet users. Moreover, since the use of big data to drive marketing will inevitably drive demand in computing power and storage, a new dynamic has emerged between CMOs and CIOs. Given this scenario, it is ever-more important marketing and IT departments build a tighter bond with each other to drive

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and terminology. By understanding technology, marketing teams can help their IT colleagues better understand how the technology impacts customers. In this context, I was recently at a one-day workshop in New York with a group of about 25 CMOs. The workshop aimed to teach us – theoretically and practically – a number of IT concepts such as coding and building a mobile application. At the end of the day, I built a mobile application that could track location, register

customers and monitor repeat purchases so that customers could be tangibly rewarded for their loyalty and interest. The day was filled with immense learning and useful insights that I took back to the boardroom. Have an open discussion: A deterrent to building a successful relationship between the CMO and CIO is the differing priorities for each function. For marketing personnel, it is of utmost priority the company is able to provide the best experience to its users, indulge in constant innovation and execute trends at the best possible speed and quality. At the same time, colleagues in IT and engineering may be worried about how this impacts their team’s resources and other priorities. An open conversation about concerns, issues and challenges makes both the department heads fully committed to working as one team. In my experience, this approach was immensely helpful when the marketing, IT and engineering teams together made the decision to put the head of digital marketing into a key role in the product development life cycle for a new launch. This meant we developed joint project plans and dashboards and had the customer’s view embedded in every project milestone. This also helped avoid any frustration at the operational level, particularly as we approached the time for the launch. Embracing a spirit of collaboration may seem odd at first for marketing and IT leads, however, CMOs and CIOs who celebrate the diversity of perspectives, welcome the collective challenge, enjoy the other’s skill-set and together become the catalyst for innovation in the enterprise will celebrate shared success. Companies that get it right in 2015 and beyond will enjoy a competitive advantage and create the next wave of shareholder value.

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9/2/2015 5:29:01 PM

FA-ESS-MagAd-Marketing-BusinessAnalytics-280x210mm-March15.pdf 1 1/15/2015 4:55:47 PM

CMY

MARKETING SPECIAL FEATURE: THE FUTURIST

HOW MOBILE CAN HELP RETAILERS RAFIQ RAZALI Country general manager Groupon Malaysia

In this day and age of smartphones, businesses should be present on any platform possible to be accessible and remain relevant to customers. Mobile commerce (m-commerce) sets a new standard for accessibility because purchases can be done at a customer’s convenience, for example, a mobile app provides more opportunities for the customer to research a purchase, creates a tremendously more convenient transaction option and is a constant companion to a customer wherever they go.

a gateway for subscriber purchases. We have seen a surge in Malaysian users on our Groupon mobile app, and worldwide the Groupon mobile app consistently ranks as one of the top 25 alltime most downloaded apps. The main beneﬁt is convenience. Our customers are able to identify the location of the vouchers they have purchased, and start redeeming the ones closest to their current location. This, of course, is an exciting development because mobile creates new opportunities for us at Groupon to explore – be it in enhancing the consumer experience

“AN IMPORTANT ELEMENT OF THE MOBILE EXPERIENCE IS PAYMENT. ORGANISATIONS MUST ENABLE CUSTOMERS TO SORT, SEARCH AND PAY AS SEAMLESSLY AND SAFELY AS POSSIBLE.” According to a study by Ericsson ConsumerLab, smartphone penetration in Southeast Asia increased from 47% in 2012 to 63% in 2013, while tablet penetration increased almost threefold from 14% in 2012 to 39% in 2013. With the rising afﬂuence of the Southeast Asian population, these numbers are expected to grow even further, demonstrating the opportunities for m-commerce remain incredibly vibrant. Our own experiences at Groupon have also shown a growing preference towards mobile as

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or presenting opportunities for our merchants. However, since a mobile app enables options such as location-based targeting, it’s important for the business to draw the line between being informative and being intrusive. Organisations must curate and structure push notiﬁcations that are actually useful to customers to increase the likelihood they will choose to opt in. I am a believer in the opt-in model, where I as a consumer make the decision to receive push notiﬁcations from a particular

organisation or not. It should also be easy for me to opt out at a later date when I choose to do so. There are many mobile app analytics that can be used to help the business such as: Supply Understanding what items to carry to fulfil the demands of the customer (generally via search, i.e. top searched keywords are items that people actually look for the most; and null searches – i.e. searches that do not correspond to an item are supply gaps which should be filled.) Understanding what categories sell better/ worse during specific periods of the year, which will help with stocking/supply chains. Demand Understanding what items have the highest conversion ratio (from page view to purchase), which should always be the items on “recommendation” or on “discount” to attract customers. Better understanding on price elasticity (by monitoring conversion while doing price changes) to maximise profits Another important element of the mobile experience is payment. Organisations must enable customers to sort, search and pay as seamlessly and safely as possible. Implementing a safe payment solution that offers an easy to use cross platform (mobile and desktop) process can significantly increase conversions from browsing to purchase. Most payment gateway providers have crossplatform technologies that offer solid and safe payment solutions. Indeed, mobile has changed the landscape for Malaysian retailers, offering the opportunity to reach a wider audience with greater convenience, connection and flexibility than ever before.

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10/2/2015 11:08:31 AM

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10/2/2015 2:44:02 PM

MARKETING SPECIAL FEATURE: THE FUTURIST

REBUILDING THE CMO OF TOMORROW PHIL WHITTAKER Chief marketing officer Themed Attractions and Resorts

I remember as a kid watching The Six Million Dollar Man TV series with Lee Majors. The series focuses on the character Steve Austin, an astronaut who is brought to the brink of death when a test flight of an experimental aircraft goes terribly wrong. He is then “rebuilt” in an operation that costs six million dollars, where his right arm, both legs and the left eye are replaced with “bionic” implants that enhance his strength, speed and vision far above human norms. The CMO of the future may need to have some superhuman qualities like Austin and rebuilt to better meet the rapidly changing needs and expectations of customers, who are increasingly interacting with companies through multiple digital channels. So tomorrow’s CMO may need to be: part technologist and analyst/ data scientist; part business leader/strategist and innovator; part coach/mentor and student. 1. Part technologist and analyst/data scientist The role and focus of the CMO is no longer about products and distribution, but is now about putting the customer at the centre of everything through utilising technology to engage customers in a very personal way with the brand. The CMO of the future must embrace marketing analytics and the ability to interpret and leverage customer data in term of behaviours, insights and patterns to grow the business. The convergence between big data and the proliferation of digital marketing channels are driving the need for the CMO to change and embrace digital as a way of doing business. Through combining big data with mobile devices, marketers are now able to make relevant and personalised offers to customers in real time. CMOs are increasingly needing to engage customers with declining attention spans (currently estimated at about eight seconds

