Strategy & Sourdough

In this episode, we discuss the three big lessons we learned over the past year of running the podcast: the strategy and timing behind of building brands, the importance of aligning strategy with data driven execution and how creativity can be the ultimate differentiation.

Indy Khabra is a digital marketing and ad technology leader with global experience. Recognised by Campaign Asia as 40 under 40 to watch, Indy has spent his career in various leadership and consulting roles related to digital marketing. Indy is a published, regular commentator in the industry. He is currently the co-founder of Livewire - a Sydney based marketing company focused on the gaming ecosystem. 

Kata Juvonen is a communications leader with 15 years of global experience. She is the Global International Communications Manager at Smartly.io, a global ad tech automation platform with over 550 employees around the world. Kata has experience in communications as a consultant, and in-house in both the private and public sections. Kata believes that communications is a strategic tool to make anything real happen in companies. 

Deborah Goldingham is one of the top CMO's in APAC. She is currently the Regional Head of Marketing for APAC at Page Group. She has previously held senior marketing, product and commercial roles at Amazon Web Services, American Express, Visa, and Mastercard, where she spent over 16 years working in impactful roles across APAC. Debbie believes redefining customer experiences and interactions with brands, and that when the voice of the customer is at the heart of every strategy, you can move mountains. Amazon's Secret Weapon, Press Releases Mastercard's Priceless Cities Campaign in SEA

Ben Hartman is one of the pioneers of the Sports and Entertainment marketing industry. He is the Chief Client Officer at Octagon across Europe, Asia Pacific, the Middle East and Africa. Octagon is a global creative agency that specialises in Sports and Entertainment, negotiating talent rights, sponsorship and partnership agreements, and creating campaigns and experiences for some of the largest brands in the world. Resources mentioned:Burger King Sponsorship Case Study

Pankaj Sharma is the Director of Account Management at Expedia for India, Africa, Middle- East, & Turkey. Previously, he led partnership efforts at companies such as American Express and helloPay (Since rebranded to Alipay Singapore), a Fintech startup where he led the acquisition strategy for merchants across Southeast Asia. 

David Fallarme leads marketing for HubSpot in Asia. He has built and led marketing teams at big and small companies including AppAnnie and Electronic Arts. He has seen versions of the "Growth Movie" a few times, having driven growth & acquisition for a handful of products with millions of users, and leading marketing functions at several SaaS businesses. David also leads an APAC marketing community, APAC Marketers and writes a marketing blog, The Marketing Student.  This podcast episode draws inspiration from David's blog post: A simple way to build your Go To Market Strategy.

Lars Bjorge is a digital marketing and digital ventures pioneer with well over 20 years of experience. Having started and sold a digital marketing agency in Norway, Lars has spent 9 years in China working in digital media, and is now the co-founder of The Scale Factory in Singapore that helps disruptive tech brands grow into Asia, with a focus on Enterprise B2B. Lars is also an Angel investor, investing both privately and through The Scale Factory. Resources: Cavai, "the lovechild of a chatbot and an ad" Sales Screen Linkedin Principles of Growth in B2B Marketing Report

In the second part of our two part brand building episodes, we focus on brand building tactical execution: how to translate concepts into campaigns, the importance of prioritising channels over budgets, balancing media with production and the problem with following best practices.

Startups are generally great at short term sales activation, but not as good when it comes to long term brand building. In this two part episode, we explore the components of a good brand building strategy: setting goals, defining audience and messaging and exploring creative territories.

Usman Sheikh is the Managing Director of High Output Ventures, who back and build businesses with exceptional domain experts. High Output ventures is a seed-stage fund and a startup studio, helping launch and build the remote-first companies of tomorrow. Usman is an entrepreneur, having built, operated and sold companies over the last 15 years. He has an undergraduate degree in Economics from the National University of Singapore (NUS) and is a certified psychometric consultant from the prestigious Psychometric Centre at the University of Cambridge. He is also a certified NLP Practitioner, and specialises in startup marketing, sales, branding, and business and strategic development. High Output Ventures HOV Access REIT Screener

Resources mentioned: Kevin Kelly - New Rules for the New Economy Geoffrey A Moore - Crossing the Chasm No Code  Visual Studio Code Contentful Braze Ocean Spray Longboard Tik Tok Clip

In this week's episode, we discuss the importance of onboarding and customer support for retention and why this is good strategy, and share insights from R/GA's latest research on loyalty that shows how great customer experiences have become table stakes and how communication is far more important than convenience when it comes to building relationships.

