WARC’s Rika Facundo shares insights that will shape marketing in Asia in 2024 – adobo Magazine

LONDON, UK — As the era of monoculture draws to a close, WARC Asia Editor-in-Chief Rika Facundo focuses on the coming year, predicting the insights marketers must understand to successfully navigate the diverse Asian region.

At the beginning of this year, I set myself two key questions to shape my 2023 editorial agenda. It’s about what the rest of the world can learn from Asia. And how can you better understand the differences between marketing ecosystems and audience segments?

After a content review and a lot of reflection, and thanks to great contributions from various partners, we can end this year with some definitive answers (and enjoy the holidays!) . This year was a landmark year with a variety of regional reports and local insights.

A fast-growing local media ecosystem

Sensemaking Asia’s new storefront remains at the center of our editorial agenda, especially as Asia remains a high-growth digital market and we seek to bridge the digital divide across metropolitan areas. will continue to be. In 2022, we put a Southeast Asia spotlight on e-wallets, and this year we’re taking it a step further with his first-ever APAC regional spotlight on how the region is innovating with social commerce. We planned.

The future of marketplace battles and TikTok shops remains to be seen as regulatory scrutiny increases. But if innovation and money follow along with audience behavior, it will be difficult to put the genie back in the bottle.

What is a genie? The fact that Asian consumers are “social shoppers” and their use of social media is shifting from connection to commerce. Products and services such as live commerce, shoppertainment, and conversational commerce will continue to be adapted and become more commonplace.

One of the key outcomes of the social commerce revolution is paving the way for a unique local media ecosystem in APAC, featuring local and regional marketplaces and super apps. As Grab’s Ken Mandel argues, Grab provides fertile ground for the growth of retail media networks in Southeast Asia, the digital media industry’s newest darling and competitor.

No matter how platforms and media mixes evolve, eternal questions about effectiveness and tactics will always remain.

In a white paper in collaboration with Google, we looked at how marketers can balance the use of channels like brand.com and Marketplace.

With shoppertainment becoming a key audience engagement and conversion strategy, we analyzed how shoppertainment impacts the entire funnel in our whitepaper on TikTok.

With the rapid expansion of platforms and formats in Asia, the credibility and effectiveness of advertising is being questioned. Mr. Arindam Bhattacharyya of Dentsu We make the case for the growth of the region’s ‘attention economy’ market and offer tips on how to sell attention study ideas to clients. Our white paper with DoubleVerify also discussed how to raise the bar for media quality and drive more effective performance results in APAC.

A state of cultural change and new needs

For years, “glocal” marketing has always been at my core, but this year the equation tipped in favor of “local.” It was only while working on his WARC Cultural Advantage Guide, the first global, Asian-led guide, that I realized that this was just a sign of the end of monoculture.

This is good news for marketers in Asia. Because it gives us permission to take the region’s rich and diverse underbelly, its usual moniker on the world stage, and remix it for endless cross-cultural possibilities and international expansion. The consensus I’ve heard is that Asia is finally becoming an exporter rather than an importer of culture and strong local brands. We are already seeing examples of this from Korea and the “Korean Wave” wave to anime and the rise of Hijra culture. But this requires a strong, differentiated and culturally relevant brand that upholds trust and credibility beyond the domestic market.

The end of monoculture intersects with another major shift in Asian values ​​and demographics. The most striking evidence comes from Kantar, who shows that a whopping 65% of Indonesia’s Muslim-majority population identifies as an “I” within a “we” mentality that spans large cities and rural towns. This suggests that they are questioning the typical “collectivist” characteristics of Asians. audience.

This shift requires going beyond a “just right” understanding of Asian audiences. Rather than making sweeping assumptions and overlaying old concepts, more work needs to be done to understand how Asian identities are being recontextualized and taboos are challenged. All this provides a new state of need and fertile ground for marketing innovation.

For example, once considered taboo, the pandemic has begun to shed light on the importance of mental health and the role brands play in alleviating consumer anxiety. This is a theme we explored in our SEA Spotlight earlier this year.

More questions to come in 2024

Indeed, this year’s contributions have further clarified the questions I posed at the beginning of the year, but they are by no means the end of that line of inquiry. Rather, the challenge for next year (and the year after!) is to become sharper and keep accumulating insights.

The regional areas we are considering for next year are:

• How are the shapes of aspiration and luxury changing in the region, particularly with the growth of the middle class and the emergence of new hubs of wealth?
• What are the new strategies for outbound Asia growth and leveraging the Asian diaspora?
• How can marketers better understand and leverage Asian subcultures, communities, and niches?
• How can we market to consumers beyond the metros to bridge the digital economy divide?
• What are the Asian values, behaviors, and attitudes that are emerging as the region becomes increasingly urbanized?
• What marketing strategies are working in categories such as gaming, financial services, alcohol/consumer goods, travel and tourism, automotive, and retail, all of which Asia is well positioned to lead?
• In the wake of many global and local elections next year, how can you ensure brand safety in an age of AI-generated content and misinformation?
• How are marketers testing, learning, and validating their effectiveness in Asia’s new hot spots like streaming and CTV?
• In Asia’s fragmented media environment, how can we ensure cross-media effectiveness, not only across channels but also across countries?

Apart from regional topics, there is also a global discussion on marketing.

• How to make the case to executives for investment in creativity and brand building. This was the central topic of our SXSW Sydney coverage.
• From systems thinking to community research, what new skills do strategy professionals need?
• How are companies decarbonizing, collaborating with local communities and stakeholders, changing packaging, innovating, and driving effective behavior change on the issues that matter most to local consumers? Is it working?

Well, it seems like we ended this year with more questions than answers. But in my book, that’s always a good landing spot. Please contact us if you are interested in contributing.