Digital Acceleration

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Digital Brands

Digital relationships make and break easily. Every connection is vulnerable and can be destroyed very quickly when bad things happen. The internet is notoriously unforgiving. It’s certainly not possible to buy trust, it must be earned. Everything is about the brand and associated reputation. Consistency is part of the brand promise too, and standing for something is better than standing for nothing.

Historically it has been hard to find stand out brand identities in corporate Asia. But that is changing and fast. There are without doubt some very strong brands in the region but arguably less so than in USA and Europe. In terms of Asia world-wide brands very few stand scrutiny on the global stage. But there are still some exceptional standout performers. As I identified in earlier newsletters, both Toyota and Samsung have broken through to the Interbrand Global Top Ten in the period since year 2000. It remains to be seen whether BYD, Huawei and others will enter the highest levels of reputational branding in the coming years.

The CEO and the company must stand for something, and make that something clear to have long term meaning. Anything is better than nothing. If the company doesn’t have a level of brand differentiation it will likely be in danger of commoditization once subject to digital disruption. At that point, the margins in most sectors will likely be harvested by others.

This is a particularly important issue to get right in Asia where the broader global historical perspective has been that with limited carve outs Asian brands have been perceived in the main to be copycats or fast followers at best.

Evolution or Revolution

The next challenge is to sustain that brand promise in a business environment that is being constantly disrupted. There is no longer any sector that can consider “business as usual” to be anything other than constant evolution if not revolution.

As technology changes and evolves, it has an unprecedented impact on how the Asian CEO should think about risk in the future. It’s not all about AI but that is a critical part of the future strategy for any organization. Solutions are now commonly available that grapple properly with some of the major challenges of big data. All of this is great for the CEO who is engaged and has a genuine desire to find what’s just around the corner. For the CEO just working down the costs without being creative, it’s likely to be the death knell for many business models.

As the internet of things, digital platforms and e-commerce come together with AI for the corporation, a CEO who is alive to opportunity as well as risk, is able to modify corporate strategy accordingly to take advantage.

Increasingly, technology is already predicting the ‘next best course of action’ based on the available data, both at an individual customer level all the way up to corporate strategic planning. This essentially means that what we thought of as the aspirations for artificial intelligence or at least the appearance of intelligence have now been realized. Smart systems, learning on their own and responding to inputs are already mimicking sentience, all be it imperfectly. So it’s time to implement, not stand on the bylines waiting for the right moment. The critical issue is how to move the whole organization forward efficiently without throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

In my next newsletter, I want to drill down into what this means in various business sectors, starting with financial services generally. In the meantime, please sign up to my free Substack here: https://tunstallasc.substack.com/ and don’t hesitate to share this newsletter with your colleagues or reach out to me directly if you have any questions. I’m only too happy to help.

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