It’s not an uncommon thing to see for a successful businessman making his way to politics as his final career destination (of doom?). But when it comes to gojek, an app we all love to use, really use, and now has come to a point where it’s impossible to go through the minutiae of daily life without it, the name Nadiem Makarim being announced as one of the sitting cabinets leaves such an aftertaste.

Here’s a 35-year old startup success story, an icon for all Millennials and Generation Z, someone whom they’re aspired to be and someone whom they look up to when catching an entrepreneurial bug. Makarim has been idolised and praised by the likes of generations that were born with technology as well as by those who catch up with technology to stay relevant.

It’s, quite simply, the one thing that makes all the fuss about religions and tolerance irrelevant. It gives a new perspective of what Indonesia can achieve if we put that aside.

Makarim’s move is a calculated one, albeit shocking for some. We gathered the sentiments we see around the media and our budding startup community to help you realise just how significant Makarim is and how he could be the dark horse that brings a new dawn to Indonesia’s education system in the next five years.

When your country calls you, you serve

Not sure where the quote was first heard or who said it first, but the quotes seem fitting.

In his own words to his staff, Makarim stated that him receiving the second term-elected President Jokowi’s mandate is “gojek’s next logical step”.

“We work together as a team for a greater good because as soon as it becomes about the individual, things begin to fall apart. Gojek thrives on talent and if Indonesia is to produce more high-quality talent, the country’s educational system is going to have to transform just like the one that began on the streets of Jakarta in 2010 (when gojek was first established),” Makarim is quoted saying.

Also Read: [Updated] Breaking: gojek CEO Nadiem Makarim resigns to join cabinet

“Our schools and academic institutions are going to have to meet the demands of our future economy. That’s why, when I received the mandate to be the Minister of Education and Culture, I knew it was something I had to do,” he concluded.

One of our group chat members pointed out a fairly good point about Makarim’s decision, saying it’s a “tricky timing for Gojek”. “Just as they’re trying to expand to new countries, their CEO left. It seems like slow progress over the year, especially with their Go-Viet head just left the company (again),” the person, who wishes to remain unnamed, said.

However, Rama Mamuaya, founder and CEO of DailySocial, Indonesia’s tech media company, pointed out that Makarim hasn’t been involved in a lot of days to day operations of Gojek for a long time anyway. “Andre Soelistyo, who is the CEO of Gojek Indonesia, does. Makarim was the CEO of Gojek Group. I don’t think it will impact the company as a whole,” Mamuaya said.

The sentiment is proven to be right, as Makarim’s staff email also pointed out Soelistyo as his successor, along with Kevin Aluwi. “I will leave Gojek in the capable hands of Andre Soelistyo and Kevin Aluwi as co-CEOs, both of whom have played central roles in moving the company along its path from that office in South Jakarta onto the global stage. They have been running this company for several years and I have complete faith not just in their technical skills and ability to execute flawlessly, but also in their integrity and their desire to do the right thing every step of the way,” the email reads.

Public and private sector’s intersection

On a more positive note, the Indonesian new cabinet just gained a fresh, forward-thinking mind, an original product of its tech industry.

The placement of the gojek’s CEO into government just sent a huge signal to investors about how open the country is to this kind of thinking. With Indonesia’s plenty of compelling business cases, the pairing of government and disruptive tech makes sense given Makarim’s position as an enabler for other new and young founders.

Critics also have been raving about the fact that Makarim has zero background in education. President Jokowi addressed the issue himself during a press conference on Thursday, October 24.

“There are around 300.000 schools and 50 million students in Indonesia. Makarim’s ability in management and applicative technology could help meet many needs of our country’s education system. Technology makes what used to be impossible possible, and this is something our education needs, a breakthrough,” said the President, as reported by Kompas.

However, some still need convincing that Makarim’s placement is not without a hidden agenda. Some pointed out that it could potentially end the long-standing competition between gojek and another unicorn that dominates Indonesia, Grab, with gojek taking the market as a whole, home.

Grab shared their official congratulations saying, “We congratulate our fellow industry disruptor, Nadiem Makarim on his appointment as Minister of Education & Cultural Affairs. As an inspiring figure to Indonesian youth, we believe he will bring innovative thinking and fresh ideas to elevate Indonesia’s education system.”