Oliver Lo helps the next generation of founders tell their story. With over 15 years of experience building and delivering hyper growth for tech brands, he has built marketing teams in major global tech hubs - San Francisco, Beijing, London and Singapore. His career has seen him lead brand and marketing at Zynga, App Annie, and Southeast Asia's unicorn Grab. He now supports a host of early-stage founders on the Surge program for Sequoia Capital. Resources: Hubspot SavvyCal Start with Why

François Briod is the CEO and Co-Founder of Monito, the comparison website for money transfer services. He has been quoted as an expert in the Money Transfer industry by prestigious media outlets, including Forbes, TechCrunch, and Business Insider. François is passionate about geopolitics, social entrepreneurship, digital culture, and his dream is to provide tools for people to empower themselves.Resources mentioned: Monito Monito article on DBS Transfer fees The story of how Monito changed it's name Google Discover

Resources mentioned:  Mailchimp's Story BannerBear and Jon's experience on documentation as marketing Aviation Gin and one of their hilarious commercials

Resources and examples referenced in the episode: Lemon.io  Lemon.io User Personas developed as part of the rebranding exercise 301 School, the online branding course Lemon team ended up taking (in Russian) Mailchimp's Style Guidelines that was a source of inspiration for naming Petcube Copyhackers Aleksandr Volodarsky's personal website

Resources: Plausible Analytics Fathom Analytics Segment

Kerry Lau is an experienced marketer, mentor, and an advocate for women in the workplace. She spent over a decade at IBM leading performance marketing, and as Head of Marketing for IBM Watson Customer Engagement for APAC. Kerry is now the Head of Marketing for Asia Pacific & Japan at Acoustic, the largest independent marketing cloud provider, which is a company branched out of IBM. She is passionate about Digital & Marketing, Sustainability, Start-ups, Technology & Women in Leadership. 

Antti Toivonen has 16 years of experience in the creative industry, holding creative director roles in agencies such as TBWA, Ogilvy and R/GA. He is now a managing partner of the creative agency Superson, and a screenwriter of two internationally acclaimed short films that won awards in festivals including Sundance and Toronto International Film Festival. His most recent full feature film Tiong Bahru Social Club is now showing in cinemas in Singapore. Antti also advises startups such as Ox Street, a sneaker marketplace in Southeast Asia.

Resources: Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross explaining AIDA funnel steps: "Always Be Closing". Warning: colourful (explicit) language. AIDA Marketing Model The New Marketing Funnel

Campaigns mentioned on the episode: Anak Bangsa Bisa Case Study Rich Brian Gojek Hijack Case Study

Steven Kalifowitz is the Chief Marketing Officer at Crypto.com. As an Emmy award winning producer, juror and speaker at industry events including SXSW and Cannes Lions, he has seen it all. From producing shows at HBO to advising big brands at Twitter, from launching a tech startup in NYC and now growing Crypto.com, he candidly shares his perspective on marketing, brand building and startup growth. Highlights from the episode: Investing in brand before having product market fit is a distraction and it will literally kill you. Software isn't about an end-product, it's about a process. The exclusivity inherent to leveraging “traditional” media helps communicate trust.  Digital banners are like taxi tops, all about reach and frequency, not just clicks.  The myth of build it and they will come. Resources Localize.city Brand Campaign in NYC Crossing the Chasm Allbirds vs. Warby Parker Connect with Steve on Twitter @skalifowitz

In this episode we talk about how to use messaging to bridge the gap between positioning and creative execution. We discuss the challenges of balancing long term, emotional, brand messaging with short term, functional, product messaging and introduce useful examples for figuring out what your messaging should look like.

Tim Harford: Trial, error and the God complex

Resources: Circle of competence Muscle Cars

How to be more interesting by Edward de Bono Trello for capturing ideas Miro for virtual whiteboarding Ninja Creativity by Russ Tucker Marketing idea scoring system by Josh Pigford of Baremetrics

Resources: How to buy a gorilla by David Meikle The DollarShaveClub.com video

Riku Vassinen is a Managing Partner at Ogilvy Africa and the writer behind the strategy blog, standupstrategy.org. He has written a book, Moccalattehipsteri (in Finnish) on marketing back in 2011 and even shot a hip hop video to promote it. He currently lives in Nairobi, Kenya. Fun fact - this episode was recorded live across three continents: Africa, Asia and Europe.  Resources: Good Strategy Bad Strategy, by Richard P. Rumelt, the great book on strategy that gave this episode its title Ryanair on charging passengers to use the toilets on airplanes IKEA's founder, Kamprad on saving money. Mark Ritson on Brand Purpose

Basecamp's Origin Story MBT Anti Shoe Fulfil protein bar

Resources mentioned: Google Scholar for academic papers SEMRush and Ahrefs for keyword research Google Trends and Exploding Topics for discovering trends Global Web Index for customer surveys Net Promoter Score

Books mentioned: Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely Obviously Awesome by April Dunford Typeform

Resources: How Brands Grow by Byron Sharp Ogilvy on Advertising by David Ogilvy The Wizard of Ads by Roy H. Williams How great leaders inspire action by Simon Sinek

What's the right balance between strategy & execution? What can you learn from the wisdom of big brands while staying nimble? This new podcast by Onur and Tuomas helps startups achieve profitable growth and build lasting brands.