Marketing in the platform age: how to transform and drive growth in a connected ecosystem

The new ecosys­tem of dig­i­tal plat­forms is dri­ving a shift in mar­ket­ing trends and con­sumer engage­ment. Meet­ing cus­tomers’ imme­di­ate demands whilst build­ing sus­tain­able growth can present a daunt­ing chal­lenge for busi­ness­es attempt­ing to steer a path through an ever-shift­ing dig­i­tal land­scape.

Today’s mar­ket­ing and media ecosys­tem is dom­i­nat­ed by dig­i­tal plat­forms that go beyond geo­graph­i­cal bound­aries, con­nect­ing peo­ple like nev­er before. These online spaces are the new ‘coun­tries,’ where peo­ple live their lives, trans­act­ing, shar­ing, and cre­at­ing. The onus is on organ­i­sa­tions to adapt their mar­ket­ing strate­gies to meet these expec­ta­tions or risk falling behind their com­peti­tors.

“The levers of growth are chang­ing,” says Adam Ger­hart, CEO of glob­al media and mar­ket­ing ser­vices com­pa­ny Mind­share. “There is now bor­der­less plat­form con­nec­tiv­i­ty that is empow­er­ing the con­sumer to demand more from brands. These new plat­forms and con­sumer dynam­ics are com­pound­ing and chal­leng­ing con­ven­tion­al notions of growth.”

A bet­ter way to under­stand peo­ple

With con­sumers more empow­ered to call the shots, there is a new­found oppor­tu­ni­ty for brands to pri­ori­tise life­time cus­tomer val­ue over short-term sales. Get­ting locked into acqui­si­tion churn and burn is unlike­ly to dri­ve sus­tain­able growth and a nar­row focus on opti­mis­ing the sale alone is a zero-sum game.

It is no longer just about how to reach con­sumers; it is also about under­stand­ing what moti­vates them in much greater detail and then help­ing busi­ness­es to plan and buy these audi­ences based on their moti­va­tions or emo­tions across dig­i­tal plat­forms at scale. Win­ning means win­ning a consumer’s trust and becom­ing the brand they val­ue and can align their val­ues with – which is dou­bly impor­tant in tighter eco­nom­ic con­di­tions. And to tru­ly grow, brands will need to suc­ceed across mul­ti­ple plat­form ecosys­tems, both their own and the GAFA (Google, Apple, Face­book, Ama­zon) giants.

“The way that brands talk to a per­son needs to acknowl­edge the mul­ti­tude of dimen­sions of that indi­vid­ual as a com­plex human being and not just some­one to sell prod­ucts to. In the past, dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing has made a lot of assump­tions about peo­ple. It is easy to put some­one in a box,” says Vic­to­ria Cook, glob­al chief data strat­e­gy and insights offi­cer at Mind­share.

She argues that organ­i­sa­tions should be con­sid­er­ing both con­text and plat­form when con­nect­ing with audi­ences. Build­ing trust starts with acknowl­edg­ing the flu­id­i­ty of human iden­ti­ty. Cook con­tin­ues: “Brands need qual­i­ty data that cap­tures this com­plex­i­ty. It is real­ly about com­bin­ing data that fus­es accu­ra­cy and empa­thy.”

There are sev­er­al ways to approach this evolv­ing land­scape. Mind­share is tap­ping into what it refers to as ‘good growth’ which requires an abil­i­ty to deliv­er pre­dictable out­comes at scale through data while also account­ing for empa­thy and insight into con­sumer moti­va­tions. This puts peo­ple at the heart of growth strate­gies. Their imple­men­ta­tion of ‘pre­cise­ly human intel­li­gence,’ which bal­ances and inte­grates accu­ra­cy and empa­thy to dri­ve growth is the next step.

