How Gojek’s technology has enabled businesses to thrive through digital transformation.
Founded in 2010, homegrown decacorn Gojek is expanding its ecosystem’s technology to further accelerate the growth of its business partners. Under the motto “There is Always a Way”, and guided by the mission to “remove friction from daily life”, Gojek goes beyond consumers to also address its partners’ pain points: creating innovative revenue-generating products and providing end-to-end business solutions.
Gojek chief commercial officer Antoine de Carbonnel said, “Gojek is an ecosystem designed to create value for everyone in it. For our consumers, we want to make their daily lives easier; for driver partners, merchants and service providers, we want to create income-earning opportunities. And now, we want to step up our game with various innovative solutions for our business partners such as online to offline [O2O] solution and vehicle-based advertising.”
The breakthrough initiatives for business partners were elaborated during Gojek’s first GoBiz Summit on Feb. 21 in Jakarta, where more than 140 of Gojek business partners from the food and beverage, retail, fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG), consumer electronics, mall and developer sectors gathered to map out the challenges and opportunities of today’s digital era.
Antoine continued, “Our end goal remains the same: building a platform to help consumers remove friction from their daily lives. By collaborating with the best industry players, we can scale up to further accomplish our mission of making lives easier, while providing the infrastructure and establishing ways for our partners to also flourish.”
The disruption of digital transformation calls for a different strategic approach. Businesses need to catch up to this trend to remain relevant and profitable.
Major retailers in the United States like Forever 21, Payless ShoeSource, and many more have failed to innovate in this era of transformation and are closing down most of their offline stores. The rapid closure of such stores has been labeled the “retail apocalypse”. The main factor behind this situation has been changes in consumer behavior, Forbes argues in the article “The so-called retail apocalypse isn't an end — it's a beginning”.
Consumers now consider experience an important aspect when buying their favorite consumer goods, particularly personalized experiences. This translates to personalized products, tailored-made recommendation systems, filtering features and much more, most of which can only be catered to by online stores. One way to survive the retail apocalypse is by implementing a digital strategy to reshape the offline retail experience.
Technology is the heart of digital strategy. In the past few years, the world has witnessed how technological advancement has enabled businesses to improve their performance, whether it be creating new features, expanding to new markets, or much more. Tech is the enabler.
Flourishing in the digital era
Technology can be implemented into business practices through collaboration with established partners, allowing them to foster and scale-up in an attempt to thrive in the digital era.
Over the years, Gojek has established its position as the most used app, with about 170 million downloads across Southeast Asia. When Gojek announced its long-term strategy late last year, the super app pioneer also articulated its drivers of growth: product innovation to address consumers’ pain points and delivering the best user experience.
How Gojek has connected its millions of users in an ecosystem may also pave the way for other businesses to not only survive but thrive in the era of digital transformation, as it offers an omnichannel platform for effective and efficient marketing, from product launch to the increase of same-store sales and market share.
“Gojek is equipped with both online and offline platforms that enable our partners to successfully adopt online to offline [O2O] business models that are better in targeting its consumers. Our ecosystem offers a wide array of growth tools that can be tailored to our partners’ business goals, such as a range of promotional tools from menu bundling, targeted vouchers to vehicle monetization, and technology integration such as GoFood Pickup, GoSend integration and ease of payment from GoPay,” said Antoine.
Through vehicle monetization, Gojek onboards its two-wheel and four-wheel driver partners to advertising platforms as a way for them to earn additional income on top of trip fares. This revenue-sharing model is aligned with one of Gojek’s goals: contributing to Indonesia’s development by empowering people through creating a wide range of opportunities to lead a better life.
“At Gojek, we leverage our business intelligence and data science to really understand our consumers’ needs and preferences. Then we empower our driver partners, merchants, and service providers through, among other things, collaboration with our business partners in meeting these demands. We believe that with technology, there is always a way to benefit everyone in our ecosystem,” Antoine concluded.
