Coca-Cola, Meta, Sea execs share 6Rs to capture SEA digital consumers – Wired PR Lifestyle Story

Southeast Asia (SEA) has become one of the fastest growing digital consumer markets in Asia Pacific. As Observed by Bain & Company, 70 million people – the equivalent of the UK’s total population – have become digital consumers since the Covid-19 pandemic.

This growth in the region is higher than in India, China or Brazil.

As with these cosmic changes in the space of digital consumption, we cannot rule out the changes that the pandemic has also brought about. It has redefined the way consumers know, buy and pay.

In fact, e-commerce now surpasses gaming as one of the major online activities as e-commerce evolves as it mixes entertainment with shopping and shopping. Online channels now play a larger role than offline channels in influencing consumers ’shopping journey.

Therefore, owners of brands of social media platforms and e-commerce super-applications cannot stand still. They should be constantly renewed, maintained and adapted lightly.

To keep up with these ongoing changes, on November 9 we will learn about three speakers on the SWITCH 2021 panel on how they are adapting their business to the ever-changing consumer environment.

Six ‘R’s’ to navigate the new reality

The table is led by Praneeth Yendamuri of Bain & Company. Although the waters of the e-commerce scene are turbulent and unpredictable, Praneeth says there are six Rs that companies need to consider to make the journey smoother:

• Rewrite the first multi-year digital strategy – Companies need to invest ahead of the required enablers and capabilities.
• Re-imagine consumer engagement – To optimize commercial spending, companies should reflect omni-channel travel. This will give them the maximum benefit.
• Refresh product offering – Diversify your brand portfolio to meet polarization needs.
• Rethink sustainability as a revenue driver – Transform the business supply chain and take ESG (Environment, Social and Governance) as a new normal.
• Redesign how consumers will spend their time in the future – In view of the pandemic, companies need to design offers with a focus on the home.
• Change the business model again – Companies need to anticipate disruptions and create partnerships.

Joining e-commerce

For a major brand like Coca-Cola, which has been hugely successful offline for 129 years, moving into the online world has been a challenge. However, it is a transition that Sam Way, the head of O2O Asean & South Pacific, values.

“We’re really excited to say we’re catching on. The reason it is critical is that it promotes a different culture. ”

This change has instilled a culture of lifelong learning in Coca-Cola and taught him important lessons in humility and empathy as Sam as a leader. For Sament, empathy is especially important because they are trying to break a highly successful model.

We’re trying to change that, so every day, these conversations about interruption, investment change, and impact are happening. And it’s tiring. It’s tiring for those teams, too. So as a leader, knowing the point of the biggest workload, you really need to motivate that team in a different way and really get involved.

– Sam Way, Head of O2O Asia and South Pacific, Coca-Cola

A dynamic team with soft skills

When it comes to building a team that is constantly innovating, creating the right team is essential. Sam says the soft skills will help the company move forward.

This does not mean that hard skills have no value in the field of e-commerce. He has made it clear that there will always be a need for this type of skill, and it is very traditionally raised with classroom and cross-curricular training.

However, there has been a greater focus on fostering talent with specific soft skills.

“As a company, our focus has been on soft skills, as I mentioned earlier, in the search for disruptive thinking, innovation and constant improvement. It’s a topic we have focused on,” he said.

As for advice from other entrepreneurs, Sam has found that diversity is an edge that companies should actively use, especially from his group.

Sam went on to cite some figures. Her group is 70 percent female, half of whom are from the ASEAN region, the South Pacific, and some members of global groups. In addition, his team can speak more than nine languages, with more than half of them bilingual.

Sam attributes this diversity to one of the main reasons it helps keep Coca-Cola ahead of the investment curve and develop skills for roles that don’t yet exist. A dynamic team well equipped with soft skills is what is needed to be competitive in today’s environment.

The role of social media in consumer behavior

Although SEA’s digital consumer has grown, Dhruv Vohra, director of Meta’s Global Business Group at Southeast Asia, believes that social media plays an important role for the consumer.

Dhruv noted that although 65 percent of consumers have spending power, they are not sure what they want to buy and how to buy it. That’s why social media plays an important role in keeping people’s hands on this journey of the discovery trade.

In addition, consumers prefer to make purchases through online channels. Therefore, Dhruv believes that brands need to take advantage of social media to help consumers make these decisions.

“Think of social media not only from the point of view of smaller funnel conversion measurements, but also to sustain consumers through discovery, evaluation, research, purchasing, through these things,” Dhruv advised.

