Being Digital in Asia

I'm still energized from last week's BRITE-Asia '09 conference at Singapore Management University. It was exciting to spend the day discussing the impact of digital media on business from an Asian perspective, and to find people grappling with many of the same challenges and questions as in the U.S.

Provost Rajendra K Srivastava started the day with an argument for the enduring value of brands.  He deftly showed how stock market performance during the global crash of October 2008 demonstrated the ROI of brand building in terms of risk management. The market capitalization of high-brand-value companies fared about 5% better in the crash than that of less-branded companies (controlling for external factors like industry and size). (Raj's talk was featured in an article by Channel NewsAsia.)

Dennis P. Susay, Merrill Lynch's head of branding for the Pacific Rim, talked about the importance to brands of first-mover, highly-visible, game-changing innovation.   Cases such as the iPhone, VW Touareg, and diabetes LifeScan, showed the importance of customer insight and meaning, and the power of collaborating with other companies.  He stressed that while service innovation is costly, it is harder for competitors to duplicate, offering sustainable advantage.  Overall, innovation offers brands a chance to make an impact when they can "prove it in a big way."

I spoke on the rising power of customer networks and their impact on brands and business models. I spoke on why I use Twitter; why even the Taliban are addicted to the Internet; and why 3 million fans "friended" a Coca-Cola page on Facebook which the company had not made.  To adapt to customer networks, marketers must stop seeing themselves as the sole source of their brands.  They also need to stop chasing today's latest technology fad, and focus more closely on user behavior.  I showed cases of how companies such as Nike, Dell, and Procter & Gamble are using innovation to engage customer networks and energize them as advocates for brands.  (My talk was covered in a ZDNet Asia article.)

Schmitt spoke about the need for big thinking in business to drive innovation, and used Odysseus' Trojan Horse as a metaphor for the power of big ideas in strategy.  Drawing on recent brain science, he explained how creativity arises in the mind from the synthesis of previously unconnected ideas.  Business cases from Apple to Dubai to Audi to Dove illustrated various techniques for generating innovative ideas.  The value of benchmarking innovations from outside your industry was explained, and the importance of leadership to sustaining Big Think, and not falling prey to the syndrome of one great idea that is never extended (the VW Beetle, or the Motorola Razr).

Kentaro Kimura, of creative agency Hakuhodo Kettle, presented his vision of how to "boil the world" for clients with media neutral, creative advertising.  The key of his work lies in finding the unique + universal "moment" for brands – from a GPS device to skin care to a warm Japanese bun.  Kentaro's speech was pure performance art, with wacky music, disarming examples, and a virtual dialogue with his agency back in Tokyo.  To me, it showed that sometimes the great ideas you need won't come from the crowd; and even in a social media age, you still need your own vision to promote your brand.

Gavin Coombes, CEO of FutureBrand AsiaPacific, offered sage advice on "being digital by being human."  In an era of increasing transparency, traditional smoke and mirrors marketing will not work.  Marketers need to shift their goal from control to influence.  Brands need to open, honest, and utilitarian, to engage today's connected, mobile, personalized consumers.  With benchmarks such as Google, Amazon, and brand Obama, Gavin spoke about the benefits of open source beer, why social networking started before the moon landing, and why banks can't run ads with the words "trust" or "stability" anymore.

Dae Ryun Chang, director of the Center on Global Brand Leadership at Korea's Yonsei University, turned the discussion to the meaning of digital media in Asia.  He detailed the three key demand-drivers of an Asian "we-me" culture that combines perfunctory collectivism with repressed individualism.  He showed how company's like Tudou.com (China's YouTube), Tencent QQ (the world's biggest IM and social networking service) and India's Idea Cellular are connecting with Asian consumers.  And he presented research showing that best branding impact for Asian consumers is elicited by a combination of touchpoints across both mobile and desktop Internet.

John Davis and Jin Han, directors of the Center on Global Brand Leadership at SMU led two boisterous panel discussions with the speakers and audience.  Among the topics and questions:

• Giving up on "controlling" your brand conversation
• Social media is not just for losers
• When offering customization works, and when it doesn't
• Different goals and different ROI on social media
• Use of social media by B2B companies, non-profits, and social enterprise
• The perils of "lame innovation" (look, we added music to our phone!)
• Who has delayed the convergence of TV and internet (our "Tom Cruise on Oprah" moment)
• Why break-through innovation rarely comes from legacy institutions
• Why social media will never capture the breadth of audience that mass media once had, but why mass media are losing more of their breadth every day as well. (In the future, will new brands just not be quite as big?)

The BRITE-Asia '09 conference was a terrific event.  Many thanks to John, Jin, and Cara Toh for all their great organizing.

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