Articles & Opinion

A strong culture of mobile innovation has emerged in the Asia Pacific region where most 'digital marketing' equals 'mobile marketing'. It’s not surprising that the eyes of marketers in other regions are starting to turn to Asia to see what can be learned about inspiring consumers to interact and engage with their brands.

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In today’s highly dynamic business landscape, customer centricity has become the key competitive advantage. To understand how successful firms achieve such high levels of customer centricity Kantar Vermeer partnered with Unilever to find the correlation. The recent cover story in Harvard Business Review features findings from our Insights2020 study and includes the 10 characteristics proven to make a successful “Insights Engine”.

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In the near future, socially driven campaigns will become a far more important way to reach consumers who will otherwise remain off marketers’ digital radar. To do this, marketers need to create more remarkable, emotional or useful content to leverage the true power of social to build their brands.

E-commerce in Indonesia is relatively small by global standards, but the category is starting to see dramatic growth. By some estimates, e-commerce will represent 8 to 10 per cent of total retail sales in Indonesia within the next decade. And the value of e-commerce is expected to hit US$24 billion this year – twice the value of e-commerce in 2014. Many businesses are now looking at how they can ride this wave.

Entertaining stories help brands maximize their marketing budgets with ads that people remember. The key to storytelling success is to bring to life resonant and disruptive big ideas in well-told, imaginative ways. Storytelling is a powerful tool for marketers.

Some people view content marketing as paid-for-content masquerading as editorial. Others think it’s the saviour of traditional advertising in an era of ad blocking. No matter what your view may be, we do know that content marketing budgets are growing and it’s important for marketers to have a clear strategy and measure its effectiveness.

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The digital brand ecosystem and the sheer volume of behavioural insight data available today have dramatically changed the consumer decision journey. To successfully build brands, marketers should have a solid understanding of the new path to purchase.

Consumers have different expectations of financial services brands today, and interact with them in new ways. Mainstream banks must innovate to provide the right functionality, communicate to build the brand, then use technology to create an experience that forges strong relationships with consumers.

Asian markets will only grow bigger and dominate more of the global arena in the coming years. And the O2O market is more advanced in Asia than in other regions. Marketers who understand how Asian brands operate and apply their insights in tangible ways will benefit. Learn more.

CEOs who will succeed in the future will focus on how to grow top-line revenues and generate greater bottom line profits by identifying opportunities with more valuable customer groups, accessing latent markets, and creating category shaping products and services. Joining the dots across their operations so that people, products and processes are customer focused will also be essential.

Millward Brown’s newest tracking approach, Digital Behavior Analytics, applies advanced analytics to digital signals like search patterns and social conversation to derive validated indicators of attitudes and behaviors that we already know build strong brands.

WPP brand experts recently gathered in New York for a session about the future of brands. The following remarks are excerpted from the wide-ranging conversation of J. Walker Smith, Chairman, The Futures Company; Nigel Hollis, Chief Global Analyst, Millward Brown; and Joanna Franchini, Vice President – Cultural Insight, Added Value.

Kantar and Millward Brown have investigated how mobile search involves brand mentions and drives brand value growth. It’s clear that no successful brand can ignore joining the app revolution.

Generation Z promises today’s brands a world of opportunity. Aside from having a distinctly different profile from millennials and preceding generations, Gen Z will inevitably influence older generations’ buying behaviors and decisions, so brands must act now to identify meaningful ways for winning with these consumers.

Learn more about which qualities of mobile advertising are most important in breaking through to audiences and how these vary across generations. Creative length and screen size also vary in driving advertising effectiveness.

It’s hard to find an advertiser these days that isn’t developing more branded content. And it’s equally tough to find a branded content campaign that doesn’t involve celebrities, vloggers, or YouTube stars, particularly for brands targeting younger audiences.

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A customer-centric business uses data to understand, anticipate and serve customers’ needs better and more quickly than its rivals. Some companies look to data software or digital marketing technologies to give them the edge. But having the right people on board, and a company culture that drives customer focus throughout the organization is what makes the biggest difference.

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The Muslim population is currently more than 20% of the global population and marketers have been quick to segment them as an audience. But is religion alone ever a strong enough driver to categorize consumers, or are there other elements which are more relevant?

How people access and view video content varies by age. Younger consumers are more digital, more mobile and, surprisingly, more skeptical toward branded content. It is said: What young people do today, older people will, generally, do tomorrow. But it’s not always that simple. Learn more about video viewing behavior.

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New Millward Brown research shows Chinese brands are now equal to international brands in Brand Power – the BrandZ measurement of brand equity – meaning they are equally competitive in many ways. International brands are failing to keep pace with the aspirations of consumers in China, and the speed of the mobile wave.