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through an exploding world of marketing channels. This situation has been further complicated by the rise of the omni-channel era where customers want instant, consistent and up-to-date information and answers, no matter what channel they choose. This requires businesses to develop a single customer view. The convergence of marketing with technology will drive the CMO and CIO to work together like never before, where their roles are intertwined. A fact supported by Gartner Research which found the CMO will be spending more on IT than the CIO by 2017. Mastering technology will be essential for tomorrow’s CMO to succeed as they use technology and data to enhance the customer experience. 2. Part business leader/strategist and innovator The CMO of the future will need to take a broader organisational role beyond the marketing department to become a business leader and strategist that links marketing to business results. CMOs of the future will expand their role beyond marketing to increasingly invest more time in general management and the strategies that define the business operations. Of all the C-suite within an organisation, the CMO best reflects the voice of the customer; the ultimate source of a company’s revenue. As a result, the CMO is best placed to identify what changes are necessary for an organisation based on deep insights into customer behaviours and market trends and to motivate and help drive the required changes through the organisation. Increasingly the CMO will need to build relationships, educate and influence internal stakeholders, particularly their C-suite peers of the CEO, CFO and CIO, taking some of the vagueness out of marketing to demonstrate ROI and a clear impact on the bottom line. They will also need to build relationships

with strategic partners to help drive product innovation, extend marketing resources and grow the customer base. Innovation will be a key focus of the future CMO, as they help develop new products and services, based on real-time customer-driven data insights, that engage customers in a relevant and meaningful way and ultimately take the business to the next level. 3. Part coach/mentor and student The future success of marketing is in the hands of the Millennials – a generation that will demand a dynamic CMO to attract, motivate and retain them. One who can not only lead, but empower, coach and mentor. Millennials want to be challenged and pushed to perform and they like to win. The CMO will need to set clear and high standards which are linked to professional training, mentoring and coaching. The CMO of the future must also continue to educate themselves and update their skills as things are changing so rapidly in the digital space a marketer’s skills can quickly become obsolete. As we move towards the brave new world of marketing, the role of the future CMO is best summed up by Sheryl Pattek, vicepresident and principal analyst serving CMO professionals at Forrester Research, who identifies seven necessities for CMOs to thrive tomorrow: Have a customer orientation, not a brand orientation; Have an analytic mindset; Be a savvy technologist; Possess digital knowhow; Be fanatical about innovation; Be a broad business leader; Be a relationship builder. To paraphrase the words from the famous opening sequence of The Six Million Dollar Man: “Gentleman we can rebuild him, we have the technology … we have the capability to make the CMO of the future … better than he was before … better, stronger, faster …” Buckle up, it’s going to be an exciting ride!

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9/2/2015 5:30:54 PM

MARKETING SPECIAL FEATURE: THE FUTURIST

SOCIO-MARKETING: THE FINAL FRONTIER OF MARKETING ASEEM PURI Marketing director Unilever Asia

It has been the marketer’s Holy Grail to individually communicate with every consumer and customise their offering for each consumer. The Holy Grail has arrived in the form of social media or people-to-people communication. Individualised, customised and instant, its ﬂagship is Facebook, now the third largest country in the world with 500 million users and millions more being added every month. Of course, there is a catch and that catch is what most marketers in the ofﬂine world don’t get – in social media all the power is with the individual – to accept or reject any communication, to recommend whether to love or hate something, to support or revolt against anything – all these decisions are now 100% in the hands of the individual. Billion-dollar brands such as Nestlé, Dell, Apple have the same weightage as friends on our Facebook pages as John, Sarah and David. Hence, marketers, despite the overwhelming success of brands such as Google, Apple, Blendtec, Old Spice and Dell having been built by this social community, are unable to bring themselves to commit to participating in this future where the consumer

truly is king. Three key reasons why A&P spending on the web is still less than 5% for the global consumer goods industry are: 1. Unable to fathom how to measure effectiveness or ROI of campaigns and generic new media investments. 2. Fear of loss of control of the brand to consumers and it morphing into something they do not like or do not want. 3. Simple lack of belief. Despite there being no conclusive evidence that TV advertising drives sales, billions of dollars are dumped every year on TV ad spots. The reason – marketers believe that TV works and their belief masquerades as fact. So what really drives sales? We know for a fact word of mouth is one of the top three drivers of purchases in the ofﬂine world – the other two being advertising – quality and quantity and point-of-sale promotions. In the online world this trend is accelerated. People are willing to trust friends, neighbours and even complete strangers in reading reviews and making decisions on what products and services to buy. So much so, that views of ordinary people like this are considered three times

as effective as advertising and four times as effective as any celebrity endorsements as a driver of purchase. For example, the travel industry has moved almost completely to a point where no one plans a trip without reading the reviews of people who have been there. So our goal as marketers in the online world is to “create a mountain of amazing opinions about our brand that drives word of mouth and eventually purchase for our brand”. The right question to ask is not, “what will make them buy”, but “what will make them recommend”. The big threat to big brands is that if you don’t start now, the mountain of opinions is going to keep building – of the one billion-plus people online, half are already in some form of social media and one in five write some form of blog to share their opinions. So what will it take to win? Put very crudely, marketing in the offline world is like parenting and marketing in the online world is like dating. (Refer to the chart below.) In the offline world you can win them over with exaggeration, bombardment and a mindset of, “I will get you somewhere, somehow”. When the choice to reject moves 100% to the consumer

Marketing in the ofﬂine world is teaching/parenting

Marketing in the online world is dating

Teach and take a break

No breaks … dating is always on in some way – meeting, talking

Educating, instructing, teaching

It’s about loving

Prove it to them

Win their heart

Predictable

Surprising

Deceit/exaggeration works

Exaggeration fails badly

You can’t escape me – in both my testing and execution

Please come to me – without your willingness I cannot do anything

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9/2/2015 5:32:15 PM

MARKETING SPECIAL FEATURE: THE FUTURIST

then the only choice left is to create attraction and love that voluntarily brings consumers to me. In such a world, if you want your consumer to date you there are four key factors to succeed: 1. You must have a remarkable point of view that attracts others to you. Without this no one will want to be your friend or spend time with you. Some examples of remarkable points of view that attract consumers on the web:

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Dove’s vision of real beauty and rejection of the artiﬁcial stereotypes that drive women crazy. Lipton’s vision of a simple healthy choice made every day can help you live a happy and positive life forever. Axe – boys deserve to win in the mating game and we will help them. Ben & Jerry’s – ﬁnd innovative ways to improve the quality of community life and support peace and justice.

