A report issued by Asia-focused Analytic, Data, Advertising (ADA) notes that by using relevant data to decide on marketing actions, marketers could build their brands, tap into consumers’ emotions that could affect their purchasing decisions and capitalize on economic challenges and uncertainties.

“By evaluating the data that they have, brand marketers can do many things, such as stealing the spotlight,” ADA Reach Indonesia country director Yogi Triharso said.

“When facing an economic crisis, most companies will reduce their marketing spending. So if you continue your marketing efforts, you will be the only one there, and the public will already remember your brand when the economy gets better.”

The majority of marketers considered their marketing efforts to be affected by slow to modest economic growth in the region, according to the 2020 Outlook for Southeast Asian Marketers issued by ADA, surveying 200 marketers of which 20 percent are from Indonesia.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) recently downgraded its economic growth projection in Asia to an average of 5 percent in 2019 and 5.1 percent in 2020, or 0.4 and 0.3 percentage points lower than last projected in April. Indonesia’s economic growth touched the lowest level in more than two years, at 5.02 percent in the third quarter of this year.

This has resulted in marketers showing skepticism toward their marketing budgets, with 68 percent of the respondents surveyed in the ADA outlook report considering their marketing budget to be “just enough”, and that sacrifices will need to be made.

Marketers also say they are struggling to acquire new customers. More than three-quarters of marketers in the survey consider themselves to be experiencing slow-to-stagnant new customer growth. Financial services, telecommunications and fast-moving consumer goods (FCMG) are the three sectors most affected.

Yogi went on to say that amid challenges and uncertainties in the overall economy, marketers needed to adopt new strategies to circumvent the situation.

“We in ADA have a framework called IDEA, which stands for identify, data, extract and actionable,” Yogi said, ensuring that the data collected by ADA are anonymous and cannot be traced back to the customers.

First, he explained, marketers need to identify the business insight and core actions that they want to achieve. Then, they need to figure out what data they need to solve the problems and, afterward, extract the necessary insights from those data so that the analysis can churn out impactful and necessary actions for their business.

ADA Indonesia country director Faradi Bachri said tracking individual data would not be beneficial for ADA, as the agency only sought customer behavior data that could be collected without personal identification.

For Indonesia, digital marketing is poised to grow by up to 17 percent this year, said ADA Indonesia managing director Kirill Mankovsky.

“We see a lot of potential in digital marketing,” Kirill told reporters.

The local arm of South Korea’s technology giant Samsung Indonesia and homegrown e-commerce unicorn Tokopedia are among several companies that invested large chunks of their marketing budget on digital advertising this year. The former allocated 46 percent of its advertising budget to digital platforms, while the latter allocated 36 percent.

“The year 2020 is an interesting year. Companies with brands, which understand consumer trends during a time like this and are armed with the right data, insights and strategy, can use the year as an opportunity to steal the spotlight.” ADA chief executive officer Srinivas Gattemneni has written in the survey publication. (mfp)

 

Editor's note: This article has been revised to state the correct spelling of ADA Indonesia managing director's name, Kirill Mankovsky.