Highlighting on how education is the first sector to take care of if we want to see a change in a nation, Makarim also said that he’s looking forward to still carry gojek’s ethos into the government placement. “From the start, gojek’s ethos is all about acting in the best interests of Indonesia and Southeast Asia and making it an even better place to call home,” he ended his statement.

Transparency is more crucial than ever

Panhavuth Chan Heng, Chief Commercial Executive at BookMeBus Cambodia, bus ticket booking startup, pointed out that even if this is a hopeful move, lack of transparency is not tolerable at this point.

“This high-profile transition could set the scene for the new Public-Startup partnership in Southeast Asia as the region is becoming more dependent on the digital economy. I believe this joint force could be the cornerstone of exponential and sustainable growth. It remains interesting to see how it plays out as the market is still very competitive and any sign of bias could become highly sensitive if there is a lack of transparency within the cabinet,” Heng said.

Therefore, Makarim resigning is a good optic, said another anonymous thought leader in our startup group’s conversation.

“Makarim still needs to state that he will not exercise voting rights during his time in government’s office and that any decisions his office makes that can impact his company will have to be approved by the president. That way he can show that he doesn’t profit off it,” the person noted.

The move might be more convenient than the rest of us thought, but Makarim would be one of the firsts to secure such a role in the government, confirming the rumours that have been out there for quite some time.

Minister of Education and Culture

Despite the rejection from gojek’s drivers who made news on Tuesday, October 22, stating that gojek drivers aren’t in a relatively good state income-wise, Makarim was announced as Minister of Education and Culture on Wednesday, October 23.

Another member of our startup group further points out that indeed, education is one part of the bigger picture.

Also Read: [Updated] Breaking: Nadiem Makarim named Minister of Education and Culture of Indonesia

“In a sense, you need a golden trinity – education (mindset), infrastructure (ecosystem), and environment (government regulation) for a good startup to thrive. I’d say to get each factor to close to 10/10 takes significant time, with mindsets being the hardest, since it’s generational,” the anonymous member said.

Anisa Menur, our Chief Editor, pointed out the obvious. “Indonesia’s ministry of education has been run by baby boomers for so long that they have lost sight of what is important for the future. With a fresh young mind like Nadiem, hopefully, it can come up with policies that fit what the students need.”

Deputy Chief Executive Officer of NTUitive, Alex Lin also gave the nod on the sentiment. “Indonesia is working on mindset change on the country level. This hopefully can be a wakeup call to all the old politicians in the region.”

“What Indonesia will ignite is not just a war for tech talent, but talent. Good talents will see that Indonesia is now a place to change, to build, to be. Talents will flow there to build new business, to find like-minded people, and be with the growth,” Lin added, fueled with optimism.

The country has been considered as a huge growth machine for the Southeast Asia region, and it is coming out of its stealth mode. Some concerns were raised over the country’s notoriety in religious views that’s been blamed for delayed acceleration.

Jiaquan Lu, a freelance writer weighed in on the issue. “So long as religious and racial harmony and tolerances are in place, Indonesia is on a fast track of tech growth,” Lu said.

Aryo Ariotedjo, CEO of wellspaces group, a community-focussed property and service with wellness goal and investor from Indonesian B2B e-procurement startup Bizzy Group, also praised Makarim’s decision.

“Great move for the government! Makarim’s success in building gojek in less than 10 years to become our country’s unicorn will help him to develop more breakthroughs within the Ministry of Education. Hopefully, he will inspire a more agile and responsive style of governance within his department and other governmental bodies too.”

If you want to become a part of our Southeast Asia’s startup talks, please join our Telegram group here.
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When my co-founder, Fiona and I started SHOPLINE in 2013, we were fascinated by the potential of e-commerce and online marketplaces. With digital penetration rates rapidly increasing across the Asia Pacific region, we knew it wouldn’t be long before the trends of the West made their way to the East – and perhaps, with even greater force.

But I’d be lying if I said we imagined SHOPLINE would turn into what it is today. Our original concept was to create an online marketplace for Hong Kong businesses – yet in a few short years, our business shifted to become a smart commerce solutions provider, as opposed to a web-builder platform.

We branched into omnichannel and point-of-sale services to offer a more holistic shopping experience. Meanwhile, as of 2019, we have offices in Hong Kong, Taipei, Shenzhen, Ho Chi Minh City and Kuala Lumpur– and are even providing our merchants with the opportunity to expand into global markets.

