Creating winning retail strategies with Social Commerce

and more. Welcome, Kenneth, everybody. Thanks for having me. Kenneth is also a Singapore native um and was voted Singapore entrepreneur of the year by the computer society in 2021. Uh So very happy to have you here today. Joining us as well is Suzie Wang. Suzie Wong is head of strategic projects and partnerships at media Corp. Susie has over 20 years experience in digital marketing, content and commerce.

She also heads up media Corp's own e-commerce strategy and is the founder behind Wonder Wonder Shop is a content commerce stream that inspires shoppers of media corps, entertainment and social channels to store, helping brands to Storify their stories and drive conversions on our platform. So great to have you here, Suzie.

this poll. The question is, has your brand embarked on social commerce? Interesting. So 38% of you in the room has said yes, you've embarked on social commerce. 31% said no. Uh We had 10% planning to do so in the next 3 to 6 months and 21%. Not yet sure how to go about it. Uh So Kenneth Suzie, it's clear we have a, a mixed bag in the room. Um So when we go through our content, it will

be interesting to frame it from this perspective. Understanding, we do have some newbies that haven't yet embarked on social commerce as well. So before we get into the speakers, I just wanted to frame the conversation from a commercial standpoint um in terms of what we're hearing from brands in terms of

their concerns. So the first question that we're often getting from brands is really how can we balance that short-term and long-term investment and what they mean by that is, you know, investing in the upper funnel brand marketing versus driving conversion and social commerce plays an interesting role within this because essentially it is content, but it also has a K P I of driving conversion. So I'm very keen Kenneth and Suzie to, to hear your thoughts on this later on as well.

The, the second question we get when it comes to social commerce is really, it's a complex and fragmented ecosystem. So how do we know where to funnel our attention and our money? And this is particularly important for SME S or smaller brands that have limited resources available, knowing which channels to choose to get started. The third is really harnessing omni channel potential and utilizing first party data. So we know some of the obvious choices is to go with the big brands and the

Behemoths like Lazada. But again, they are first party uh data holding onto that data. They are walled gardens. So what are some of the ways that we can utilize? Uh we can utilize social commerce to retain our own first party data? And how can we all know also harness omni channel?

Because one of the things that we know from an omni channel perspective is the size of an omni channel buyers basket tends to be larger the studies by Google and Walk show that it's 1.5 to 2.1% larger than the average consumer So how can brands get a, a bigger piece of their pie and look to diversify their social commerce with a omni channel strategy as well.

So just looking at the the landscape as a whole walk and Google did a study over 16 countries and they looked at existing and emerging channels for brands across S E A when it comes to purchasing on digital. So we know that during the pandemic, it really accelerated uh digital marketing and it accelerated digital purchasing on e-commerce shop attainment, social commerce and more so much so that I think it's grown three times

the size that it was before the pandemic. And there's also estimates that by 2024 it's going to overtake that of physical stores. So we do know for brands, this is something that they should be putting their attention on. We do know based on this study that Google and Walk has done that they're looking at online marketplaces now as traditional e-commerce and things like social commerce are really the emerging and scaling markets that we

need to look at as brands. So I'm curious, moving on to the speaker portion, Suzie, can you tell us the difference between e-commerce and social commerce and what are the things that brands need to consider? So,

recommendation engine, you know, boring stuff, right? I but important stuff but they are very, very functional. But when it comes to social commerce, right? Frequently the words you use uh it's about content, it's about experience, it's about storytelling, uh community influence and these are the engagement of course, and these are important words and I I spend a bit of time to talk about examples in a bit but just the the basic definition, right?

So social commerce is a subset of e-commerce and to give a a more uh granularity to it, basically the integration of um product discovery, um the sorry, the integration of social experiences and ecommerce transaction. So basically in the sales funnel, what you really want to do is drive consumers down the funnel really quickly, right? From product discovery all paid to check out very quickly. So in social commerce, you can do that very efficiently.

It's almost like a sales funnel compression, right? So that from the point of inspiration to the point of checkout, it happens within the social media platform or it could be enabled by social media platform, right? So you imagine things like content audience engagement, seamless checkout. These are key success factors. OK? So with this two uh definition of what social commerce is mean. OK. So let's you hear a lot about uh discovery commerce, right?