2. You must offer the great value that a true friendship brings • Novartis’ hay fever alert service helps 10 million sufferers every day by alerting them as to which areas are likely to get the hay fever next. • Best Buy’s Twelpforce on Twitter helps customers with IT issues whether they bought with Best Buy or not – 30,000 followers within months. • IKEA’s do your own home is now one of

Phase

Brand

Activity and results

The world is doing it. Let’s do something online, anything

Domestos

Game created to show how the category works, the product’s functioning and circulated internally – a few thousand users and views

Multiple

Created a site, bought some search words, did a campaign or two

Rexona

Rexona for men deodorant launch Created a game that had users doing various challenges – 24 million plays in Europe with four million links to the site

Omo

Created a blog-based site to create a community of mums who believe that learning via experience is the best way to learn. Nearly 25 million people logged in and read some of the content, but less than 1% participated in an activity or shared a comment – high on awareness, but low on engagement

It’s another media channel – let’s use it where it’s relevant

Most of my target group is online – I can’t afford not to engage them online

Here is my chance to show every consumer how much I love them

Axe

Mr. Chocolate Luvah – insight that women cannot resist chocolate. Photo contest where participants could convert their Facebook proﬁle or blog to become mr.chocolate luvah – the hero of the campaign and win prizes – nearly 200,000 people visited and 40% registered. The variant became the No.1 best seller in the Philippines

Ben & Jerry’s

Social philosophy is to show the fans how much we love them. On election day, to support democracy as a way to promote peace and justice, offered on its Facebook page “a free scoop when you vote”. Tied up with Google to show locations of voting booths and Ben & Jerry’s sites – over 600,000 cones given out and nearly 1.35 million searches – top six on Google

Lipton

Overall philosophy is to help consumers make a simple healthy choice (drink tea) to help them live a positive and healthy life every day. To launch a new tea with Theanine that makes the brain sharp, Lipton created the world’s largest jigsaw puzzle and invited Indians to solve it online. Nearly 200,000 people worked together day and night to solve the jigsaw. Now a Guinness record for the largest online jigsaw solved – this alone led to a 25% increase in sales

Lipton

Linea tea – rediscover your waistline in eight weeks – invite 10 other friends on any social platform and win eight weeks of tea 2.5 million views 50% increase in sales 300,000 registered

Lipton

Add flavour to my office life – afternoons in offices are boring – make videos to show how they can be interesting – Lipton starts off the viral Viewers are guided to register for free tea delivery in the office to create a fun moment Six million video views 700,000 requests sent for tea 300,000 tea sets delivered

Lipton

Customise your new year greeting by blowing tea steam in unique greetings and shapes via QQ – leading IM platform in China – 45 million unique visitors 23 million greetings sent Three times the servers crashed No.1 social media activity in China, ever

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The online and web wake up service done across Asia – massive success – in India four million wake up calls – database then used for CRM and sampling

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MARKETING SPECIAL FEATURE: THE FUTURIST

Marketer’s goal

Online I can do a census

Offline I have to do a survey

Bonding – Love for the brand – do they love you

Voluntary actions Feedback – comments Blogging Spreading feedback – likes Participation Can be accurately measured and mapped to each individual

Surveys to check loyalty

Trial – experiencing the brand/purchase – do they try you

Surveys to attribute to sales Direct redemption promos can be tracked Direct redemption offers can be accurately measured and mapped to each individual – becomes even more effective with mobile

Correlate sales plus surveys to attribute to sales

Awareness – do they know you

Clicks Visits Unique visitors Page views Ad impressions Can be accurately measured and mapped to each individual

Ad awareness Surveys/trackers

“THE BIG THREAT TO BIG BRANDS IS THAT IF YOU DON’T START NOW, THE MOUNTAIN OF OPINIONS IS GOING TO KEEP BUILDING – OF THE ONE BILLION-PLUS PEOPLE ONLINE, HALF ARE ALREADY IN SOME FORM OF SOCIAL MEDIA AND ONE IN FIVE WRITE SOME FORM OF BLOG TO SHARE THEIR OPINIONS.” the top apps on the iPhone allowing users to place any furniture they want to buy in their home and take snapshots before they actually buy. 3. Do it in a way that is remarkable and inspiring • The Old Spice man is funny, inspiring and interesting enough for thousands to ask him questions and spread his funny answers – 100 million views and 100%

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•

increase in sales. The Blendtec videos shocks consumers – 700% increase in sales and more than 200,000 subscribers on YouTube plus 10 national TV appearances. Axe’s “call me” campaign gets four million subscribers asking for a wake up call from a hottie – Tanya who called them in a husky voice.

4. Do it forever with passion – you are only

•

as good as your last action Starbucks – it’s an always-on dialogue starting with My Starbucks Idea onwards with consumers. Apple – though secretive welcomes feedback on its site and dialogue between consumers on how to better use/improve Apple products.

Measuring digital effectiveness While the marketing jobs to be done remain exactly the same, the ways we measure marketing effectiveness improve radically when we come online. It’s quite simple – you can find what each individual is doing in response to your message and who they are doing it with – everything can be tracked, followed and measured. On online I can do a census, whereas offline I must rely on surveys. (Refer to the chart on page 51.) Brands’ evolution in digital media There are four stages in the evolution of an offline brand in going online: 1. The world is doing it. Let’s do something online, anything. 2. It’s another media channel – let’s use it where it’s relevant. 3. Most of my target group is online – I can’t afford to not engage them online. 4. Here is my chance to show every consumer how much I love them. Let’s look at some examples of what brands are doing in each of these stages with some successful cases and examples. (Refer to the chart on page 52.) As we can see, brands that follow the four golden rules can win big, really big online.

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In our year-end event, we asked senior marketers what the future of marketing will be. The discussions ranged from personalisation to e-commerce to procurement. Read more about the topics in the following pages.

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HOW SERIOUS ARE YOU ABOUT PERSONALISING YOUR BRAND?

The future of marketing lies in personalisation, speakers at Marketing magazine’s event, The Futurist Live, said. Commenting on what would make a great brand in the future, Andrew Hipsley, SVP and chief brand officer of McDonald’s for Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa, said staying relevant to fast-evolving customers was truly one of the biggest challenges for brands today. “Brand marketers need to put their customers at the forefront of all their decisionmaking to truly connect with them. The new mantra for brands today should be to go from mass marketing to mass personalisation,” he said. “Giving customers the power to customise is the future for McDonald’s. Personalised burgers are a game-changer for us. As a brand, the more control we give to our customers, the more that we get back from them.” The power to customise is also critical when opening up in new markets. Many a

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times, brands see culture as a barrier when launching in a new territory. However, brand marketers need to rethink of ways to embrace the culture. That’s one of the key challenges for McDonald’s as well. “The two things I think that are relevant in referring to culture are, first think global and act local. The second is to adapt the brand model to really fit a business model, so that we can make money while building a brand,” he said. One example he gave of “thinking globally, acting locally” for McDonald’s was in Korea. Korea is one of the most digitally savvy markets globally with huge engagement rates on social media. Using the Big Mac, which is one of the best-selling global products for McDonald’s globally, a promotion was launched in Korea. McDonald’s took a tried and tested approach launching the Big Mac chant campaign and asked Korean consumers to come into the restaurants, dress up and recite

the Big Mac chant in less than six seconds to get a free Big Mac. This stunt was fairly consistent with what’s been done around the world. To make it relevant to the market, Korean consumers were asked to video this and upload it on social media. After which, McDonald’s promised to select three or four of those videos to make the television commercials for Koreans. “The campaign resonated with the Korean audience far more than in any other market. We tried it because we tapped into the local insight – 32,000 individuals or groups came into those restaurants during a three-week period to recite the chant and 5,000 videos were uploaded,” he said. Continuing the theme of personalisation, Sam Ahmed, group head of marketing for Asia Pacific at MasterCard, talked about how reaching consumers online in a targeted manner and creating unique experiences for them was crucial for brands. “Relevance and reliability in any market is key in the world of e-commerce,” he said. “In e-commerce, you can’t use the same website in every country. While western users might prefer a cleaner web page, Chinese consumers might like one which is far busier.” Also, given the speed at which digital is making personalisation possible, brands getting into e-commerce need to have the right offer at the right time for the right consumer. “If you are unable to do so, you will be categorised as spam. Today good e-commerce players thrive on making great emotional connections with the audience,” he said. With all the data present, e-commerce brand marketers need to know how to turn that into great marketing content which will be relevant to their consumers. “At MasterCard, the key thing we found was that e-commerce is not about advertising. It is about building a business model for your business that works on e-commerce. And that model might not fit what you have today,” Ahmed said. Hence, adaptability and a nimble approach to business is key. “E-commerce marketing is about speed. Speed between marketing and agencies and marketing and legal is critical. If you see an opportunity on e-commerce, it lasts about 12 to 14 hours. If you delay any action, you’re two weeks too late.”