The pro­pri­etary Audi­ence Ori­gin data ser­vice is the bedrock of this approach, hold­ing exten­sive, first-par­ty con­sumer data around inter­ests, behav­iours, media con­sump­tion and deci­sions about pur­chas­es and spend­ing across 74 mar­kets. “This human intel­li­gence allows us to help our clients use their media with the inten­tion to meet that chang­ing con­sumer demand,” says Ger­hart.

Machine learn­ing prod­ucts pow­ered by pre­cise­ly human intel­li­gence are a means of get­ting to grips with the nuances of audi­ences at scale. By tak­ing empa­thy data and con­nect­ing it to pre­ci­sion data, busi­ness­es can bet­ter under­stand con­sumers’ moti­va­tions, mind­sets, and emo­tions.

Look­ing to Asia for the future of mar­ket­ing

Asia’s har­ness­ing of dig­i­tal plat­forms for mar­ket­ing pur­pos­es is very advanced and sig­nif­i­cant­ly dif­fer­ent to that in the rest of the world.

Ecom­merce pen­e­tra­tion is broad­ly sim­i­lar in Europe and Asia, at 78% and 74% respec­tive­ly. The dif­fer­ences emerge when eval­u­at­ing mobile usage. 85% of APAC con­sumers use mobile for online shop­ping com­pared to just 47% in the UK. A recent pro­pri­etary GroupM study across Asia Pacif­ic found 82% of respon­dents said that they pur­chased via online shop­ping plat­forms. This is not that dif­fer­ent from oth­er regions. How­ev­er, what is notably dif­fer­ent is that 34% report that this is being done via super apps — a far cry from the mere 6% in the UK.

Helen McRae, CEO of Mind­share Asia Pacif­ic, says: “Con­sumers in Asia see more con­nec­tiv­i­ty. They can socialise, pur­chase, and be enter­tained all in one ecosys­tem. WeChat is prob­a­bly the best exam­ple, where you can chat with friends, order a taxi, shop for clothes, trans­fer mon­ey, order a take­away and watch pro­grammes, all with­in a sin­gle envi­ron­ment.”

The emer­gence of super apps is chal­leng­ing mar­keters to be more con­nect­ed and more con­sumer-cen­tric. This new lev­el of con­nec­tiv­i­ty and flex­i­bil­i­ty is built into Asian plat­forms such as Tik­Tok from the start. Many brands are advanced in cre­at­ing the right dig­i­tal ecosys­tem, but this ecosys­tem looks dif­fer­ent to that in oth­er regions and com­pa­nies must embrace trans­for­ma­tion and review lega­cy prac­tices to deliv­er on growth strate­gies.

“Mega Days like Sin­gles Day in Chi­na are where ecom­merce comes to life with big sales, but along­side these events there is live stream­ing, influ­encers tak­ing the stage to talk about prod­ucts and a more all-encom­pass­ing push is play­ing out,” says McRae. “It is not only just about the sale but every­thing that goes around it.”

GDP in South-East Asia is pro­ject­ed to grow at just over 5% for 2022 and 2023, includ­ing Chi­na at 4.25% and India at 7.9%. This exceeds pre­dic­tions for the US and EU, which lag at around 2%, accord­ing to Euromon­i­tor and the IMF. McRae says: “Brands should be using this oppor­tu­ni­ty to build dig­i­tal ecosys­tems that look dif­fer­ent to the ones that exist in oth­er regions. The world is not one size and the levers of growth are shift­ing in Asia and else­where.”

With such fast-mov­ing economies and con­sumers, brands mustn’t sit still and should instead think lat­er­al­ly about data and data sig­nals. Mind­share used traf­fic data flow feeds to help clients in Chi­na pin­point oppor­tu­ni­ties and see where growth was return­ing. With Louis Vuit­ton, it was boost­ing live stream­ing atten­dance at shows with data insights from con­sumers around a pent-up desire for trav­el, includ­ing tak­ing over one of China’s hot vaca­tion spots for the show.