We’d considered international expansion from as early as 2014, when we were selected as a member of the 500 Startup accelerator in Silicon Valley. After all, in our increasingly interconnected world, it only makes sense to think cross-borders.

But the prospect of expanding beyond your native market is daunting – particularly as a startup or small business. How do you know when the timing is right, or where to go? And how do you sustain momentum once you’re there?

Asia Pacific markets also present a unique challenge. Unlike Europe, which is united by regulatory frameworks, currency and is overall digitally mature, while APAC is fragmented. Our consumer habits, cultures and currencies are all different. Even the biggest multinational companies can struggle when entering the region because you cannot have a one-size-fits-all solution.

But then, it’s therein that lies opportunity. Startups and SMEs on the ground are more nimble, agile and culturally aware, leaving them better poised than the giants to charge ahead. Look no further than Grab’s successes against Uber. Internationalisation could well be your chance to beat competitors to the punch.

Based on our own experiences —both good and challenging – and the lessons we learned along the way, here are some tips I’d like to share for going global.

Learn everything about your new market

For each of our international office launches, there was a significant amount of preparation we undertook, including identifying local market needs, conducting foreign market research, and structuring a business plan while staying flexible to adjust product features and adapt to local customer needs.

1. Listen to your customers

When Fiona and I first launched the business, we would search for potential leads on Instagram to introduce our services, and ask questions on how we could better support their growth ambitions. We wanted to involve them in the shaping of our business and ensure they felt like they were part of the SHOPLINE story.

To this day, we still engage with our customers on a 1:1 basis to get their thoughts on what our next steps should be – this should go for any business pursuing aggressive growth. Listen to your customers and get feedback, treat them as collaborators and partners, and take the time to understand their challenges. It may sound obvious, but it’s easier said than done. It requires a close relationship and time commitment.

Indeed, one of the reasons we eventually chose to expand our global footprint was based on feedback from our merchants, who wanted to seek cross-border opportunities. My advice is to stay humble and have your customers’ interests at heart, eventually, you’ll be able to find that perfect slot.

2. Conduct research and watch carefully for opportunities

In SHOPLINE’s case, the opportunity was clear. We know there’s a wave of rapid digital penetration in the Asia Pacific market, which in turn makes having an online presence a necessity–not a nice-to-have.

Also Read: How to scale your e-commerce company from zero to $100M

For example, in Malaysia where we most recently expanded, the government has ambitions to double e-commerce revenues, which would see the industry contribute up to RM$21.1 billion (US$5.1 billion) in GDP by 2020. To achieve this, the government has offered a tax exemption for products valued under RM500 (US$120) and loosen the restrictions on B2C import items. And as a transportation hub for Southeast Asia, Malaysia is expected to lead the development of cross-border e-commerce in other ASEAN markets.

However, according to the Department of Statistics (DOSM), little over a third (37.8 per cent) of Malaysian organisations have a web presence. This is a big gap that needs filling.

3. Consider your cultural fit

For your first international venture, it’s also worth keeping in mind your own heritage. Selecting the right market is perhaps the most challenging task in the process. Blindly investing in new markets is a huge risk. So I’d always recommend selecting countries that share a similar background to your home market, in terms of language or culture.

In our case, we first expanded from Hong Kong to Taiwan. Our shared traits and market characteristics helped with lowering the barrier to entry and gaining an effective understanding of how to nuance our products and services for local merchants.

4. Localise your product offering

Of course, there are still many differences between Hong Kong and Taiwan – not least of all, in terms of language. So you can’t expect to offer the exact same service and product wherever you go, especially if you want to demonstrate how much you value your customer relationships.

As such, be ready to adapt your offering to cater to local nuances, whether that’s the language you use, the way you market your products, the prices you set, or even certain functions.

Take McDonalds for example – as well as the standard cheeseburgers and fries, its menu offers localised options that are uniquely made for the market or region. Think of the Nasi Lemak Burger, Bandung and Durian ice creams, or simply being able to order rice with your meal. These aren’t things available in Europe or the States.

In our case, wherever we launch SHOPLINE, we immediately prioritise the securing partnerships with local payment gateways and logistics providers. In Taiwan, this meant integrating with LINEPay, while in Hong Kong, our users can complete their purchases with PayMe – both popular payment options among local shoppers, but not necessarily further afield.

