In the fast-paced world of business, customer loyalty has become a vital cornerstone for success, and the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region is no exception. As companies vie for a competitive edge, loyalty programs have emerged as a powerful tool to engage customers, drive repeat business, and foster lasting relationships.

The APAC loyalty market, already valued at US$2.69 billion in the present year, is poised for remarkable growth, projected to reach a staggering US$6.99 billion by 2028, at an impressive CAGR of 21.06 per cent. In this ever-evolving landscape, businesses are increasingly turning to innovative solutions to capture a slice of this exponential growth.

With such promising growth prospects, businesses are keenly aware of the need to stay ahead in the loyalty game. Society Pass, a brainchild of Dennis Nguyen, recognises the untapped potential and steps in to address a significant gap in the market.

Bringing together consumers and merchants across Southeast Asia on a single, universal loyalty platform – this is the vision that sparked the creation of Society Pass. Founded by Dennis Nguyen in 2018, the platform has quickly risen to become a major player in the region’s tech landscape.

A unique problem, a pioneering solution

Inspiration for Society Pass came from recognising a significant gap in the market – the absence of a universally accepted, open-loop loyalty platform serving consumers and merchants throughout Southeast Asia. Nguyen saw an opportunity to create a seamless rewards experience that transcends geographical limitations, providing a unified platform for users across the region.

Also Read: Society Pass unit NusaTrip acquires Vietnamese travel marketplace VLeisure

To achieve its vision, Society Pass set out to integrate numerous global partners, offering users an expansive rewards network. To manage the complexities of such a vast network and ensure consistency, the platform initially rolled out its services to companies within its ecosystem.

By limiting the platform to Society Pass members initially, the team could control the quality of the user experience. As the platform matures and operational hurdles are resolved, it plans to expand its offerings to merchants outside the ecosystem.

Nguyen’s extensive experience in consulting, investment banking, and venture capital in Southeast Asia played a pivotal role in building and scaling Society Pass in the region. His expertise in identifying market trends, raising capital, hiring talented executives, and navigating regulatory frameworks allowed the platform to scale rapidly.

Benefits for consumers and merchants

Society Pass takes pride in cutting across various consumer verticals, offering a seamless user experience for both consumers and merchants. Users can earn and redeem rewards across multiple partner brands within the ecosystem, creating a compelling loyalty program that drives customer retention and engagement. For merchants, Society Pass offers a permanent customer loyalty solution, significantly reducing the cost of customer acquisition and increasing revenues.

In a world dominated by social media and digital channels, Society Pass has taken an active approach to branding and marketing. Leveraging platforms like Facebook, Linkedin, Instagram, and Twitter, the company stays connected with its audience, shareholders, and the media. Regular press releases and financial updates keep investors informed about the company’s progress.

As the Founder, Nguyen oversees multiple aspects of the company, including management, acquisitions, HR, and investor relations. However, he attributes the company’s success to an exceptional executive team comprised of seasoned professionals with extensive experience in Southeast Asia’s retail, technology, and finance sectors.

Going public and looking at the future

Becoming a publicly-listed company on Nasdaq was a major milestone for Society Pass. It provided liquidity for investors, access to public markets for expansion funding, and the distinction of being the first Vietnam-based company to complete a traditional IPO on the US stock market.

Also Read: Rapid execution is paramount for our success: Angeline Seah of Virtualtech Frontier

Looking ahead, Society Pass envisions becoming the go-to payments platform in Southeast Asia, serving millions of consumers and merchants. Continual upgrades to the technology offerings aim to deliver a seamless user experience, solidifying Society Pass’s position as a market leader.

Society Pass, with its innovative approach to loyalty and rewards, is undoubtedly redefining customer engagement in Southeast Asia. With Dennis at the helm, the platform is poised for further growth and success, unlocking the true potential of permanent customer loyalty and cash discount replacement.

By the end of Q4 2023, Society Pass has set its sights on seamlessly connecting all ventures within the ecosystem to the Loyalty App, ensuring a smooth shopping experience across its extensive network of over 650k merchants.

As the world embraces fintech innovations, these pioneering companies embody the spirit of transformation, reshaping the loyalty landscape and revolutionizing customer-business relationships for years to come. With visionary leaders at the helm, these solutions hold the key to unlocking the true potential of permanent customer loyalty and driving business growth in the dynamic APAC region and beyond.