In the next few slides. So early on, I talked about the sales bundle where you you are catching consumers at the point of product discovery. Now, we all know that there are basically two types of shoppers, right? The first uh they know exactly what they want, right? And mostly guys, I guess I need to buy some nails, right? And you walk into, into a hardware store and you buy exactly what you need. But for most of us myself included, we we tend to uh prefer browsing, you know,

getting that inspiration, what to buy. You want to shop around, browse around. So this chart basically shows uh that from the survey, we know that more than 50% of online purchases are actually discovery led, right? Versus search land, search lab. It quickly, you kind of know what you want and you search specifically for the best price or you know where to get it. But for the promotions, but discovery la means you want, you

want to be inspired, right? You want to understand the product attributes, you want to be, you want to be delighted, right? In shopping. So in the Discovery Lab, shopping uh out of the 53%. So which, which channels are the most important for discovery lab. No surprises. It's definitely social media that takes up social media, short video messaging that

takes up about uh 62% right? So in short, what I'm saying here is we while we're here in this room, um because the future online retail is really discovery driven and social media is indeed the most important driver of discovery, right? So definitions and why it matters and what about in the local context, right? If you look at this data, uh users for us, what are the main reasons you use social media and out of the top 15, 5 of

them are related to commerce, right? Things for example, finding content 26% finding inspiration for things to do and buy is 25% right? So this really is about placing yourself your products and services at the point where consumers are uh in the discovery phase. All right. So that's the local statis statistics we have. So what about the opportunities, right? How big is the market so globally? Uh we know right now it's roughly about $500 billion. Social commerce is worth about 500 billion.

Now by 2025 it's projected to grow up to 1.2 trillion, that's like 2.5 times. So um that's huge, right? And in terms of contribution to total e-commerce, uh it's taking up about social commerce is taking about 10% of all ecom spend and definitely is expected to rise about 17% by uh 20 sorry, there's a typo there 2025 right? So it's three times as fast as ECO. That's something for us to know about, about locally uh in Singapore right now.

Uh in 2020 and uh last year, the entire ECO is worth 14 billion US D or sorry uh worth nine billion US D and by 2027 is worth 14 billion. So imagine if, if so commas is about 2030% share, that's huge, about four billion are worth as a bucket.

content based and a shop shop videos. Uh Kendle will spend quite a bit of time to talk about videos in a bit, but just showing you an example of what we've done uh on, on the shop. So I turn of the song. So basically, we've engaged our shopping host, our influencers to do demos and explain us. And uh this is a story actually, it's, it's definitely clickable to our E store to purchase so you can

see that. And uh this is example, I asked my daughter to, you know, tell me what's what's up right on Instagram and

So this example of live commerce, right? And everything has happened as it goes as soon, there's no hardly any script, just pointers, you know, demos, explainers and boxing. So this is a Facebook example. Again, the links are clickable and you shop within the platform uh shop, meaning is enabled by the platform, right? So another example would be that experience would be virtual tryouts, right? Uh Snapchat does that very nicely. So you have a

lady here trying on different handbags, right? To look at the colors, right? So basically experience, it's about making online shopping fun, right? Online shopping can be very un fun. I'm sure some of you agree, right? You go through multiple listings and all that. So this is the experience is about pulling in your consumers, you know, making the experience interesting and engaging for them. Now, the final category is network. OK? So I'm sure

uh so you have bought things from group buys. Uh we buy is one that has about 3000 leaders, com community leaders and they work with suppliers to sell in bulk, right? So what this what this means is uh the community can ban together and buy things that uh that is according to their interest at a special rate. And uh this is an organized goodbye, right? And there's also secondhand marketplaces like uh Facebook marketplace, right? So the, so three buckets that

you can consider, right? And um all very different execution. OK. So these are the examples now. So I'll just talk very briefly, what are the different advantages, right? And since most of you are just starting out, well, definitely uh it's about growing your audience, right? And when you collaborate with creators, uh each of them comes with a

