OPINION: Digital an inalienable part of consumers' lives

Increasingly, technology is enabling consumers to stay wired across platforms — moving seamlessly from one digitalised platform to another with very little downtime. And more often than not, they are using a couple of media platforms concurrently. Obviously consumers are in almost total control in what they choose to consume. Brands need to start connecting with consumers in a truly meaningful way that speaks to their core values.

Certainly, there are a few brands which are doing very well socially. Starbucks for example has been successfully engaging consumers and encouraging brand ambassadors. Dell has gone even further with social — consumers can now book Dell products via weibo! Yet when compared with corporate brands, individuals have been even more successful in the social space. For example Han Han, whose insightful social commentaries resonate with consumers and Yao Chen, whose popularity is a testament to the power of authenticity and personality. 

In the next five years, traditional media will be digitalized. Almost every channel or platform you can think of — outdoor sites, digital TV, your fridge - will have a chip embedded. But the greater shift is that consumers will be moving between these platforms in a seamlessly inter-connected way. 

They will be engaged in a progressive, on-going conversation/activity with minimal disruption as they move from one digitalised platform to another. Brands will need to think beyond the “traditional” digital platforms of laptop and mobile to develop a progressive and seamless conversation with consumers on other digitalized platforms. There will be far fewer discussions around “digital strategy” but more around an overarching communications strategy and the role of different platforms within that overarching strategy. 

Digitalization of formerly non-digital media will lead to much greater availability of effectiveness measurement — the development of a currency based on specific desired consumer responses instead of proximate data such as GRPs. For example digital cable TV has already reached 88m households and is growing rapidly still.

A key opportunity area is analytics — to quantify investment effectiveness in driving desired consumer responses. With burgeoning and increasingly robust consumer response database driven by digitalization, analytics are increasingly getting powerful in measuring effectiveness of various platforms / formats / investment levels in triggering a specific response from consumers — for example getting a brand into consumers’ consideration set to change of perception towards a specific brand attribute to purchase intention.  We no longer have to rely primarily on proximate measurements such as GRPs. Marketers who are willing to invest in analytics have a much greater opportunity to get closer to the billion-dollar answer on ROI. Also, with consumers becoming more and more easily distracted and used to byte-sized information, brands that can bring meaning to the fast paced world will have a high chance of success. Brands need to find ways to be part of the bigger socio-cultural conversation.

Mobile apps and e-commerce are the other obvious areas of opportunities given the proliferation of 3G and smartphone usage. In particular, I think there is great opportunity to build in call-to-action element via technologies such as LBS and AR.

In China, I would love to see more marketers pushing the frontier and becoming more open to experimentation. Consumers are evolving too rapidly and China and they are very different from other markets, so there are times when past learning and learnings from other markets may not provide the level of direction required. There are times, when you may have to create new norms and you need to test and learn!  Of course a robust learning loop has to be put in place. The cost of failure is high, but China is a big market, therefore offers plenty of test markets. China is, to a large degree, a resilient marketplace — the reward of learning quickly is even higher than the cost of test failures.

My biggest observation about marketing in China in the last year is rising sophistication among local marketers, represented by the likes of Vancl, Metersbonwe and Bubugao Oppo Real. They learned from global brands very quickly, yet they don't simply ape western brands – they customize their learnings in the China context, taking into consideration the China media landscape and consumer psyche. Vancl and Metersbonwe definitely capitalized on social media, but they also leveraged traditional media such as TV & OOH to great success. Increasingly there are more China brands displaying boldness to experiment and do things their own way.