5. Hire locally

The reality is that for all your research and customer feedback, there are bound to be things an audit won’t unveil. So you need to be there, absorbing the business culture to develop a strategic plan.

When we enter new target markets, we always seek to hire locally. This enables us to gain new insights into the local competitive landscape and customer behaviour; and build networks and partnerships to navigate potential problems with greater ease. In turn, this usually translates to higher operational efficiency and better customer satisfaction rates.

Also Read: How do you grow your startup? Take some advice from 4 experts in digital marketing

Soft launches are also a great way to test the water and review your strategy over time. This was the method we adopted for our expansion into Malaysia, giving ourselves a six-month runway to work with a selected group of launch merchants, and understand their needs and requirements compared to other markets.

Taking the plunge: What to do once you’ve arrived, and maintaining momentum

Once we’d made our decision and committed to a launch, it was important that we gathered a team we could trust to be our eyes and ears on the ground, ensuring we were keeping on top of emerging trends and merchant needs to prepare for the future.

6. Decentralise to offer greater autonomy

If you have a team on the ground, decentralisation will allow local offices to take charge of the marketing and sales strategies in their markets, which helps in facilitating the process of expansion.

That’s not to say headquarters shouldn’t be involved—you want to retain brand identity across all offices. But the more you expand, the less time you’ll have to look at the finer details, so as a business owner, make sure your team is on the side, and excited at the prospect and hungry for growth, enabling you to prioritise the bigger picture.

If you’re stringent during the hiring process, you can ensure you find individuals who relish a challenge, share both your business’ values and company culture, and are capable to lead the charge in their respective country. This has the added benefit of giving employees a greater sense of authority and accountability when it comes to their work. Success will be a group effort.

7. Enable cross-border collaboration

That said, you’ll often have projects which involve multiple markets and require your employees to work together cross-borders. Having an effective structure in place can facilitate that collaboration.

We are fans of Scrum – the process management framework – when we have international projects underway. Essentially, Scrum ensures that each project has an appointed product owner, scrum master, and team.

The product owner ensures that actions are clearly communicated, decides what needs to be done and sets priorities; the scrum master monitors progress, facilitates meetings and removes any distractions; and the team executes the work to achieve the set goal.

8. Avoid complacency

After successfully rolling out the product, ensure you spend time reinforcing the quality of your product or service on a regular basis. Look no further than the iPhone’s decline in the Chinese market as rival, local phone brands garner favour with the population. If there’s a business opportunity to be had, it won’t be long until others attempt to ride the wave — you need to stand above the rest.

Also Read: Business scaling 101: What is scaling and how to scale

Depending on your sector, this may well involve introducing new products or services to provide a wider range of services to existing customers, as well as potentially enabling you to engage new audiences.

For example, at SHOPLINE, we noticed that there are a variety of channels that merchants use to reach out to audiences, including brick-and-mortar stores, online stores, and social media sales pages. As such, we rolled out O2O (online to offline) solutions that help to aggregate data and sales information from all these platforms, so that our merchants can analyse their sales across different channels, and provide their customers with an omni-channel experience.

9. Commit

Finally, demonstrate that you intend to stick around. Coming in as a foreign organisation, local customers may doubt your commitment to the country so building trust is essential. It could be as simple as marketing campaigns, but you may wish to consider other initiatives, such as committing to education in the market, or working with industry bodies on the ground.

Announcing office launches are only the beginning of your venture into new territory, and just as you size up the market, the market is also sizing you up. After building that trust, stakeholders and potential customers will view you in a more favourable light, which will widen your footprint, and establish a strong foothold.

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When deciding whether to hire in-house public relations or engage an agency, there are a few factors to consider. Having worked in both roles myself, I am a strong believer in companies of all shapes and sizes engaging a PR agency on a retainer or at the very least a project basis (i.e. bringing them on during specific periods when you need them).

The question is really whether you need an in-house communications team at all. For smaller firms, the answer is almost always no. For larger firms, the answer is almost always yes – but that is in addition to an agency, not as a substitute for one. Let’s break this down a bit further.

Cost versus output/productivity

 

Firstly, most small businesses will not have enough PR, communications, or marketing work to justify multiple (or in some cases even one) full-time hire, eight hours a day, five days a week, 365 days a year. Having been there myself, I can tell you that small businesses just do not have enough internal demand to justify the cost and relatively little output achieved from a single hire, who will without exception have a more limited skillset than an entire agency – and at a comparable monthly cost to the company.