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PROCURING A BETTER MARKETING PLAN

It is clear that procurement will be playing an increasing role in the marketing process. A World Federation of Advertisers survey done amongst marketers last year showed that in 2014, 51% of respondents said that procurement led the agency remuneration process as opposed to 2011 – where only 43% said so. While this initially did not sit well with agencies, who tended to oppose the costcutting tendencies of procurement, the trend is slowly gaining favour with marketers. Madhav Nayak, the marketing director for fabric conditioners – Southeast Asia, Australia and New Zealand – at Unilever, said that he sees procurement getting involved in Unilever’s big spend markets earlier and earlier in the discussion of marketing strategies. “There’s a huge opportunity (in involving procurement early). What we don’t do well enough is talk about it on a three to four-year basis,” said Nayak (pictured, centre).

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Have a view of where you want to go and involve procurement early, he advised, speaking on a panel at Marketing magazine’s Futurist Live 2014 conference held in December last year. Moderated by Sunil Yadav, president of Amplifi at Dentsu Aegis Network, the discussion revolved around the impact of the increasing involvement of procurement in marketing. Ideally, marketing plays a big role in agenda setting and can influence many stakeholders, including procurement, said Nayak. “Procurement can be an ally. One important thing that we should realise is that cost is as important to marketing as it is to procurement. Do we have procurement partners today who are looking at where the costs are, where the leakages are and where we can save money?” However, DDB’s Asia Pacific chairman John Zeigler (pictured, right) warned against disappearing into a procurement-driven world

where cost-effectiveness drives the agency relationship – and ultimately, the work for the client. At present, agencies are already facing a talent drain as client-side roles prove a stronger lure for agency staffers, especially with clients being able to offer more attractive pay packages. “I asked my team, asking if anyone was happy to do what they are doing now for half their salary. No one raised up their hand. The reality is that there is no balance in general. With the way things are going, agency staff are working hard for more time. But there will come a breaking point,” Zeigler said. “We lose a lot of people to the client-side of the business, where they can get paid on average 40-70% more per month.” “If you’re just talking to your media agency about efficiency and media spend, or just being creative, that lack of connectivity will kill the possibility of significant change.”

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CUT THE JARGON, LET’S JUST CALL IT GROWTH

If studies by the Fournaise Marketing Group are to be believed, marketers are in big trouble. Research concluded the marketing profession had a serious issue with the concept of “return on investment”. Incredibly, two-thirds of those interviewed did not think ROI required a financial result. How is marketing as a profession to be taken seriously as a driver of business performance if we are unable to show the effects we drive? Understanding effectiveness – and the factors that drive it – is a major challenge for marketers. Effectiveness has been confused with efficiency and this has meant marketers are chasing the wrong goals, and failing to get the most out of their marketing budgets and their agency partners. We are seeing a slow decline of our industry because marketers are downgrading creativity and in doing so – I believe – undermining their best chance to deliver breakthrough results for businesses. This may, in fact, diminish the influence of the marketing department and potentially their personal influence as well. At the heart of this vicious circle lies the quest for efficiency. And efficiency lies with media. Marketers ask how they can eliminate waste; how they can reach their target audiences as cheaply as possible. The assumption is the

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creative work or even worse, the actual ad agency, is basically interchangeable. Forget the “big idea” – the media plan calls for a 30-second spot and a radio ad. It’s an easy trap to fall into if you’re a young client eager to deliver quick savings. But efficiency is only half the story. There is a big difference between efficiency and effectiveness. If efficiency is about minimising the cash leaving the business, effectiveness should be about maximising the cash coming into it. In fact, let’s just rename effectiveness and call it “growth”. Rolls off the tongue better, and speaks more directly to the CEO and CFO vernacular. The best way for marketers to deliver growth – profitable growth delivered over the long term – is an investment in creativity. And I don’t just mean advertising creativity – business creativity can also play a big role in achieving growth. The Institute of Practitioners in Advertising in the UK released a series of studies into its database of effectiveness case studies. The bottom line from these studies is that creativity is the key to effective marketing. Brands with consolidated markets and rapidly changing data and media technology require “business creativity” – the application of

creative thinking across business processes to deliver competitive advantage – not necessarily advertising creativity. Brands are asking what can be done differently. How can they innovate through a service offering or product design? How can fresh understanding of the path to purchase unlock growth? How can brands maintain engagement with consumers beyond an ad campaign that launches and then disappears? This thinking is a model we have started to develop for our industry recovery. I call it ECG – engaging creativity for growth. As an industry we need to proactively engage clients by emphasising the value of creativity. We need to present ourselves as creative business experts – not just the creativity of a 30-second spot. And we need to talk about growth – how to grow brands in competitive markets, and how to maximise growth from a marketing investment. Most importantly, how to agree with marketers on growth goals that are measurable. Correctly reframed, agencies can make this change and make the case to clients. My bet is the clients who listen will be outperforming those who don’t. The writer is John Zeigler, chairman and CEO of DDB Group Asia Pacific, India and Japan.

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Over 120 senior communications professionals gathered to discuss the pressing challenges of public relations and its future in the second edition of Marketing Magazine’s annual conference. Here’s a wrap up of what was shared during the event.