different uh reach according to their their community base, right? And, and it's great also for reaching beyond local market, we know many successful live streamers now they are uh using their reach into other markets to sell products and services as well. Uh definitely building a stronger customer relationship. I I I know of this example where the eyelash company, you know, for everyone that comments, you know, on her, so on social commerce post, she reaches out to them

with a discount code, you know, one by one. When she's first starting out, I think that was a great example of how with social commerce is no longer a faceless customer, right? You can reach out to them directly. Now, insights uh I'll just share from a live streaming perspective because and do a lot of that is that when we um do live streaming, right, we do look at the stats real time and it's really helpful because you can see where the peaks are you at which point do people

drop off? At which point do people buy? And then you um you, you, you tailor your content according to the reactions from the, from the customers, right? Um And frequently when we see that the the sales is not moving, we do things like, hey, you know, stocks are limited, you know, it is going, is going if you, you need to grab it before it is gone and you can see the instant reaction. So it's

very instant feedback that we get. And of course, with the data, you can do personalization and targeting and finally, for better conversions. Um definitely, I I'm sure everyone heard of how uh in China uh the kind of live streaming success they have is kind of nuts, right? For, for them, I um live streaming conversion can be up to 30%. We've heard of how uh they've sold things in one day more than you know, what Amazon can do in a uh

in a month combined for just two influences. So definitely better convergence uh getting the insights and growing and engaging audience. OK. So um with that, OK, I just wanna share a little bit about what we are doing on uh social commerce. So earlier, I explained that it could be enabled by social commerce or um within the social commerce platform. So this is the example where we have actually enabled our own platform with social commerce capabilities right. You see here, what we have done is,

is a live streaming experience. And on me, watch me watch is our O TT platform. And at the bottom, there are all these engagement buttons that we can trigger for uh that you can, you can like you can command, you can share it. And then when you trigger button, you actually can look at all the various products and services you can buy instantly, right? You don't have to go to, you know, so many different browsers. So you can do it in

app and uh uh uh in web experience as well. OK. So this is our live streaming um IP cop on shop now, uh I'll share also very quickly some of the key learnings from live commerce that we done in. So uh earlier, I shared one of the advantages of social commerce is reaching a different target audience or spending in the target base. So uh to give some background, actually, I'm involved in home shopping business

as the first business when uh we started off in 2019. Now, um home shopping audience uh was of a certain age demographic, right? So they tend to be about 50 and above. So we say how do we reach the 35 to 49 for example. So we went to live commerce and uh we've seen the results where by going to uh live commerce, we actually see my car right on me, watch as well as Facebook and the audience is actually younger compared

to the home shopping business. So I'm I'm making a point that, you know, because social commerce, we have five million users in Singapore, right? Your influencers targeting different target audience work with them, you know, find your audience, right? The second bit is about engagement. So I share about advantages of having that close relationship with your customers through social commerce, uh through engagement tools, like polls, comments like and share. We have seen engagement rate of 35%

It's actually a very long advertisement. But why is the time spent so so huge at 19 minutes is because as the name implies that it's not just about stuffing the product attributes down the truth, but it's sharing the brand attribute, sharing how you can use it, you know how you can enrich your life, right? So it's a form of what we call shop attainment that really engages the audience. OK. Um

So I, I think that's been very clear. I might just stop because we have a few questions coming in. Um And I might just ask you this question that came in from the panel and, and Kenneth feel free to jump in as well if you have something to say. But the question came and it said any advice on how we differentiate ourselves from competitors that are already on social commerce platforms,

So I, I encourage you to be really creative because on social media, there's really not much rules, you know, and uh I've seen like live streaming, you know, some people do it very differently. I, I recently saw a live stream they unbox their luxury good and they throw it like very dramatically, right? It's just for dramatic effect and I thought, you know, it caught my attention, right? So I'll encourage you whether it's live streaming or social post, don't seek perfection, right?

Just do it, just start somewhere because at the end of the day, your brand story, right? You you you're confident of your products and services, you can uh you can work with different influencers, you can work with internal brand advocates, right? It doesn't always have to be engaging influencers, for example. So, so what I'm trying to say is that be creative about it for, for us, uh you know, that, that seems to be a template for live streaming

out there. So we ask ourselves to really follow exactly what they're doing, right? We we, we don't have to. So the beauty of live streaming is it gives you instant data, you can try something this week, try something next week and see what it takes, which, which caters to your audience.