I have heard many business owners concerned that hiring an agency for a few hours a week does not make sense when they can pay someone the same price and have them working for their business in house all day, every day. My question to them is: Yes, but how many hours of the day are they actually working? This can be a hard reality to face up. The cost of labour has an associated cost of output or productivity. On that metric, the agency wins almost every time.

Think about it, what is an agency? It is a group of professionals, in this case in public relations, who work on a transparent model where they either bill by the hour or, more commonly today, by deliverables achieved. This could be a press release, a media interview, or a piece of content developed and placed in a business magazine or newspaper. There is no clearer metric for cost and associated output than that. This is on top of the broader – and more valuable – counsel they provide on messaging, positioning, and strategy.

Also Read: 10 signs your company is not ready for Public Relations

At this point I want to take a quick detour so that we understand the concept of cost centres versus profit centres, because it is important to this part of the discussion:

Unlike in a business with an in-house PR person where that individual constitutes a cost centre (i.e. they are not directly responsible for sales or generating company revenue), in an agency the consultants working on an account are profit centres in their own right because they are servicing the agency’s clients. They are directly linked to that economic activity (output of goods or services for capital). What this ultimately means is that if relatively little is delivered from the in-house role, the person in that role knows it is not directly tied to the company’s financial performance or revenues either way.

In an agency, things are different: the fear or underservicing a client and therefore losing out on revenue is much more acute. It means there is more economic (money makes the world go round) alignment with the agency model for delivering good work than the in-house model. That’s just the way business and economics works.

Finally, the agency will also absorb the costs of industry-standard software and databases that it subscribes to as part of its client services – costs which a business would be wont to invest in for an in-house team, but which are nonetheless very vital to delivering the best standard of work and results possible.

Next, let’s look at skillset.

Also Read: Save it for a rainy day: How startups can handle media crisis like a pro

Skillset

 

I referenced this earlier, and it is really very simply: an agency will always bring more skills to the table than even a fairly large in-house team. This is especially true for agencies that operate across geographies and can tap on relationships and expertise in different markets. But even if both the agency and in-house team are operating in a single market, the agency still wins out on the skills side in most cases.

That is because agencies hire a variety of skills sets that are needed across the consulting businesses, from digital marketing to media relations, from content specialists to crisis communications. This means that they can “activate” the necessary skillset on different accounts, as and when the need arises.

The client benefits because demand for certain skills can be ramped up or down throughout the year, but they also save costs because it would not make sense to have a crisis expert, say, on a full-time salary when a business may only need his or her specialist skillset from time to time. The same goes for all sorts of other areas within the PR toolkit.

Therefore, the cost and associated output of activating agency specialists when necessary actually represents a cost saving rather than an additional expense for a client, something I wish more business owners would understand. And the value of getting a moment of crisis or large company announcement dealt with properly and professionally, versus things falling apart or being underdelivered due to inadequate in-house skills, is something that will stick to the business’s reputation for years to come.

So, we can also see why agencies win over in-house nine out of ten times on the skills question – it is about economies of scale, diverse specialists available at the flip of a switch, and lower costs of tapping on those skills relative to the results achieved versus full-time in-house hires.

Also Read: In democracy, social media is the fruit of the poisoned tree

Ideas

 

I am calling this section ideas, because that is what it boils down to – but you could equally call it “creativity” or any other number of synonyms. The point is, PR is ultimately about one thing: communicating ideas effectively. There will always be multiple ways to tell a story, just as there are lots of different ways to write the headline of a newspaper or journal article (a headache for journalists). But which of all the options is superior, and how do you know?

That is where brainstorming, experience, a nose for a good story, and a sense of the news cycle comes into the equation. The advantage most agencies have here, again, over an in-house team is that there are multiple PR professionals on any given account who can brainstorm narratives and angles together. They can also tap the experience of colleagues on different accounts in diverse industries, and sometimes share media opportunities amongst themselves – especially when one might not be suitable to client A, but is perfect for client B.

When combined with feedback from the client and their in-house team, this dynamic tends to result in the best of both worlds: an idea-meritocracy of sorts.

This brings me to my second point linked to ideas, which is that advisory is the intangible part of the client-agency relationship that is not explicitly billed for on timesheets or contracts, but is always available through meetings, phone calls, and emails. If you need feedback on an idea, you can ask the agency for their thoughts at no charge, and the advice you receive will always be professional and dependable.