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DOES PR HAVE A PR PROBLEM? Anyone in the marketing industry will tell you their job scope is rapidly changing and PR is no exception. The playing field is now entirely different. That’s what the speakers at our recently held PR Asia conference highlighted. “PR is really just a part of the whole communications, but a lot of people assume it is purely media relations. Why is that so?” Ambera Cruz, marketing head of APAC at Meltwater, and the moderator of the panel discussion, asked the panellists. Let’s call it communications and not PR “I think in a lot of organisations, PR is interchangeable with the press release,” said Angela Parr, director of PR and public affairs for Asia Pacific at Visa. She added the truth was far away from that. PR professionals and agencies do far more than just media relations. It may have been the case historically, but a lot has changed with the onset of social media and digital, and in general. Of course, media relations is still crucial to a PR campaign, any activity and a communications activity, but it’s part of the entire communications plan. “A lot of companies in the future will change it to communications, letting PR be a formal part of that,” she added. Added Emma Dale, co-founder and managing director (Asia) of Prospect: “We are

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becoming more integrated than ever before. And now we need to bring talent into agencies and communications functions that are creative or digital specialists not just PR. If everyone’s understanding of PR is media relations, it will be tough to attract the right talent.” And that’s the problem PR has. Why it’s not just about the name This misconception is causing the industry problems that are more than skin-deep. “Why can’t we find that sweet spot where PR agencies are able to help build strategies and become more than just arms and legs for their clients?” Cruz posed the question to the panellists. It boils down to what the agency can offer. “It’s not just me telling the agency what to do. It’s more about asking the agency what they can add, suggest,” said Audrey Mok, the general manager of communications at Sony Electronics Asia. The relationship between a PR agency and a client is not that good, according to Dale. “In Asia, PR agencies aren’t seen as being a true partner yet. I am sure that will change though.” “Quite a few senior PR people leave and set up their own specialist boutique shops/firms – and are giving clients senior counsel and being their trusted partner. I think the frustration for inhouse organisations is they are not able to have

that level of access to the top management.” Clients need to trust the agencies On the client-side, it is imperative for them to share as much information as they can with the agency. A member of the audience aptly pointed out: “It is ironic that some companies know and want PR, but they do not trust the agencies well enough to share more information which are assets for them to do their jobs well. “Clients know that PR is important and most cost-efficient, but it’s still in the bottom of the budget chain. We are expected to do a lot with very little input.” And this warrants a change in perspective from the top management. There needs to be a lot of education done about communications involving both in-house and external communications teams and the top management. Quite often, for the regional director of the company, unless he’s a marketer or communications person by training, it would take a lot to be comms savvy, the panellists highlighted. And this differs from company to company. Quite often now, communications heads report to the CEOs. “Hopefully, we will see more and more of that – and that’s only going to happen if the CEO truly believes in the communications function and what it does,” Dale said.

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THE SHRINKING NEWSROOM AND WHAT PR NEEDS TO KNOW Journalism, like any other trade, has been hit hard by the digital age in the past five years, with newsrooms everywhere struggling with shrinking resources. For Singapore press such as SPH and MediaCorp, the trends are no different. This has meant several changes in news making. “Most newsrooms are not in expansion mode. Their duties, however, are expanding. A reporter has to file three stories instead of one,” said managing editor of The Straits Times, Ignatius Low. Speaking on a panel at Marketing magazine’s PR Asia conference with PN Balji, editor of The Independent Singapore and founder and former CEO of MediaCorp’s TODAY newspaper, Low spoke about the ripple effects of the shrinking newsroom.

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Rapid news, rapid responses One obvious change is how reporters now file stories, as people consume news from all sources. For example, news is now expected to be filed on the same day it happens. “In the past, if there was a press release, let’s say about the COE prices coming down, the correspondent would take his time, call dealers, call analysts, come up with the story at eight o’clock and it goes to print. Now, he has to file a full story one hour maximum after the news breaks,” Low said. “When the reporter calls you for a response, you no longer have the luxury of waiting. If you don’t give a response, the story would go without it. You have less time to respond.” However, he added that giving a different and new angle could help the PR professional

get more coverage the next day because the reporter would need something new then. “If you have a crisis situation in your industry and you have to issue a press release – issuing a press release for the next newspaper is no use because the news is already breaking,” said Balji, citing the Little India riots that broke on social media, and the fairly delayed statement that came from the Ministry of Home Affairs. “People are already making up their minds about the situation – you would have to engage the journalists immediately.” While the issue often lies with management not being able to release all details, the key is to move fast and update as the situation moves, he added. Also, with editors and journalists having less time, they may not be able to look at stories as

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closely. “If an editor has many stories, he will pay attention to the more important ones. Things can go wrong and as media professionals you must give attention to detail,” Low said. Handling a younger and less experienced newsroom The next thing that arises from shrinking resources in the newsroom is a younger and inexperienced workforce. PR professionals will find they are working more with younger reporters who may not be as well-versed in the background and context of the issue. But there is a great opportunity here, said Balji. “If you can take the young journalist into your confidence and offer him or her as much background as possible, they would appreciate it a lot, and you would have your story,” he said. Alternative news sources: Are they all “evil”? “People used to say the ST is a monopoly. Yes we are close to one when it comes to print, but there are also several news sources in Singapore itself. We are dealing in a world with more newsrooms,” said Low, referring to the proliferation of online media. “They all have differing rules of engagement. Some of these media agencies are trained – they write responsibly, fact check, etc. There are some news sites that are younger and they are more interested in getting eyeballs, the story being shared. As such, things can go out without being verified. And information is spread quickly.” While traditional media outlets tend to demonise alternative media, the situation is not black and white.

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Added Balji: “It’s easy to accuse online media of being rubbish, that it does not check its facts, etc. I think generally it is not the case. I’m not in defence of it – they also have a lot of manpower issues – but I am quite sure the online media has in some way benefited not just mainstream media, but the society.” He gave the example of NParks’ Brompton bicycles case, which was first run by the mainstream media. “It was a straightforward story. The price was given. The online media took that story on and ‘investigated’ the issue and finally, HardwareZone came up with a story, with pictures to show the person who was involved in giving the tender, and the close relationship of the parties involved. The final result was the government called in the

practices investigation bureau and the officer was fined. “The online media is not all bad: there are gems that come out of it.” Mainstream media looks at online media to see what is getting traction, and then covers it. Online media reads traditional print such as The Straits Times to give stories a life of their own. Each feed off each other, he added. Consolidation of news Finally, another effect of shrinking newsrooms is that one sees a consolidation of news sources. Globally, as newsrooms cut their foreign bureaus, there is a move towards news wires such as Reuters, Bloomberg and AP for news, with more news organisations subscribing to these for content. This happens on a local level with organisations such as SPH and MediaCorp as well. Within SPH, this results in increased content-sharing across all assets. A story done by someone on The New Paper, for example, may be used in another of its publications and vice versa, said Low, calling it a “buffet table” of shareable content, where the publications can pick off what they need. MediaCorp also picked up a “central kitchen” concept where its reporters became multi-platform journalists several years ago, though the current practice is not clear. In both scenarios, what this means is that instead of working with four or five journalists in the past, PR would deal with only one. This also could mean that a single mistake or bias would be amplified across all platforms. This throws up the question for PR professionals – how does one build relationships? How do you gain trust with the right people to write your stories?

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THINK COMMS CAN LEAD MARKETING? HERE’S WHY agents. However, today, with the likes of telcos and airline industries making a play in the insurance space, as well as online insurance sales further segmenting the arena, insurance companies are becoming lesser reliant on such channels. This sees insurance companies marketing to a broader audience, on a bigger scale, and making marketing and communications merge increasingly. “Today, the person who creates the brochures, also writes press releases, and also is in charge of the organisation’s digital banner ads and social media channels,” he said. It only makes sense to make marketing and communications work in unison. “Together they can determine priorities and lead products and ultimately decide what is told to the consumer.”