Looking at what kind of essence is your brand story complicated? For example, if you are marketing a tea product, right, selling English breakfast tea or selling a Wellness product, you don't want to look at tea lovers, you want to look at the beneficiaries, uh the people who drink your time, for example, in the wellness space, they might be influencers who are really much really very much focused on increasing their mental capacity

in terms of awareness. In terms of uh mental shortness, there might be people who engage in activities that are very similar mobile, right? So you really kind of target this and aim to forge a very strong following there. It might be just 100 100 advocates and no, it doesn't matter because this this first advocates and this person will spread the message across the group and it's so much easier to catch by such targeted news, right? So in a sense, boil

it down the first principles. What does your brand communicate? Who do they speak to? And don't look at the the general category three levels, cutlery levels doesn't matter. We're not going to stand up from such a and go deep and go first and go public. Hm, that's a great point. So in terms of, you know, not needing to worry about reaching the masses or millions, but really focusing on the quality of your audience. Yeah, great Mo moving on, Suzie.

So we put in our media called Special Sauce on it, right? We put in our celebrities, we put in uh our content in production infrastructure, right? And then we, we just pivoted to uh a format that really sticks with the audience. So with that, we realized that storytelling is so important and then went to live streaming, right? Live streaming is a little bit different from home shopping in that

it's very instantaneous, it's life, right? And like what uh is, is really under communicating, communicating your brand attributes and product attributes and very important is uh always tell the customers what is the problem you're trying to solve in their life, right? When, when you approach, you don't start going on, you know how wonderful your product is, is they really addressing the problem that you're trying to fix in our life, right? So that's shopping inspiration.

So OK, let me quickly just take you through. So for us, we see more cars on new watch as well as Facebook. But then we ask ourselves, how do we maximize the content? Right. So we actually look at beyond live stream. What we have done is we have uh edited the, the, the live streams into uh social commerce shorts, short videos that are clip shop, right? That's one, of course,

we cannot forget F T A, right? So in this case, we've edited and we've put it on air as in our TV channels and put a scannable code there, right? A QR code and it's worked really well. People are actually scanning the TV screen. Thanks to, you know, what we went through with trace together, right? Uh E newsletter and well as well as shop article.

So really uh it's not just about live stream. So I encourage all of you where you say, oh you know, just, just put everything in livestream, think about what you can do with the content, the storytelling that you have already done on live stream and how it expands uh across uh content formats. And in terms of the on channel sales approach, uh don't forget that other than driving to your own E store, your product pages uh that there's also the network based uh uh social

commerce that I've mentioned. So we do group buys. And what's interesting is the people buying, group buys are actually the the products that didn't quite work sometimes right through live stream actually work on group buy very well. So it's just different audience as well.

Yes. Exactly. Right. So, so in that sense, I guess it would also be saving money on content production because they can just take one piece and carve it across many different platforms as well.

you need close up shots. So ahead of time during the live streaming, you plan it so that at the end you have those shots to actually edit, right? So plan with the any. Yeah, interesting.

after that. Right. A lot of conversions, right? 50% we have actually recorded almost 50% of engagement and conversions come after the live stream. So don't think that you know, a single live stream is young, you know, uh if it succeeds, you are successful, it feels you it doesn't mean that a single content can be make or break, right? Make sure that we require. I think that's uh 11 kind of, all right. So lay if you have no other questions, can I move on to the the awesome, so kind

of kind of really focus on video, right? And I want to explain a bit more why video for social promise is the future and we think it is the present as well, right? OK. Very quickly talking a bit about we are a video solutions provider that has been fortunate enough to work with some of the largest brands and platforms in the world, right? We have worked with our brands like video, of course Grab uh in Indonesia, which is the which is the

