Digital Commerce for the End-to-End Consumer Experience

Lianne Mui, Director, Apz Digital & Isea Marketing, Mccormick & Company

Lianne Mui, Director, Apz Digital & Isea Marketing, Mccormick & Company

With consumers slowly returning to office and what might be part of their lifestyle pre-pandemic, an important question remains on how brands need to adjust their consumer experience offering to stay relevant.

Honing into the Grocery category, online sales has grown the most in SEA at 2.8X between 2019 to 2021 but that is also largely because historically, compared to categories such as electronics and apparel, groceries was still mostly bought in the offline supermarkets and general trade. Most consumers interviewed in the SYNC Southeast Asia report do expect to maintain or increase their spend of grocery online even post pandemic.

Even then, this is not expected to grow exponentially so we need to understand how their consumers interact with brands. In SEA, 80 percent of digital consumers seek online channels, particularly social media and ecommerce marketplaces, to discover and evaluate a new product. Woolworths in Australia are also seeing their shoppers engaging more with brands’ content and communities. In fact, 60 percent of their consumers research online and buy them in-store2.

To prepare for these changes, brands need to rethink how to approach execution across the marketing funnel.

• Incorporate ecommerce in-app media as part of your overall media strategy

Still looking at just display and video ads on the usual suspects Google, Facebook, TikTok, programmatic networks to drive your consumers through the marketing funnel? Whilst these may work for your standard awareness objectives, the leaders in this space have already recognized ecommerce in-app media to also support Awareness and Consideration objectives in addition to Conversion goals. With number of monthly visits continuously growing in most of the top ecommerce platforms post-COVID, it likely indicates a combination of increase in new users as well as their existing user base returning to browse more often. Therefore, ecommerce shoppertainment strategy is imperative to the holistic media plan.

Brands should also develop a tracking methodology to analyze if the spend across each of the traditional digital and ecommerce media touchpoints is sufficient and effective based on the behavior of the consumer in the respective category.

• Build a new content plan for your new media strategy

Replicating your traditional product pack shots is not going to influence consumers to make an online purchase (think back on how long we took to convince ourselves never tore-use TV commercials for online videos). While it is important for someone who has seen your social or OOH ad to be able to link up with your online product benefits and pricing, it is even more critical for someone who is seeing your product image for the first time on ecommerce to be enticed enough to drive that click through to the Product details page and be sufficiently convinced to add to cart and check out, or look for it in the grocery store. For instance, at McCormick Asia Pacific Zone, we will be progressively upgrading our digital shelf to include beyond product specifications on the product image to aid selection and also highlight key benefits to differentiate our products from others. We started with a brand new herbs and spices sachet format launch in SEA with our “Singles” last year, where similar imagery and marketing messages “Fresher flavor, Better taste” used in our main media channels were also extended to our ecommerce content. That way, consumers could have higher product recall and those exposed to the new product for the first time on ecommerce could also appreciate the differentiated product attributes.

Brands Should Also Develop A Tracking Methodology To Analyze If The Spend Across Each Of The Traditional Digital And Ecommerce Media Touchpoints Is Sufficient And Effective Based On The Behavior Of The Consumer In The Respective Category

Media Assets across Social

Ecommerce Digital Shelf

Key rule of thumb is to anticipate the content needs of your consumer and ensure it is accessible to them at the right touchpoints.

• Innovate for future scale and growth

To ensure your brand stays as a leader in this space

• Be ready to test new solutions available in market – ecommerce in-app media in Asia Pacific is still not as evolved as China’s ecosystem, so there are many new solutions and partnerships formed between the media publishers and ecommerce portals to deliver new and more effective ways of reaching and converting consumers. Set aside an innovation fund around 10-15 percent of your annual budget for your agencies to propose solutions and take a leap of faith to test and learn.

• Continue to upscale the entire organization so Digital Commerce stakeholders act as an integrated, agile unit – marketers need to stay up to date on the new developments in the ecommerce platforms and partner with ecommerce leads to pilot new projects. Buy-in from senior leadership is also important since consumer behavior and platform developments will continue to accelerate quicker than before.

• Experiment what should be in-house and outsourced – there are certain chunks of work which you may find provide more agility to the business when accomplished in-house. An advantage of managing ecommerce content and analytics in-house is the ability to turn insights into actions much quicker. We’ve also found an opportunity to manage some of the influencer work in-house which in turn has helped us better define the scope and value-add needed from our agency partners.