Public relations and its ties to marketing is a highly contested issue. Where should PR sit when it comes to the umbrella of marketing? Who should lead it? Is PR just a product of the marketing function? During the PR Asia 2014 hosted by Marketing magazine at the Four Seasons, Vishal Doshi, head of corporate communications and marketing for Southeast Asia at American International Group (AIG), opined that corporate communications and marketing should be integrated as one function, ultimately led by a PR professional. “I believe marketing plays a subset in communications. My personal viewpoint is there is a risk the marketing way of thinking will overwhelm PR if the two came together and was led by someone with a traditional marketing background,” he said.

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In an ideal structure, he explained the PR and marketing function would be merged and led by an individual who was responsible for all of the organisation’s relationships – externally and internally. That individual would be the head of communications and marketing and would also need to think like a public relations-trained professional. They would need to ensure transparency and engagement both within the organisation and with consumers. This structure would then need to be supported by people who maintained various relationships with customers, employees, shareholders and various channels of communications. This is particularly true for the insurance space. He said historically companies such as AIG and other non-life insurance organisations relied on intermediate channels and sales

PR in the new world – managing your stakeholders and boardrooms On the whole, the PR landscape is no doubt changing. There is now a slew of new technologies, new channels and new stakeholders leading to PR professionals having a steep learning curve. According to Tino Fritsch, head of communications and the press spokesperson for APAC at ThyssenKrupp, PR now has to act as an internal consultant and explain new roles in the marketing landscape and guide the company through it. This should be seen not as a challenge, but as an opportunity, he explained. “This new complexity is a big chance for communications to stand up. We have to learn to use PR in the boardroom. Who else other than PR professionals can try to get boardroom professionals more hands-on?” he asked. He also argued for the merger of PR, investor relations and marketing. “If PR reports to the CEO, while investor relations and marketing report to another board member who is also responsible to marketing or branding, this can lead to friction. Investor relations may have some financial information – you have the information from the CEO – but the budget is still within the marketing. It has to be more integrated – otherwise you lose or risk a loss,” he said. “Now we come to the new world – it’s about managing complexity. It is about different stakeholders. It will take time for those who are used to the old style to adapt. But you cannot run away – you must embrace it.”

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FORGET YOUR RULES AND START EXPERIMENTING The growth of the online world has taken the PR industry by storm. In a world where everything is now digital first, PR professionals have to start thinking like publishers. Furthermore, with the rapid change, there is little room for hard and fast rules.

“Digitisation has changed everything for us as communicators practitioners, PR people and as marketers. For public relations, it means that we as PR practitioners need to think like the publishers.” She explained that today PR produces

“Since the lines are blurring, the skill set that marketing needs versus the skill set PR needs is actually quite similar.” Madeleine Little – director and head of PR for Asia Pacific at JLL

The PR world has become all about experimentation. “If you are looking to engage your audience through PR tactics, it’s not about straight forward advertising. It is a lot of experimentation – not huge budgets,” said Madeleine Little, director and head of PR for Asia Pacific at JLL, who spoke at PR Asia 2014. In the past, PR centred very much on media relations and crisis management – today those lines have blurred, explained Little.

its own content, putting out original stories to engage with audiences. Overall, according to analytics done by JLL internally, bounce rates are also lower and readers are spending more time reading original thought-leadership pieces. How the evolving PR scene has impacted marketing “Since the lines are blurring, the skill set that marketing needs versus the skill set PR needs

is actually quite similar. It is no longer them and us anymore,” Little said. Over the past few years, JLL has moved towards an integrated approach with its PR and marketing teams working together to come up with ideas and create content. Furthermore, with the increased sophistication of marketing automation systems it has resulted in both PR and marketing teams sharing the same measurement tools. This then allows for a balanced understanding of how one department is contributing to the growth of the organisation. However, where PR and marketing both intersect most is in the need to break down and understand audiences. Rather than looking at “vanity metrics” that were termed as part of the old PR world or the media relations world, Little urged PR professionals to go beyond to assess quality rather than quantity. There is no doubt tomorrow’s PR world will no longer be reflective of today. “In terms of the ways we can use online or digital – it will keep progressing.” All PR folks can do is keep up with the pace of digital and become “expert generalists rather than siloed specialists” of tomorrow.

MANAGING A CRISIS OF NATIONAL PROPORTIONS: PETRONAS SPEAKS UP Petronas occupies a unique position in the oil and gas industry. Owned by the Malaysian government, it is tasked with the country’s oil and gas resources, and is the national oil and gas company (NOC), apart from also being an international oil and gas company (IOC). The company was recently positioned as the world’s sixth most profitable Fortune 500 company in the oil and gas space. This renders the communications role for Petronas a high-stakes one, and a relatively complicated one at that. Stakeholder relations is core to its communications, over any other forms. There are two hats its comms department must wear: one as an NOC and the other as an IOC, managing stakeholders for both. “We are a national oil and gas company, but we need to act like an international one. We are expected to look at the socioeconomic profits of the company. We need to pay dividends,” said senior general manager

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of group strategic communications for Petronas, Liz Kamaruddin, speaking at PR Asia 2014. Because of its NOC role, it also has to contribute back to the community. It is clear that managing internal stakeholders is what takes up most of her attention, and is her team’s biggest concern. “If anything goes wrong with the country it’s our fault, if anything goes right it’s not us. That’s the Petronas dilemma,” she said. For example, petrol in Malaysia has been heavily subsidised by the government. When it decided to lift those subsidies substantially, the public was riled, with much of the blame falling on Petronas. There was a rally against Petronas, with consumers looking to boycott the company – “even though the prices affected others like Shell as well”. “So what we did was to engage the stakeholders and government. We were part of the key communications plans,” she said. Another incident happened where the

company had an explosion in the long pipeline across Sabah and Sarawak that cut across the dense forest. This went viral through social media, and Petronas faced a crisis saying it was not aware of the situation. The team released a statement and got its guys on the ground level to do safety briefings and get down to the area to deal with the situation. “We decided to build disaster-relief centres which are not available in remote areas where people don’t know where to go for help. We will get the guys down to train the people. The public just wants to know that you acknowledge that you have a problem – and you must always be available,” she said. Her team consists of at least 140 staff for her comms team at the group level, she reveals, with everything under the branding and CSR umbrella for the group coming under her. The company is also investing in creating a training school for its comms team, which includes leadership training.