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Image credit: Society Pass

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In the world of business, marketing is king, and the iconic doll brand Barbie’s recent success showcases this perfectly. Leveraging its iconic brand image, extensive product line, and carefully planned “pink publicity” campaigns to attract its diverse target audience, Barbie embodied the power of strategic marketing with its US$90 million movie revenue during its opening weekend. 

For startups or emerging brands, marketing matters more than ever to ensure that they stand out and succeed in their respective markets. But with their limited resources and different sets of priorities, emerging brands tend to need a different starting point in their marketing efforts compared to their more established peers. 

Thus, here are some lessons I’ve learned from my time driving marketing strategies in different stages of startups, from those still in their infancy to those that have matured over the years. 

Early stage: growing your brand name by tapping into brand partnerships

New brands typically focus on raising brand awareness as their starting point to generate leads. However, a lack of proper planning can lead to expensive and ineffective marketing efforts that waste an already limited budget. 

Also Read: Experts from Indonesia’s business landscape share Marketing best practices

This is where partnerships can come in. In 2020, 55 per cent of brands enjoyed increased revenue from partnerships, with 29 per cent of D2C decision-makers projecting at least a 20 per cent growth in their revenue for the previous year. Partnerships can be a cost-effective way to grow your brand as you can tap into each other’s resources for your cross-promotional needs.

However, many businesses fail at their collaborations for various reasons, such as failing to communicate or maintain the alignment of goals. Therefore, it is crucial for startups to find brands that share their goals and target demographic before designing a marketing plan addressing these factors. 

When I led foodpanda’s marketing in its early stage, I was tasked with increasing the brand’s sales with a limited budget. Taking inspiration from Tripadvisor’s and MICHELIN’s eye-catching window stickers, my team and I planned and executed a branding campaign where we increased the visibility of the foodpanda brand logo through other businesses’ storefronts, riders’ jackets and bags, and DBS Bank-owned ATMs in Singapore.

This strategy was a great example of free advertising at a low cost. That, coupled with other digital marketing strategies we were running at that point in time, resulted in an average of 15 per cent to 25 per cent increase in order count every month.

Other examples of co-branding partnerships you can tap into include affiliation programs and content partnerships. Brands can also run joint product marketing campaigns where they collaborate to develop a product that showcases the uniqueness of each brand. Some popular joint product marketing campaigns include the collaboration between Apple and Nike (Apple Watch Nike) and McDonald’s, and Hello Kitty. 

Growth stage: Increasing your customer base through marketing analytics

When new brands have now gained enough traction, the marketing strategy should shift from brand awareness to customer acquisition. To increase your customer base, businesses should first thoroughly understand their audience and strategise accordingly. 

Also Read: Influencer marketing strategies: Driving engagement and reach in Indonesia

However, to improve the effectiveness of your marketing strategy and the allocation of your businesses’ resources, marketers should prioritise analysing data obtained from the results of previous campaigns. From there, you can see what has worked in the past and experiment with what may work in the future, taking the opportunity to improve your future campaigns. Analytics also help further personalise your marketing efforts, which 97 per cent of marketers said results in increased business outcomes. 

My Chope team and I successfully turned a Korean-drama-inspired brand video viral with more than 1.2 million views in two months. The app also saw an increase in downloads by more than 25 per cent MoM, four times the average, truly showcasing the effectiveness of viral marketing. 

Viral marketing isn’t a shortcut to instant results, of course, and it wasn’t by chance that we managed to achieve these wins. Behind many viral videos are countless tedious hours spent researching available data and channelling these data-driven insights into various experiments and failures.

After all, behind many successful high-quality campaigns lie an equally high quantity of operations to learn from; for quality cannot be drawn from inspiration alone. Thanks to the insight we have gained from data analytics, my team and I more than doubled the projected growth in reservations in 2016 and doubled it again in 2017 compared to the prior year.

Mature stage: staying in the competition with User Generated Content (UGC)

At this point of growth, brands should focus on trying to remain competitive in the market while making full use of the available resources. User Generated Content (UGC) is an excellent asset that brands can and should leverage and utilise effectively.

98 per cent of users read online reviews for businesses, showing their increasing reliance on the internet and/or social media platforms as their source of trusted information. Due to this, UGC are valued for their authenticity as they originate from customers instead of the brand.

During my time at Tripadvisor, traveller pictures and reviews were my team’s and my main source of assets for campaigns. The platform allows visitors to discover places when they travel and encourages them to leave reviews at any point of their trip.

