Glenn Parker: There's such a lot of demand for these products and services. Marketers want to have access to the same tools that they frequently are able to get overseas. The challenge in Asia Pacific is that there are just so many different cultures and countries that are at different maturity levels in terms of the data they have, the way that they use marketing.
So we're very focused on trying to build a regional solution. We recognise that that's going to take time. We're working with a number of companies now on a regional basis, and where we can, we build our insight data and additional capabilities in those countries. But we've still got room to grow. We haven't just started, we've been here for a while in the market, but now we can really talk to customers about their regional needs.
Pereira: How developed is Asia Pacific in terms of digital marketing practices?
Parker: It's different in different countries. When I was in China two years ago, I'd see, for example, a major international IT consumer company have a banner ad on a website and you'd click on it and it would be an error page. There was never a link there. All they were doing was buying banner web space like they buy a newspaper or magazine ad.
What we're now seeing in China is a big shift away from two years ago. There are a lot more organisations thinking about how they can build web-based strategies, both in email and on their sites, and use that to help build loyalty with customers and improve their conversion rates online. But there's still a lot of room to improve in how companies build their web-based strategies. Many of them have websites, they may have loyalty programmes or email campaigns, but there's not a lot of intelligence being applied.
I talk about a scientific approach to marketing a lot, and its really about applying the insights and understandings in a way that is more intelligent, and segmenting your customer base, dividing relevant offers, being more thoughtful around how you build a strategy for increasing your digital database size, and making it easier for customers to do businesses with you online.
Pereira: What does end-to-end marketing mean?
Parker: We start with the strategy -- what are we doing or trying to achieve? Often we see case studies where an organisation cannot grow its customer base. One of the best examples we have is a UK-based one. It was a company that had 7.5 million customers and it wanted to grow that to 10 million, but was unable to do so: it was losing customers as quickly as it could acquire them. The cost of acquisition was going up, so they had to change their game plan.
When they were losing customers, they were treating them all as the same type of customer. They had different products and different divisions, but treated all customers the same way. The first thing that we did was help them understand the issues. Sometimes organisations need help in understanding what aspect of their data is preventing them from moving forward.
Then we work to build, usually within three months or less, a consolidated view of the customer base. We will draw, in some cases, hundreds of different data sources into a consolidated view that's designed for marketing. We build in things like Mosaic, get things like addresses cleaned up, we have an understanding of consumers, and then we can start to build strategy.
In this case of the 7.5 million to 10 million customers, the biggest problem was churn, so that was the area we focused on first. What we did was work out there were actually 30 reasons for customer churn. We split up and segmented the churn, and had 30 different strategies to go to market, and were able to execute that because we had a system that allowed us to go fast.
We had single customer view ready to roll, we had consumer insights. What happens in organisations normally is that there's an essential section called the analytics department, and they do a lot of the analytics for the marketing department. They can take quite a bit of time to do that, so what we've done here is really put control in the hands of marketers, and they have tools which are very easy to use and very fast. It allows them to get the data they need to build their campaigns, and they can execute those in days rather than weeks.
The final part once you've executed the campaign is measuring results. One of the things we see in Asia is very little test and learn and very little measurement. That's a big part of our proposition. We have a number of products to help do that. Many of those are online, such as Hitwise, an online competitive intelligence solution while some are offline, like FootFall, which measures the change in visitor numbers to shopping centers.