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The B2B buyer, just like any other consumer, has undergone a major transformation. What then are the implications for the B2B marketer? Marketing organised its first B2B marketing conference to uncover how brands in this space are evolving. Hereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a recap of what was discussed at the event. 6 4 MARKETING J A NUARY- FE B RU ARY 2 015

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HOW TO TURN MARKETING INTO A PROFIT CENTRE While every marketer understands the importance of knowing the customer, the process and nuances are different for B2B marketers than B2C – at least to some extent. But if your company is one that is set in its ways, as B2B marketers, how do you orchestrate the change throughout the organisation? According to Lynn Huang, head of marketing and strategy for Asia Pacific at Honeywell, it’s a change marketing is responsible for. She was speaking at the B2B Marketing conference held at the Four Seasons organised by Marketing magazine. “You have to be able to articulate that dollar value to be able to convince the buyer to buy,” she said. In the B2C world, if the product is “cool”, people may buy it, but in the B2B world, people won’t buy your products unless they have seen the numbers, and have made the calculation to assess whether it can help them make money (or not). For marketers, the first point of contact should be the stakeholders at every step. What also matters is the process, Huang says, adding that waiting for a top-down approach is not the best way. “This thought-leadership needs to be driven by marketing, together with its stakeholders,” she said. “As B2B marketers, you need to talk to the IT managers, finance managers, the decision makers consisting of different groups and stakeholders and make sure all of them can see the product can help them make money.” What then defines marketing? The sales team is defined by sales revenue, finance by numbers, and HR by hiring the right people for the right positions. What about marketers? According to Huang, they are defined by how much they know their customers and what insights they can share with other departments for the entire organisation to be customer-centric. This, therefore, requires a shift in focus – from downstream objectives activities such as interaction, and access to upstream ones such as understanding the customer needs and value of the proposition. “Physical retail space; access online and offline – are downstream values. As a B2B marketer, we spend a lot of effort on the downstream. But do not forget the upstream aspects of creating needs and values for the customer. If you want to drive the profitability to

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your company and maximise the value of your customers, you have to focus on the bottom line. How do you do that? Get closer to your customers.” While it may be a lot more cost-effective for B2B marketers to focus on downstream, if they do not shift their focus to upstream, it’s going to be hard for the company to become a truly customer-driven company. It’s all about customer needs In the old world, the segmentation was based on the industries, but that has lost much of its relevance today. The effective way to segment now is to analyse the needs of the B2B buyer. Within retail, for example, B2B marketers should not group all the supermarkets together. “Do not just pull out the industry index and perform the segmentation.

“B2B marketing is focused on driving the profitability of the business and identifying the customer needs and ensuring that you have a competitive edge. How good you are is decided by how bad your competitors are.” And that can be achieved through simple steps such as meeting clients over lunch to get a fuller understanding of their business and how it operates. “For the role of B2B marketers – I encourage myself and my team to see customers from the business perspective, understand what defines the business, where the focus is, and the value you and your organisation could provide your customers. “There should be a lot of interaction between marketing and sales, and marketing and innovation. Marketing is not a function – it is a way of doing business.”

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3 WAYS TO EASE MARKETING’S TENSION WITH SALES

The selling cycle has changed drastically over the past 20 years. Customers now have already done about 60% of research beforehand and a sales person has only a small window to make a difference. Hence, many organisations allow marketing to take the lead on a sales function. But have the marketing departments of today learnt to speak the same language their sales counterparts are speaking? KP Unnikrishnan (pictured) marketing director for Asia Pacific and Japan at Palo Alto Networks, shared his views at the B2B Marketing 2014 conference. “I used to have a CMO who used to say that marketing drives sales. It is a powerful statement – it is not about driving numbers, but also about driving the sales organisation,” he said. He added that today, it was about identifying what you as a marketer were able to provide for the sales organisation while building up a true partnership. “Unless a marketer is able to build a partnership with his sales team, the relationship will never take off. As we grow as a company, as an industry, as a fraternity, what are we doing to build a true partnership with the sales organisation?” He added that in a sales role, it was always about deadlines and hitting numbers. The best way to harness a relationship with the sales teams is to empathise with it and understand where its demands to the marketing function are coming from. If a marketer is unable to do so, 100% of the battle is lost. One fundamental rule marketing has to

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remember is to connect with the business as a whole. “If you have no idea what the other departments are doing, or about the overall business, or the cross-margin kind of revenues the company is bringing in, you have lost the battle,” he said. A good salesman, he added, does not just always talk, but rather listens. Hence, as a marketer, you will also need to listen and understand what sales needs before you strategise your targets. Creating a market for the future “Marketing is not just about building a brand or business. It is about building and creating a market for the future.” If you as a marketer are able to think along these lines, build a campaign and an activity based on this, it would help the growth of the company and your sales teams. So what exactly is needed to create a future-ready marker? Short-term versus long-term planning It is about thinking short-term and long-term, said Unnikrishnan. It is about working with the sales teams to figure out what is needed over the next two quarters as well as over the next two to three years. The more you can connect with them for both quarterly and long-term planning, the more it will benefit you. He added for marketers, it is difficult to help sales counterparts unless the request is put in way in advance. This is because marketers are geared towards impacting and contributing to the following quarter, rather than the present

one. Therein is a fundamental communication breakdown. Hence, marketers need to define the market and timeline for the sales teams. “At the end of the day, it is the health of the sales organisation and the overall company that matters. While creating leads are very important, it is not just about taking some data and throwing it over to the sales teams.” Marketers need to show their sales teams that they are investing in and qualifying these leads. “It is vital to show that you are putting a subset of your marketing dollars to make sure you are getting the right qualified leads into the system.”He also added the definition of a lead had to be different from an organisational standpoint to a team standpoint, down to a sales standpoint. The definition is the way to go back and assess whether you were successful or not. Work as a team What also brings the sales and marketing teams together is the payouts. He added that if one person on the team was unsuccessful, the entire team should also be deemed unsuccessful. “This however is not something that marketing can change, as it’s a HR policy. However, this integrated approach is something marketing teams can push towards in the organisation to make sure that teams are aligned.” Measurement and communication Measurement is vital. When you are able to measure your numbers, you are able to stand in front of the quarterly business review to say these are the kind of numbers that marketing impacted. This has to be done consistently. “I would recommend that you do that on a regular basis. Your list of pipeline, numbers, reviews, go out week after week to the sales organisation to see how they are creating numbers, what is happening on your pipeline, what’s happening with conversions.” This keeps the lines of communication open and helps marketers understand the psyche of the sales team. “These are the guys who are bringing money to the table, driving revenue for the organisation. Marketing can always be looked upon as a support function. It is about understanding and aligning yourselves more to make things happen realistically.”