The reviews that we collected were used to drive industry-leading campaigns like Travelers’ Choice Awards and Year in Travel 2021 that market to audiences across the whole travel ecosystem. By launching campaigns like this, we are able to remain top of mind and maintain market dominance while reaching new potential customers. 

Finding the strategy that works for you

As a marketing enthusiast, I’ve had an exciting journey learning from industry giants such as foodpanda, Chope, and Tripadvisor, and I hope the lessons I’ve learned will be valuable for businesses out there hoping to boost their marketing efforts, no matter which stage they are at right now. 

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Prepare to be surprised since this mind-blowing article about ChatGPT was not written using ChatGPT! This is the product of a true, knowledgeable human mind!

Since ChatGPT has replaced Blockchain and Web3 as the most talked-about topics, suddenly, the internet is full of AI experts. However, AI is a complex matter and a tool that needs to be used in the correct way. Also, AI is not new, but the rise of computing power has made AI much more broadly available, usable, and powerful.

I am a big believer in AI complementing the work of humans, allowing for greater productivity and speed of execution. I don’t see mass unemployment or poverty, I see opportunities ahead.

My experience with early chatbots

I first dealt with chatbots (kind of early forms of ChatGPT) as CEO/MD of iProperty Group, where we implemented the first chatbot in ASEAN to replace website-based search in 2016 with free text search and the ability to ask follow-up questions.

The result was mixed; while the search was more comfortable and powerful, the chatbot at times showed irrational, emotional behaviour and was not useful enough to be maintained. After the chatbot started to insult journalists during the launch, despite being well-trained, we realised more work had to be done.

Also Read: How ChatGPT and automation are revolutionising so-called ‘traditional’ industries

Later, as Executive Chair of iCarAsia, I tried again to introduce a chatbot in 2018, specifically trained on all new car models and knowledge about cars. It worked much better as the focus was narrower than last time. The only new side effect was that chatbot lacked the ability to verify information on the web. This resulted in the bot fabricating information, a trait which is still around with the latest ChatGPT version.

So we funnelled the usage even further and ended up using the chatbot for providing car dealers with a channel to receive incoming requests after office hours and for the bot to pass on these leads to the human, like an outside office hours receptionist.

Current use cases of chatbots

A few years later, with bots having become smarter, now at Juwai IQI, where I am Co-Founder and Chair, we use chatbots as assistants for our warriors (agents) to do simple analysis (sales information), reminders of birthdays of clients, and other administrative tasks, thereby increasing the productivity of the warriors by allowing them to focus on more value-adding tasks. We also use ChatGPT for the drafting of marketing material; however, anything created is reviewed by a human afterwards. To me, this is a perfect example of how bots are usable at this stage.

I see a great opportunity for chatbots to become more prominent in consumer service as first-level support to help sales and support staff be more productive. However, a few things need to be resolved first.

Challenges and misconceptions

The big advantage of ChatGPT is that it is always available and very fast, but the inherent risks and specific characteristics of a chatbot need to be monitored and factored in. I want to list a few of those here and also end misconceptions.

And most recently, the interface to interact with ChatGPT and GenerativeAI has become much, much easier.

Many people say ChatGPT’s biggest weakness is its lack of empathy. I don’t think that’s correct; this depends on the way it is set up. The latest research, as referenced in Frontiers in Psychology (May 2023), shows that ChatGPT actually outperforms humans in empathy.

Also Read: Is ChatGPT a great invention or is it being ‘hyped’?

Empathy can turn into negative emotions. There is still a risk of ChatGPT becoming emotional and, at times, aggressive if left unattended or unsupervised.

The other misconception is that humans are more creative than ChatGPT. Again, this is not scientifically validated. However, where humans outperform ChatGPT is “giving context” and not taking statements “at face value”. It will take many years of learning and future variations of ChatGPT or other chatbot languages to handle this; related to the lack of context is the inherent biases that ChatGPT and similar programmes have. Like humans, ChatGPT’s frame of reference is based on what they learn.

Learning is happening via technology, so the risk is that whoever controls the technology controls the bias. In consumer service, bias is very risky as wrong advice can be given, which leads to significant liability (and probably no insurance cover) — think robo-advice. Bias and inconsistency in responses are two significant shortcomings of ChatGPT at the moment.

Also, security concerns (refer to the Samsung data breach) need to be factored in. Nothing that gets discussed in ChatGPT is private.

Conclusion and future outlook

In summary, there are still a few areas to resolve, but we have made significant progress over the last decade in the use of chatbots.

