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Asia Pacific Trends Marketing

Trending 2017 and beyond: A forecasters view of Asia Pacific

By Michael Agnew, Head of APAC

December 29, 2016 | 8 min read

Michael Agnew leads Foresight Factory’s business in Asia from Singapore. The company (formerly Future Foundation) is an independent consumer trends agency, scouring the globe to identify the critical trends and disruptors for their clients. Agnew gives a forecasters view outlining the trends we’re going to start hearing a lot more about in 2017, and why they matter in APAC.

Michael Agnew

Emotional intelligence

Influencing emotion is a foundation of successful branding. While that is a constant, what is changing is how consumers express emotion and personality online, how well this can now be tracked and, in the age of the filter bubble and personalised algorithm, how difficult it is for brands to get a seat at the table if they are not aligned with consumers’ emotional needs.

Traditional markers of identity; age, gender and geography, are becoming less useful signals, and instead each of us are crafting online personas we want to be seen as a reflection of ourselves – to varying degrees of subtlety the across the world. Half of Chinese and Indonesian internet users agree “I wish I could be more like the person I describe myself as on social media”.

Further, we are increasingly leaving a digital trail signposting our mood and emotion, and by proxy our personality: emojis and stickers, shares and conversations; emoji use is more established across all demographics in Asia vs. US or Europe.

In 2016 Unruly launched EQ Targeting in Japan, helping brands to identify consumers most likely to connect emotionally with a video, not just based on demographics, but also groups of consumers with specific interests.

Spotify’s programmatic audio campaigns, now in four APAC markets, have also enabled buyers to reach consumers based on their listening habits and music taste and not just standard demographic factors. Spotify playlists are often centred on specific moods and moments such as chillout, commute or workout, meaning relevant ads can be more accurately served.

Smarter ways to tap into mood and emotion with advertising will continue to appear, but the true marker of this trend will be brands offering services, products and even prices tailored to personality and emotional state. Of course there will be trust issues: consumers will want to retain control over how they say they feel for example, but getting this right means understanding how to really make people happy.

Brands are about to get bypassed

One of the reasons emotional intelligence is so important is the difficulties facing brands as a result of platformisation. Social media services are striving to pull more and more activities onto their platforms. WeChat is the best practice example - increasingly dominant with a raft of brand, commerce, financial and account services all delivered through the app. Kakao and Line also boast impressive levels of dominance in their respective home markets of South Korea and Japan. In Southeast Asia, Facebook and Line are both expanding social-commerce services with the introduction of bots, dedicated commerce stickers and payment solutions to keep as much activity as possible in-platform. In Thailand, where competition between the two platforms is highest, Line has launched a Foodpanda-style on-demand food and grocery service 'Delivery Man' which can bring meals to your front door on the back of a scooter.

While messaging platforms provide a new channel for branded engagement, over 50% of consumers in China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand have already used messaging services to chat to businesses on their smartphone. As chat has the potential to deliver on a more emotionally intelligent level, the risk to brands is that consumers communicate only with the delivery mechanisms and outsource brand choice to them.

This is particularly true as discovery is transformed by smart household devices that can order for you, sometimes even automatically when stocks are low. Amazon is taking its first step into Southeast Asia by launching in Singapore in Q1 2017, hopefully (my geek hat is firmly on) bringing smart assistant Echo Dot to the little red dot. Chinese retailer JD.com has launched the similar DingDong device which can understand either Mandarin or Cantonese.

Instead of being sidelined by AI, brands must adapt to its reality, and tap into the trends that make people share to ensure they are discoverable, not invisible. Tapping into non-verbal languages such as emoji, providing opportunities for people to be performative via shareable experiences and products, and creating and fostering communities that maintain direct communication with consumers, can help brands avoid being bypassed.

Identities linked to transactions

We imagine a future in which there exists a universal digital identity for every individual, offering instant verification, uninterrupted experience and heightened security. Though 2017 isn’t likely to be the year this vision is realised, significant strides are being made towards this. The most immediate application of the trend is manifesting in retail and payments. First, by making it easier to pay, as retail stores recognise the consumer through biometric identification, then by identifying other relevant attributes like store loyalty, past purchases and personal ratings.

While much of APAC is still cash-based, payments are a huge growth area in the region, and interest in swiping your phone at the checkout is high amongst smartphone owners. India’s Paytm has had a significant boost due to the country’s recent cashflow issue. Over 40% of fintech companies in Indonesia are said to be in payments. Apple Pay is now in China, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand. Facebook has been trialling an in-platform buy button in Southeast Asia. I could go on. Yet before most payment systems have widespread usage, biometric technology already points to an even more seamless future.

Alipay has launched ‘scan your face to login’ technology, and Alibaba is also taking part in China’s initial Social Credit System pilot project, assigning scores to consumers within its database. The company has admitted to using purchase information as part of the ratings, surmising that consumers buying diapers are likely to be parents and therefore more responsible consumers, at least in the company’s eyes. And ahead of the 2020 Olympics, Japan is testing a fingerprint payment system for tourists that could see visitors registering their prints and making payments with just a finger tap.

Inconvenience and delay are the biggest barriers to purchase and seamless payment linked to identity via biometric authentication systems can lubricate transactions and encourage spend. Beyond this, the trend provides the opportunity to link more consumer data points - commercial, social, online, in-store... for a more holistic picture of the consumer and their preferences.

Life, augmented

Another year and we are still talking about VR but there is considerably more to throw into the immersive reality mix in 2017. VR itself still has strides to take, and while headsets are far from becoming a standard household item, arcades are popping up everywhere from Singapore to Tokyo. Huawei reportedly plans to open 10,000 VR experience stores in China where the market is projected to be worth USD $8.5 billion in the next four years. And while Pokemon Go stole the AR headlines in 2016, the launch of the first Google Tango-powered AR handset from Lenovo in late 2016 showcased the potential this technology has in gaming, shopping and edutainment, particularly in a mobile first region. But it is hearables which are the new kids on the immersive reality block – smart earbuds that can provide voice controls, track fitness, and allow you to customise your real world audio experience. While the best innovation is coming from the US, interest in using hearables is highest in China at almost 90%. Perhaps the most exciting hearable device being developed right now is The Pilot – an in-ear translation device giving people the power to communicate with anyone without language barriers.

The Pilot points to a niche angle of this trend: the notion that there are natural limits to our physical and intellectual abilities is progressively weakening. For healthcare and tech brands, the future is not only in finding solutions to human illness and frailties, but also finding ways to improve the mental and physical performance of the healthy through augmentation and bio-upgradable technology. The desire for self-optimisation is widely felt, particularly in the appearance conscious markets of Japan and Korea. Samsung were awarded a patent for smart contact lenses, while researchers at the University of Tokyo have been developing e-skins: an electronic display laminated onto the surface of the skin. In recent years we have witnessed amputees successfully beat able athletes in sporting events, and companies such as Google are investing heavily in trying to slow ageing, and ultimately even prevent death, so really what are the limits of our abilities?

Michael Agnew is Foresight Factory's head of APAC. The latest trends report can be found here.

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