largest social commerce platform in Indonesia. We have got 70 million users in Japan, which has 100 million users and even in Africa and the largest e-commerce platforms in the African group to broadcast live video and shop, shop videos with their audience. Yeah. And you know, this has really hit me quite a bit right. The way we interact, even the way we're communicating right now is no longer the same we four years ago, no one would have thought that we would

have 60 people in the webinar. But everybody will think that this will be done offline and purely offline. But the truth is the way we interact has changed for and the world now is a swappable media generation, right? When I talk about swappable media, I talk about tiktok but not only tiktok, I talk about Facebook views, I talk about Instagram views and shots. I talk about youtube shots and I talk about even Netflix in America has

released their own short video section, right? So everybody is obsessed about consuming video and this is really, you know, uh enhanced by the statistic that 82% of internet usage last year, 82% are staggering, 82% were spent online videos. This was still something you need to do, right on top of you. If you talk about video being the primary mode of communication, you would then have to talk about video first commerce, right?

Which is what Susie, you know, very previous but kind of zoom in a little bit on to what the future perhaps can hold for video first commerce in China, right? 470 billion last year was student life shopping sales to give you a bit of a you know, benchmark on grounding, right? Life promise in China makes up about 30% of total GMB e-commerce, GMB in China. Whereas for the rest of the world, it's a mere 1 to 2%. So there's

a lot of room to grow. And the people who on this webinar, I think all of you are top leaders in attendance, webinar would be kind of spark that life promise might be something that you are investing in the future. And I would wholeheartedly encourage you to buy your deep into this because we think that life form can potentially contribute even 10%

in every single country that is a huge amount. And if you are first over here, you know, this is you're gonna build guard rails and moats that are very difficult for comp to cross. Yeah. All right. Talking a bit about the macro, right? Zooming out a bit. If you look at the timelines for from 20 to 2011, all the way to 2022 you look, you see many large platforms like Twitch Taobao, Facebook, Zara Shopping Amazon introducing their proprietary live commerce streaming solutions and tapping on the

live coms to drive sales and convergence engagement. I want to bring your attention to two outliers here. And to me, obviously, the they are huge, the video space off line what they're doing this year and beyond, they are really diving deep in the right form that all of us here and doubling down on the fact that this generation is video first media and they want to bring this audience to uh to focus on their brands as well.

So beyond this year, we see many more other brands not necessarily owning platforms, adopting directed commerce strategies, video first commerce strategies, Kenneth, I might just jump in here because it's a very interesting scale that you just shared in terms of, you know, looking at the behemoths of tiktok twitch, you know, all the brands that are obviously utilizing social commerce in a big way.

Um You might be getting into this in, in your latest slides, but I think there's a few questions in the chat in terms of social commerce and how it reaches audience directly through these channels and social platforms. But how does this impact the collection of data and info?

And I think this goes back to my initial question in the intro about the power of first party data if we continue to feed these these beasts and we're not getting that first party, how can we ensure that we're having that relationship, longevity with our customers as well and being able to utilize that a great question. The so look, we don't intend to go head to head against the behemoths. What we want to do is leverage on the group trends, but yet have a funnel to

slowly collect first party data. So to give you an example, I'll probably give you an example of a successful use case first. And then what are the cons of just relying on the social media platform like tiktok? Right? So of course, all of our customers in Turkey, a brand in Turkey, they actually consistently did some of cast live streams on Facebook on Instagram and their own website, right? They did it, they did

it over the span of one year. And the intention there was to migrate the Facebook live viewers and Instagram live viewers slowly but surely to their own website. And they have succeeded. They've done this phenomenally. Well, they've uh actually migrated close to 70% of their viewers to their own website and collected first party data which means they know what their names are.