With an in-house team, internal company politics and other challenges can often prevent the best ideas winning out or honest opinions being surfaced, which is necessary for a truly effective advisory relationships – something that is true whether it applies to finance, fitness, or public relations.

Also Read: Social media isn’t child’s play, it’s a vital marketing tool

If an agency thinks a company’s campaign idea is weak or an announcement will not deliver media results the client is expecting, then it is in their best interest to advise them as such. If a project goes ahead and the results are underwhelming, it does not reflect well on the agency as the advisor and it does not bring any benefits to the client, so agencies are unlikely to take that route.

Ultimately, agencies are economically and professionally aligned to give honest feedback about ideas and come up with the best ideas they can, even when it means the right thing to do is to advise the client not to go ahead with a project – and even when doing so may mean less business for the agency.

Conclusion

These have been some of my thoughts on the question of public relations agencies versus in-house. Let me know your thoughts in the comments!

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Image Credit: Oleg Laptev on Unsplash

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I don’t know about you, but there are brands I deliberately avoid. In this world of perpetual distraction, loyalty is a much talked about subject, but disloyalty rarely gets the airtime it deserves. This is a problem. Loyalty is often transactional in nature. Only few brands manage to create true advocacy among their customers. Advocacy requires the customer to proactively associate with a brand’s reason for being, and few companies achieve that at scale. Anti-loyalty is much more easily generated, typically highly emotional and very detrimental to business.

Many people believe loyalty is about capturing repeat transactional behaviours, but this perspective is flawed. During my Honours Bachelor back in university, I researched the motivations triggering loyalty program participation. We like to build habits to simplify everyday life, but that’s only the surface.

Most loyalists, we found, look to achieve one specific emotional goal: They are either maximisers that enjoy the goal progression to a reward, or social caregivers that look to maximise contributions to their family or group. While not exhaustive, these motivations show that loyalty is a very personal subject. It explains why many people passionately hate certain brands they’ve had a bad interaction with, but few put the same energy and emotion into the names they habitually purchase.

This matters greatly in a world where most of us have very little control over the things people say about us. Anybody can voice their opinion online, give ratings and reviews, endorse us and promote their views around what we do, whether we like it or not. This means we are well-advised to give people as little incentive as possible to emotionally condemn our work and business. But how? Ironically enough it comes back to purpose.

Also Read: Why trust is the biggest barrier to entrepreneurship and innovation

Those with the genuine purpose to build towards a better world need not worry so much about transactional loyalty, because they are the candidates most likely to benefit from genuine advocacy. Companies and people focused on transactional loyalty must perpetually find ways to hack our decision-making so we build habits around their products. Financial or product incentives are the weapon of choice here, and with enough coupons and discounts in the mix we start to believe that loyalty to Product X is a good way of satisfying our deeper and less obvious needs. Except this does not work for everyone.

Hardly any of the loyalty programmes currently out there are properly designed around the personal emotional needs we seek to satisfy through brand loyalty. Transactional approaches get the job done, but miss the point. The transactional and faceless approach to customer interaction and loyalty looks nice in theory, but is spectacularly misguided.

As many have argued, we think of brands and companies just like people. This is precisely why we are best advised to build relationships with customers beyond a chain of transactions. Put simply, the anti-loyalist feels offended by the anonymity and sterility involved in having to deal with companies that are incapable or reluctant to cater to their needs, and dissociates him- or herself from those brands through a hostile attitude.

Also Read: 10 amazing reasons why you should hire for incompetence

Interestingly, the troves of passive loyalists many companies have acquired through their programmes over the years are very likely to be influenced by Anti-Loyalists. Loyalists see brands just like ants living in symbiosis with acacia trees – they stick around in exchange for regular doses of nectar. There’s little passion involved in their behaviour, and the trust they have in the brand is transactional in nature. This means Anti-Loyalists are potent predators to many businesses.

This is true even for brands with high NPS. NPS approximates whether someone would recommend Brand X when prompted, but has almost nothing to say about the significance that person attaches to the product, service or company. Few brands have a solid count of true ambassadors among their loyalty base that passionately advocates for what they do. The ones that have achieved it, quite logically, are iconic household names.