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HOW TO CREATE A CONTENT FACTORY AND RUN IT WELL For brands, it is vital to engage customers in conversations early in the sales cycle and what drives this is content. Every company is focusing on content which will get them the necessary results, but how can marketers build a “content factory” within the organisation? Rashish Pandey, director of marketing for APAC at Cisco Systems, shared some tips at Marketing magazine’s B2B conference. “As marketers in general, and in B2B in particular, we are an insecure lot. As long as our customers engage with us, we are happy,” he said. Our biggest fear is indifference. It is when customers choose to ignore us – that’s our worst nightmare. The indifference tells you that you’re creating content that is not resonating with your customers. Compelling content is a combination of relevance to your customers, the persona you’re talking to and the journey you’re engaging them on. A few questions marketers should have top-of-mind when coming up with content are: • Does this content help my customer do his job better? • Is this timely? Marketers get wedded to the idea of a content calendar, but does that calendar have scope for “breaking news” moments that happen every day? How quickly can they turn around and capitalise on those situations? • Is the content findable? • Is it inspiring in a way that makes the buyer stop and think? 1. Identify personas Looking at a typical B2B buying landscape, you’ve got seniors, partners, technical decision makers, etc, who play a different role in the buying process. In the past, brands used to think in terms of segments – hospitality or retail or aviation and so on. The need now is to look at the personas behind those decisions. Cisco has identified 17 of these different personas that are either championing a decision or influencing it or running a process. “We get really close to them to understand what keeps them awake. Somebody wants to become an AGM from being an IT manager, or go deep technically. Do we understand all that?” Pandey said. 2. Not all content is created equal The type of content depends heavily on what stage of the sales cycle your product is in. It should be specific to that stage. If you are talking

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about thought leadership when the customer is actually looking for comparative information of vendors, it will not resonate. What will resonate is when you know you have compelling content and you’re connecting it with the persona and their belief systems and at the right stage. Many agencies tend to separate search from content marketing. “That’s really not true,” Pandey said. Content marketing is one part of the puzzle when you look at the customer insights and whether you’re serving them with the right content. “At Cisco, we look at deep analytics of our site visitors – what they are looking for, which pages they visit, how much time they spent on a page, what does it tell us about them and so on.” 3. What problem are you solving? A marketer should constantly ask this question.

“There are no boring brands, there is only boring content.” What’s your unique point of view on that problem, in that industry and that’s what you should be talking about. The how’s of content marketing The fundamental challenge with content marketing is the number of avenues where content needs to be deployed. From newsletters, websites, events, social media – the demand to push compelling content is high. There is also an increased need to feed this beast on a regular basis. Almost half of organisations posts something once a week. So, how do you get around to building such compelling content? “It takes an army to create the compelling content,” Pandey said, adding it’s not that the content does not exist in the organisation, it exists in silos. “As marketers, it is not our job only to create content, but to be an orchestrator of content

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that resides in the silos of the organisation.” Content in Cisco is generated by multiple departments – R&D, analytics, the social media team, events and so on. On top of those, marketers need to also look outside the organisation.At Cisco, there are tens of thousands of engineers who have spent a year getting certified. “How are we engaging them to amplify, create and share their stories with their community?” Every time a B2B company does sales enablement, it generates content. “As a marketing manager, it’s your job to find the content, surface it up and package it in a way that resonates well with your buyer personas. It is therefore imperative to talk to other teams within the organisation. “When you expand your lens, you can find that content that you need to surface, package and use it to engage customers. That shift in approach to content needs to take place.” “Can you help position the geekiest person in the company as a community hero? Those are the things you need to think about when looking for great content,” he added. How do you create snappy content? One of Cisco’s most popular reports is the annual security report which gets thousands of downloads and is a huge hit with customers. In

“Our biggest fear is indifference. It is when customers choose to ignore us – that’s our worst nightmare.” Rashish Pandey — Director of marketing for APAC at Cisco Systems

the past that one report would be shared and circulated, but now it creates multiple smaller pieces of content from it. It could be an assessment tool, videos, case studies, tips and tricks. This layered with sharing on social media got Cisco six times the increase on the consumption of that one report just by changing the form factor from a monolithic 30page report to multiple different sorts of content. “Your marginal cost of creating that content and reaching that out falls substantially down. Think smart with your existing content.”

•

Get your agency to capture content As marketers, when trying to get a blog from a senior decision-maker within the organisation, you often face the excuse of time crunch, but the same executive could be on stage for an event. That’s your time to maximise the content opportunity. Get an agency to capture all of that and churn content out in different formats – from short articles to tweets to LinkedIn posts. In summary, how do you manage the whole content marketing process?

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Follow a roadmap – it will take a while to get this right so be prepared. Companies should start moving away from product-based campaigns to persona-based campaigns. Be frugal – don’t spend too much money advertising that content. Find out what your “hero content” is – a white paper, a special industry report and promote that. Leverage free promotions – a typical company home page is very product heavy. Move away from that and make it a showcase of content and embed content in your promotions. Keep your eyes open – broaden your vision. It is not just about the particular campaign. You need to start mapping what products are coming out, when your senior execs are in town and so on and create compelling content in a timely manner. Be agile – all your customers are going through a transformation in their industries and, as marketers, you need to understand that and be there when a “breaking news” scenario happens for them.

CONTENT MARKETING KEY IN B2B SPACE “Security products are like insurance. Users don’t buy them alone,” said Eric Chong, senior director of channel marketing for APAC at Trend Micro. The company’s products protect gateways, data centres and cloud environments, among other things. Due to the escalating cyber crime scene, security has become a big consideration for CIOs. Hence, in addition to traditional abovethe-line and event marketing investments, Trend Micro also has to lean on its channel partners to push its product in front of buyers, which will in turn, sell to end users of Trend Micro. Marketing spoke with Chong to find out how the company educates its partners to sell effectively. Marketing: How do you ensure your partners are selling your products correctly? Chong: We don’t just focus on the technical aspects of the products themselves. We also use our partner education programmes to impart soft skills to participants, thus allowing

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them to fulfil their aspirations. This is something we take pride in: It’s not just about learning what Trend Micro and its products are about – our partners will also learn, for example, how to work with security consultants and understand better the client’s security landscape. In this way, we aspire to really help them to do their job better, which we hope will mean they’ll be loyal to our product even if they move jobs. Marketing: What challenges have you encountered in implementing your partner education programme? Chong: The main challenge we face is that, like most IT vendors, we have a lot of content. It’s easy for our users to drown in information. Further, it’s difficult to know how best to serve the information to users – for example, mobile phones have limited space. To counter this, our information is structured to make it digestible, ensuring readers can gain something valuable out of our content. We combine online and faceto-face interaction like classroom training to provide the best engagement.

Marketing: What tips do you have for marketers who want to create effective partner education programmes? Chong: We realised that in order to create an effective education programme, you have to know your partners and what they want. That’s why we feel our programmes are successful. Our partner portal contains relevant content, not just product information. You have to make sure your education programmes aren’t just product portals. Finally, role-based content access will help provide the right information in the future to the right person.

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45 Ubi Road 1, #03-03A, Singapore 408696

8-9 April 2015 InterContinental Singapore

Asia’s 360o Forum for Content Marketing How solid is your brand’s content strategy? Curious how some of the top brands are innovating marketing practices in order to leverage content and improve the customer experience? Content 360 is your one stop immersive look into the world of best practices for content marketing from across the region. Stay connected, learn from experts, share your ideas and join in the content revolution!

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Daniel Yam Storyteller and ﬁlm director

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Priyanka Nath Digital and social media lead, South Asia Dell

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Rupali Shah Digital marketing lead Fuji Xerox

Jamshed Wadia Head of social & digital media Intel Asia Pacific and Japan

Nadeem Amin Regional digital marketing manager - ANZ, Asia Paciﬁc, South Africa Kellogg Australia

Myra Gorostiaga Social media analytics lead Lenovo

Sara Varela Associate director, social media Marina Bay Sands

Pete Mitchell Global media innovations director Mondel z International

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