They know perhaps their credit card details, sorry, maybe not that, but they know exactly which transactions happen at which part of point and whether it's through a credit card or whether it's through a traditional source of a payment and additionally as well, they know exactly how to target them with addresses. This is very incredibly powerful, right? So

that's a success case. What is maybe I'm just going to finish up with the detriment of purely having your brand on tiktok or Facebook or Instagram. But if you are selling, let's say a shoe, right? Uh they're selling a shoe and you advertise on tiktok or, you know, a really great ad on the shoe and someone taps on the commercial advertisement and they purchase the next moment when they strike the next video or the next three or four videos, they will see an

advertisement for your competitors product, another issue, right? So, I mean, you can't blame the platforms, right? And really they want to incentivize viewership and conversions, but that's what you get, you will enter people fun of spending more and more money to stand out. Interesting. So I guess it's important for brands to think about how they can, like you mentioned, diversify and not be overly reliant on on one player to be working

on their own strategy. Does that include in like incorporating macro K O L s to perhaps drive their their own live streams to, I guess, create shortcuts to build those audiences? I'm sorry, could you repeat that again? I just meant um if, if for example, like you mentioned um the the client that was looking to do their own live streams, you suggest that they incorporate, you know, macro K O L s big K O L s to head up those live streams to help bring in those audiences faster.

No, not really. I will see those as a one off and I would be really, I will really keep in mind that uh a macro influencer, youtube or Instagram might not be the best and best. In fact, most of our success, our customer success case have been with micro influencers and sometimes even some of their staff for employees, right? So we um really a successful business in China, even where large cosmetic brands turn to their over the comp sales stock

to do live streams, to demonstrate their cosmetics. And they really have seen great success and they are starts and employees become many ambassadors and K O L so you can start small. You don't spend the whole time. Yeah. And

But we do see, you know, a monopoly player like the Amazon player. And then um you know, so you're like, hopefully, hopefully, like you, like you come in and democratize, democratize the ability to collect data, democratize the ability to broadcast video and have viewership on your, on your own websites and apps, right? So that's all.

So moving on, if we're talking a bit about, you know, if a business as video marketing strategies, which I think many of them do I remember due to the right, we are reliant on these platforms, right? Depending on where you and as you mentioned correctly and all this as well, right? You will lose the ownership, you might potentially lose margins as well depending on where you end up selling to, importantly,

you lose customer loyalty, right? Use your customers will see multiple of the competitors in a single section of browsing and it's really difficult to build it yourself, right? Because uh you know, I don't think it's a very easy thing to build a whole live streaming platform. So, so that's why the life comes in, right? A couple of use cases that are going to show with us on the left is the um marketplace, the largest marketplace in

Turkey Chen, there are 40 million money users. What you see on the left is a live stream and very much like what Susie has demonstrated that they have actually cut up the live streams in short videos and posted it on their platforms after the live stream is done as well. So really, really successful and the they're using the micro influencers, they don't have millions and millions of followers. They are ambassadors of campuses, the ambassadors

of uh you know, thought leadership groups. That's right. Moving on to the use case grab. So if you open up the Grab app in Thailand and Malaysia and Malaysia are still doing the test, you will see the live stream grab life as power by the life and using Grab life. It's very interesting, right? They managed to deliver food directly from the live stream. You can order K F C or Pizza Hut directly from the live

stream and have it delivered to your. Yeah. So uh Susie mentioned that already and you know, one shop has been one of the examples of how big content actually uh can actually really reinforce the grand attributes and you have a lot of uh organizations happen too, right? Data ownership. So I think lately when you mentioned first study data changi airport group, but they are very, very much aware of

the importance of this. And the problem is when they started live streaming on Facebook, they would have customers, but they didn't know who the customers were after the live stream ended and they were very much reliant on multiple live streams every single day. Which became really expensive, really practicing to produce, to make, make sure. And I'm sure that the same customers come in and build warranty. Right. So that's not what we want to bring the viewers into the Changi

Airport app on the Sun City website. And that's what they did successfully with our channel solutions. All right. So we talked a bit about the um micro trends and how the world is shifting towards video first commerce. But I want to show you something. I mean some really exciting new discoveries we have been fortunate enough to engage with. Yeah. So firstly graph right, diving a little bit deeper

into grab life. What you see on the stream are influencers who are speaking about their love for pizza or K F C and you can interact with them by your comments, which is pretty traditional. But here I like to pause here and show you this, these stickers, right? These stickers are virtual gifts, right? And they can be sent by expanding grab points, right? So when you send, when you send the virtual gifts, grab