A recent study by Mind­share called ‘The Geog­ra­phy of Pur­pose’ also revealed that only 5% of con­sumers in Viet­nam assume brands are nev­er try­ing to be gen­uine, com­pared to 48% in Japan, show­ing that whilst all con­sumers are demand­ing more from brands, there are dif­fer­ences across cul­tures: “brands need to ensure that trust and pur­pose are con­nect­ed to the local land­scape and what con­sumers local­ly val­ue.”

An exam­ple of this is Lifebuoy in Indone­sia. In place of dis­counts, the brand offered con­sumers a free doc­tor con­sult ses­sion for every pack bought. This approach not only built trust in the brand but also addressed a need in the coun­try where health­care is not acces­si­ble to all.

Growth starts with reduc­tion

Tom John­son, Mindshare’s glob­al chief solu­tions offi­cer, spear­heads the cre­ation of solu­tions to help clients dri­ve ‘good growth’ and dig­i­tal­ly matu­ri­ty. He works along­side clients with a focus on organ­i­sa­tion­al design, oper­at­ing mod­els, infra­struc­ture, con­sumer strat­e­gy, automa­tion, and com­merce.

“The first point is that growth often starts with reduc­tion, cer­tain­ly if it is to be ‘good’” says John­son. He argues that many big com­pa­nies already have all the tech­nol­o­gy they need and are some­what bloat­ed as through the last few years of hyper growth in ecom­merce it has been easy to jus­ti­fy invest­ment in this space.

There is now a need to take a step back and eval­u­ate what is required and what is get­ting in the way. For John­son, the strat­e­gy is clear. It’s about iden­ti­fy­ing “pock­ets of over­re­liance or under­use or things that are not being done well, extract­ing those and using them to dou­ble down on the things that will dri­ve future growth.”

It’s why the first thing Mind­share often does with a new client is a matu­ri­ty audit to iden­ti­fy where it can high­light the oppor­tu­ni­ties, as opposed to just deploy­ing some media. “We all talk about dig­i­tal as the present and future, but there are still incred­i­ble silos with­in mar­ket­ing to address, they large­ly exist because growth and lega­cy have had to co-exist. Inte­gra­tion is crit­i­cal and you must remove those silos if you want to suc­ceed,” says John­son.

Com­pa­nies on a mar­ket­ing trans­for­ma­tion jour­ney all too often try to be excel­lent at one or two things in a silo, like search mar­ket­ing, and so miss the big­ger pic­ture, or they try to do it all at once and fail. But the dig­i­tal ecosys­tem is now so com­pet­i­tive you have to build incre­men­tal­ly, adding small changes up and ensur­ing it all stays con­nect­ed. “Inte­gra­tion now mat­ters as much as indi­vid­ual per­for­mance,” says John­son.

Mea­sure­ment must also be con­nect­ed. Suc­cess is all too often deter­mined by mea­sur­ing media out­put alone but there is often a blind spot when it comes to fac­tor­ing in all the things that sit behind the out­put, whether it’s the tech­nol­o­gy, the cost of the peo­ple, the deliv­ery net­work, or the prod­uct itself. “We believe it’s good for busi­ness­es to fac­tor all this in, whether direct­ly applied or just acknowl­edged and as we move to a dig­i­tal first econ­o­my, this becomes cru­cial,” says John­son.

It is not about a desire to eke out one more sale, but engag­ing with the entire ecosys­tem to under­stand con­sumers more inti­mate­ly, cre­at­ing life­time val­ue and in that jour­ney, focus­ing on find­ing the small things that can add up, this means look­ing as much at what you don’t need, as what you want to add.

“This is why we try and bal­ance the ‘good’ with ‘growth’,” says Ger­hart. “It isn’t just a mes­sag­ing approach, it’s about embody­ing what is good for the con­sumer, what is sus­tain­able growth for a brand and what deliv­ers good growth for all.”

For more infor­ma­tion please vis­it mindshareworld.com/news/goodgrowth

Pro­mot­ed by Mind­share