As long as we control the process, we are heading for a bright future, control and regulation are essential. Unsupervised, however, there is a risk that AI becomes a large threat to future generations.

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Sports is hands down one of the best stress-busters after a long, hard day of hustling at work. This is a sentiment often brought up during my conversations with friends both within and outside of the industry, and — according to a sports culture index study — one echoed by more than two-thirds of the Malaysian population.

The challenges and joys of organising sports activities

Understandably so, considering sports offer far more than just the physical benefits of better bodily health; it also has a proven correlation with stress relief and improved psychological well-being. This is especially important for younger Malaysians like university students or working adults, many of whom do try to squeeze in time for a sports session with friends to unwind amidst a busy schedule.

Therein lies the problem: while group sports sessions are always fun, coordinating them usually isn’t.

Finding a date and time that works for everyone can already be a hurdle, but the real problem sometimes begins after. Slots in sporting facilities can fill up quickly, particularly in popular neighbourhoods and student hotspots, which can leave many groups scrambling to find a suitable alternative that is equally accessible and can accommodate the group’s needs. This in itself is a very time-consuming process, looking up courts’ availability on social media or even calling them directly. And this doesn’t even factor in last-minute cancellations!

I have personally encountered each layer of this problem — but let’s face it, who in the sporting community hasn’t at some point?

Also Read: How e-sports is evolving with blockchain gaming

This was a topic of heated discussion over a round of mamak with friends, which, as it turns out, ultimately led to us developing AFA Sports. AFA became a mobile app that specifically collates sporting facility information (such as opening hours, availability, and court options) from multiple sites, which will help fellow Malaysians easily find and book courts from just one platform.

But more than just being the brainchild of a few sporting aficionados, the AFA app was a real awakening for all of us who share backgrounds in data processing and information technology (IT). Sport is never solely about the on-court, in-game experience. It is also about how that experience can be altered and amplified within a community of like-minded sports enthusiasts.

In this sense, digitisation can be a game-changer — literally.

Digitisation: Transforming the sports landscape

Digitising and automating processes the way the AFA app does is only the tip of the iceberg. In fact, digital tools have the potential to completely transform the way Malaysians approach, enjoy, and engage with the sports they love.

There are already app features and platforms that bring sporting fans together for a friendly game or a community event. But more than helping consumers find each other, digital tools can also help connect the wider Malaysian sporting community to businesses that matter — sports facilities, equipment makers, even trainers and part-time coaches.

I am happy to share that AFA has recently introduced the highly anticipated “Activities” feature, which empowers hosts to organise both public and private events, providing users with exciting opportunities to participate in a variety of sports activities. With a seamless payment tracking system and user-friendly interface, AFA ensures a smooth and convenient experience for all.

Also Read: The changing face of gamers and what it means for e-sports startups in SEA

But that’s not all — AFA has even more in store! In the coming month, we are thrilled to unveil our upcoming Academies and Tournament features, further expanding our platform’s capabilities and offering users an even more comprehensive sports experience.

With a wider network at their fingertips, businesses can also look to expand their presence and infrastructure to keep pace. For instance, project management systems will ensure even large volumes of appointments (or any related data) can be made and tracked more seamlessly with minimal manual upkeep. Cloud-based booking infrastructure can also help sync data across multiple platforms or servers in live time, which is essential for time-sensitive or constantly shifting items like bookings.

In the larger picture, stronger integration of digital tools in the sporting industry will put it in a prime position to benefit from Malaysia’s rapidly expanding digital economy — which is projected to contribute a whopping 25 per cent of the nation’s overall economic growth.

The power of community

As with many other industries, digitising the multiple touchpoints in sports will open up a myriad of opportunities, starting with a more connected sports ecosystem that brings all the different stakeholders together, from casual sporting fans and small establishments to professional athletes and larger sporting organisations. The landscape will also be ripe for new markets and businesses to flourish, which can, in turn, attract more investors to grow sports locally.

The ‘big picture’ benefits may sound like very top-level business jargon, but ultimately the growth of the industry as a whole will trickle down to us: the everyday Malaysians who love sports and who love playing sports with the people we love (or people we will come to love)!

Nothing unites us quite like a Harimau Malaya or badminton match, a testament to how vibrant and dynamic the sports community already is in Malaysia. So just imagine how much more we can do when they’re supercharged with digital tools — and highly connected opportunities to do more together!

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Image credit: AFA

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