Beyond the metaverse and AI, making measurable differences to brand-building

While metaverse, AI, and other ‘shiny new’ tech may dominate the trend reports, it will be quieter changes to Southeast Asia’s ecommerce platforms and landscape that will dominate in terms of tangible impact to marketers.

The more mundane changes occurring on and around pureplay marketplaces such as Shopee and Lazada and super-app aggregators such as Grab are far more than shiny new toys—they will make a measurable difference to sales and brand-building, and company operations.

Retail media’s evolution will force new capabilities

Many look to China to understand the future of Southeast Asia ecommerce. According to an eMarketer statistic in Campaign Asia, 40.7% of China’s digital ad spending in 2022 went towards retail media networks owned by  Alibaba and JD.com.

Indeed, most big platforms, such as Grab, are launching or strengthening their networks, with significant changes recently or to be announced. This will lead to a shift away from the Facebook and Google networks.

Brands will need to ensure that their agency or in-house teams are trained in these tools and that their structures are such that changes can be made at the necessary speed. Frequently the setups associated with ‘traditional’ FB/Google-reliant strategies will not be fast enough.

The 'commerce content catchup' will intensify

Getting the right content on your digital shelf is more important than ever. Content must work harder than ever, and sellers must work harder to create it.

The content on many brands’ online stores is a patchwork of previous whole-store revamps and ‘bitty’ incremental changes due to campaigns, new product innovations, regulation changes, etc. The result is an inconsistent experience, even within one store, and sub-optimal content leading to lower discoverability and conversion rates.

Moreover, as the volume of sales (and traffic) through online stores grow, the stakeholders getting involved will also increase. Brand builders and CMOs, as well as regulatory people, will be looking to ensure online stores are a brilliant brand representation.

In some cases, store-wide revamps of content will be needed. Still, in other cases, innovative brands will set up processes that enable ongoing changes to be identified and prioritized based on data. For example, working with tools such as Edge and digital shelf analytics provider Efundamentals and having ‘studio style’ teams, with analysts, media and content people sitting and working closely, will ensure that gaps can be revealed and added to a prioritized backlog.

Shoppertainment matures—and hopefully disappears as a word

Did anybody notice the word “shoppertainment” getting used less in 2022?

I did. Headlines were rife in 2019-2021 around livestreaming, gamification and other functionality. But unfortunately, these efforts were no more than experiments encouraged by the platforms themselves and in many cases, the traffic and, thus, ROI were not there.

The use of these features will not go away. However, more innovative brands will start using and measuring these tools as just that, tools. And, like any tool, it will be considered rationally alongside other options based on its ability to pull in and convert traffic.

Moreover, where they are used, they will need to be done more efficiently—with proper and cheaper solutions to scale the effort.

Less tolerance for marketplace ecommerce as an ‘island’

As marketplace ecommerce continues to grow as a proportion of overall sales, brands will be less tolerant of disconnects between upper-funnel or brand marketing and lower-funnel marketing.

More extensive brand-building efforts must be more seamlessly connected to what happens on the marketplace platform. So, for example, we’ll see more super brand days connected visually and in terms of a message to the current brand campaign; brand campaigns will have better linkages to the platforms; and PDP content and hero images will carry with them messages and cues from brand campaigns.

Kimberly-Clark Vietnam uses their marketplace platforms as an opportunity to build the brand, as well as sales, with its storefront displaying a consistent and impactful look and feel, as well as brand messaging.

Linked to this, agencies will voyage upstream and downstream

As the divide between marketplace ecommerce and ‘everything else’ reduces, agencies will succeed in making this easier for their clients.

Enablers, who started as store and logistics operators, will invest more in their capabilities to deliver more significant creative ideas and products that come to life on and around the marketplace.

Meanwhile, more extensive agency networks strengthen their ability to execute within the platforms. This includes moving by the holding groups to acquire or build retail media-buying capabilities and creative and content agencies hiring platform experts to ensure their ideas can come to life in and around the platforms.

Evolving significance of regional ecommerce teams

Regional ecommerce functions have sometimes been awkward roles. Budgets almost always sit in the markets and often in different functions, such as sales. So how many spent their time was playbooks, playbooks, and being in the same city as Shopee and Lazada to craft the JDP?

But this is evolving. The thought leadership and platform relationships will continue, but brands will explore new ways to guarantee regional scale.

One of these is through influence in a brand’s media buy setup, often centralized through regional or global relationships with the media buying agency. Getting this right, on behalf of local markets, to include retail media capabilities, for example, will be essential.

We’ll see the emergence of central hubs that can monitor and change online stores in multiple markets. This will lead to significant savings and efficiencies. In addition, intelligent ways of working will mean local ecommerce leads can tap into centralized services as quickly as they would their regional enabler.

Less familiar categories will find their footing in the marketplace

We saw several high-profile store openings in 2019 and 2020. Companies like BMW set up Lazada to benefit from the traffic—but also the PR.

Many of these have since gone quiet.

However, we see other categories succeed in the marketplace. For example, the fact that large amounts of product searches begin on marketplaces rather than Google will mean that businesses such as healthcare and services will benefit from this traffic and exposure – similarly, as the ad tools develop (see above), these platforms will be able to buy audiences and compare the cost of doing so to FB and other platforms… in many cases, there will be cheap eyeballs available.

The way to win in this space will be to research your shopper with web rooming – browsing online but buying offline —in mind. For something like pharmaceuticals, a consumer may never build a big enough basket to justify a purchase. Still, they may explore product features, check prices etc., on a marketplace store before buying it elsewhere.

Jeremy Webb is the vice president for experience in Southeast Asia at Ogilvy