He noted that Southeast Asian consumers are very open to experimentation; they examine more than five to eight websites and apps before deciding what to buy.

Therefore, the goal of e-commerce companies is to create loyalty and “sticky experiences” so that people can spend the most time on the app and have the perfect experience.

Dhruv noted that increased consumption of short-form videos has also highlighted the rise of gamification in purchases and direct purchases; all of which help create a “sticky experience” for consumers.

Given this changing consumer behavior, this is changing the online strategy for e-commerce businesses.

Although these mega sales days and times are very important, our research shows that 80 percent of people change their favorite brand in the last three months. So you can’t launch it or just plan for a certain day.

All you have to do is have a year-round strategy where you spark the interest of people where they are and when they are. As a result, we don’t see an online strategy as the first for a particular season or event.

– Dhruv Vohra, Director of Global Business Group, from Meta in Southeast Asia

E-commerce businesses need to “adapt, integrate, accelerate”

After hearing so much about how consumers have changed and how e-commerce companies have changed, Dr. Santitar Sathirathai, Chief Economist of the Maritime Group, offers some insights into e-commerce vendors.

Dr. Santi classifies transformation into three words: adapt, enter, and accelerate. For Dr. Santi, the word “adapt” is the best way to describe what is seen in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the region.

“SMEs have really used networking tools such as e-commerce to adapt to the changing situation and social distance. They use e-commerce to reach customers across the nation, even if there may be a time when the store is offline or they had to close it, ”Dr. Santi said.

Another word game of the past, e-commerce has been particularly helpful for SMEs to ignite and capture trends. Moreover, these changes can be done easily and easily on e-commerce platforms.

The accessibility of e-commerce platforms has also enabled the proliferation of entrepreneurs. A study by the World Bank in Indonesia revealed that 25 percent of the platform’s vendors are new vendors.

The most interesting of these numbers is that some are housewives and most are women.

“They use this opportunity to sort out work and take care of their families, while running a business, to keep a family earning extra income,” he explains.

Due to the abundance of new vendors, it has accelerated the pace of innovation in e-commerce platforms like Shopee.

“We have 25,000 brands at Shopee Mall, and we need to keep adding and innovating and learn from the brand as well. We’ve added new services, such as allowing brands to have their own loyalty programs to generate more conversions and repeat purchases. So all these programs are becoming more and more important. ”

The role of policy makers in creating a virtuous circle

Dr. Santi also noted how this transformation of the e-commerce space is also a result of policies and programs that support the growth of the e-commerce space even further.

In Singapore, programs like Enterprise Singapore’s e-commerce booster package have helped tremendously for SMEs to embark on their digital journey.

“[It is a] a promising development that is a good representative of private and public partnerships, ”Dr. Santi said, adding that it creates a“ digital steering wheel effect ”.

When a party suffers from the benefits of technology, they realize that this path to digitization is really worth it.

“This is investing, and recycling that, and they will do more. And the more they see the more benefits, the more opportunities they have to move forward, which creates a virtuous circle. ”

On the other hand, even those who are not digitized are reluctant to try it; that’s one of the main topics Dr. Santi hopes to work on in Shopee.

How do we get from this state of stagnation to the state of a virtuous circle? I think that’s where the really important policy comes in, where it’s good to see a lot of governments put in that effort, people can’t move forward and get into that digital steering wheel.

– Dr. Santitar Sathirathai, Chief Economist of the Marine Group

Predicting the future

In view of the seismic changes in e-commerce, the panel was asked to provide a forecast for the coming years.

Dhruv has extrapolated from the current work environment, stating that the future of work is hybrid, where technologies such as augmented reality and virtual reality play an important role.

This also provides for a shopping experience where dialogue and social commerce will continue to grow.

“The core theme is AR (augmented reality) and VR (virtual reality), and how they work, how we shop, and how we live.

In terms of consumer goods and distribution, Sam sees a disruption in drones and driverless cars.

“If we are rethinking that we will have thousands and millions of cyclists constantly being sent home, I think we are wrong,” Sam said. In the end, consumers will win.

Dr. Santi has seen the reverse migration of young people returning to their homes to teach older generations how to use technology. In this way, more digital literacy is taken up, which in turn changes the digital consumer.

When we talk about digital consumers, we usually think of young people in the past, but now, perhaps, it’s not just youth. Actually, more generations [are] come together.

– Dr. Santitar Sathirathai, Chief Economist of the Marine Group

Featured Image Credit: SWITCH 2021