All of this means two things: First, companies that are transactional and nondescript in their approach to customers, and visibly lacking purpose in their business, will have a hard time remaining relevant in future. Second, investing in true purpose and a relationship-focused strategy for customer engagement is more satisfying and rewarding for everyone involved.

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This article previously appeared on LinkedIn

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Singapore was recently declared as the top performing smart city in the world, outperforming major cities like San Francisco, Seoul, London and New York. Yet, this achievement can only be lauded if the move towards smart cities creates a net positive value for humanity and the planet.

There is no question that smart cities are in vogue with governments across the world today as the overall market size for smart cities is projected to grow from US$308 billion in 2018 to US$717.2 billion by 2023 globally.

While this is an overall positive development for the world, we need to acknowledge the fact that if not done right, the rise of smart cities may turn out to be one of the toughest challenges of our time.

Smart Cities – polluting our future?

Alarmingly, up to 4.2 million deaths occur yearly as a result of exposure to air pollution and 91 per cent of the world’s population currently live in places where air quality exceeds WHO guideline limits – and that is just for air pollution alone.

The rapid rate of industrialisation, driven by the appetite for smart city development, is exacerbating the problem of pollution in many parts of the world.

Proliferation of data centres and IoT control towers – core components of smart cities – places an incredible strain on existing infrastructure, leading a rise in carbon emission as well as land pollution.

As countries race ahead in their bid to accelerate smart city development through industrialisation, the environment and ultimately humanity is paying the price for this phenomenon. This is most clearly seen in Asia, where 99 of the world’s 100 most polluted cities hail from this region and environmentalists have sounded the alarm as pollutant levels continue to increase across Asia.

Also Read: As the tech ecosystem matures, Echelon is here to navigate the future

The answer to this challenge should lie in the smart cities themselves. By harnessing technology – the very same force that is driving smart city development and environmental degradation – we can tackle pollution right at its source. Through ideas such as leveraging existing infrastructures instead of erecting new ones, technology such as smart energy grids can be inbuild to current buildings to collect, analyse and manage energy and other data.

Leveraging government to governent collaborations

However, it is important to understand that technology alone will not solve the problem of pollution. Similarly, a smart city by itself will not impact the environment as much as a regional network of smart cities would.

The problem of pollution is a global one and to address this, we need a collaborative approach between cities and countries so synergies between multiple parties can potentiate the environmental benefits of technology.

For instance, the recent Singapore-Nanjing Special Projects Cooperation Panel (SCNP) saw both cities signing agreements in water management and clean tech solutions in line with Nanjing’s plan to curb pollution and drive the growth of ecological economy.

In doing so, solutions provider from the private sector will be able to tap on the advanced technological ecosystem in Nanjing, using it for test-bedding, and if successful, scaling it for the wider region.

Government to government (G2G) collaborations such as the SCNP allows cities to learn from one another, harmonising efforts while working towards one common goal. This will in turn cut down overlapping work while freeing up resources, ensuring only the most efficient and commercially viable solution is developed and brought to the market.

Some of the key drivers towards smarter and greener cities would also involve the agreement between governments to pass environmental-friendly mandates such as universal standards for green buildings.

This requires significant efforts on the policy, legal and logistics front as it is often challenging to align two different bureaucracies. Transparency and constant communication will be vital for meaningful G2G collaborations, particularly around the development of common standards and approach towards addressing environmental issues.

Smart Cities Network (SCN) is currently working on the region’s first ‘Digitally-Twinned Smart Cities’ which will be tested as a pilot project involving Singapore, Jakarta, Cauayan City (Philippines) and cities in the West Java Digital Province in Indonesia.

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It aims to address existing and emerging challenges of food and energy security issues, natural disasters, economic development, business and technology disruptions, as well as other global issues affecting the region.

Through this, we hope to get insights and a better understanding of the current state of the cities, analyse the data captured, and subsequently develop solutions across the participating cities to address their problems.

In doing so, we can improve the quality of life of the city dwellers, inject dynamism into the economy while minimising the ecological impact of our economic activities.

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For more on how we can achieve smarter and greener cities, and what the future of such cities will look like, join me on my panel titled ‘Future Cities Panel – Building the Foundations of Smart Cities and Beyond’ at ConnecTechAsia2019 Summit, Day 1, 18 June at Marina Bay Sands, Singapore.

Photo by Holger Link on Unsplash

 

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