Mirum partners with Forrester to help brands compete with disruptors like Airbnb and Alibaba
J. Walter Thompson digital agency Mirum in APAC has announced that it's bringing on board Forrester’s Digital Maturity Assessment Tool.
The agency believes using the tool will help support its work in trying to help more traditional brands modernise and digitise their businesses, in order to better compete against the new breed of disruptors like Airbnb and Uber.
Sharon Ng, Mirum’s head of strategy and advanced analytics consulting, said: “With the likes of Alibaba, RedMart, Uber, AirBnB and Grab disrupting traditional businesses in Asia, companies are realising the need to overhaul dated business processes and operations and to find new revenue streams via digital channels with focus on the customer’s experience across your brand’s digital touch points across multi-screens.”
The tool aims to help clients work out their current state of digital readiness, and then give step-by-step plans on how to overhaul their digital capabilities. Rather than create their own tool, Mirum said they adopted the Forrester tool because it was a “credible third-party evaluation scorecard”.
While digital use across APAC is extremely varied, many markets do lead the world in terms of mobile penetration. With mobile-first businesses such as Alibaba placing strong plans to grow internationally, as well as in its local market China, traditional brands need to move fast to compete.
From a marketing point of view, a small part of the digital transformation that Mirum is hoping to provide for brands, spend on digital in many Asian markets has a large, but narrowing, disparity to catch up to, compared to the level of time spent with digital devices.
According to Magna Global, TV still represents the largest spend in APAC at 40% of all spend but with mobile growing 70% over the past year, it’ll buoy the growth of digital and represent 70% of all digital spend by 2020.
Mobile spend is still growing at a faster rate in Western markets such as the UK, which saw mobile ad spend grow by 78% over the past year, according to the latest IAB and PWC report.