points are removed to the balance. And as a company is a great, you know, this this all this ends on the balance sheet works. And we have redeemed almost $500,000 worth of grab points just by virtue of virtual. Yeah. So for delivery, virtual new frontiers for for live streaming, you lost so many shopping shop. Next, we have seen organizations use live stream to do uh char charitable events and charity events. Yeah. So for example, Hyper Life charity event and they raised almost $200,000 and

they live stream. So people would actually scan a code and donate live, right? They could uh kind of request for their favorite song. It was a third time as performance, right? They could request for their favorite song directly on the live stream as well. Yeah. So I'm sure a lot of you guys are familiar with this uh particular live stream. MP MD who

write down speech. So what life has done here was to analyze this live stream in real time and text sentiments to every single comment that was produced positive, negative and usual. So this might seem a bit a bit compulsive. Why do you need this content for a live stream on this in a political context? You probably can say that you might be used to determine who uh

promoters detractors or neutral observers. But if you look at it this way, you can actually kind of applied to commerce context by saying certain things. So yeah, I knew you were really interested in on this uh topic. I wanna put, no, I to be honest, I was just thinking about the, the emojis and comments that would have shown up in this particular one about Prime Minister's pink shirt because I think this is a viral one which Yeah. Yeah. His pink shirt, I'm sure he got sold

out in many places after after that happened. So for example, um kind of zooming into your pink shirt comment, right? Let's say if someone like uh kind of ask, hey, do you have this pink shirt in a open color like a red in size L? Right? So we can deduce now via the comments and sentiments. Three things about you. You like the color red you probably like and probably a size, right? So then we bucket you into a persona, you might be a house husband, you might be a executive,

you might be a student, whatever. And we tag it the persona to your transaction data. And now we can recommend you um suitable products for your purchase in the future because we have the first party data, right? So that's super powerful sent analysis for. But one of the front of that. All right. So Suzie touched a bit about a R and S virtual Trion. What you see here is the possibility of going to

do a live stream without even appearing a screen. And this is in incredible popular in the in Japan where you have youtubers, uh virtual tubers where you know, animate characters appear on the screen and the the live viewers and no one knows who are the sound, you know exactly like what and you know, super interesting to, to see this happening. You might, there might be a very uh you might not even need a real person to create a live stream, but it brings me to my next point.

So I'm gonna, I'm gonna just shut up a lot and let you guys listen to this. Hello Retail Executive Summit. I'm speaking on behalf of Kenneth Tan from be live. I am not a real person. This is the future of live video. You don't even need a real person to live stream. All right. So I'm, I'm sure no one wants to see my ugly face more than live stream. And next time I'm doing this, I'm going to do this by a virtual streamer. Yeah, this is incredible. As, as a

company we currently no credit for for this video. I just, right. But we have seen many, many companies from Korea. They have managed to replace their entire live stream repertoire with virtual streamers, right? So this is, this is uh gonna be exciting. Um Of course, it doesn't mean that there's no need

for real human interactions. But what this means is because livestream content is so difficult to produce to find the right post is really quite right if you manage to find a post that, you know, uh symbolizes a brand efficiently and really well, virtual streamers can be alternative forms of that direction. Hm So, so Kenneth, this is obviously quite exciting for brands. But my, my question for you is because there's so much talk around A I around fraud around trust. Um Do you

think that's gonna be an obstacle for consumers purchasing? Uh Is it, is this gonna take some time to really kick off in terms of people building trust with virtual streamers? Yeah, I think it's important to tag your campaigns to a reputable brand if you do intend to use virtual streamers,

but that's putting on a regulatory corporate head, right? If I were to put on my entrepreneur, ha I would say this is a huge opportunity for smaller brands you really go in because it's purely due to the fact that there are no regulatory measures put in place, right? You might do you want to black sheep you don't buy, right?

I mean, the is there, please research more and you know, it is really exciting for a net observer to look at a virtual streamer and they might just, you know, kind of find out more about your brand if you use this well enough. So I do think it's fortunate. OK. All right. So I'm gonna end this slide by talking about power of video first social commerce, first and foremost, it drives conversations and these conversations eventually lead to engagement which

eventually conversions as well. So video first social commerce, please um check it out, you know, don't, don't take on a observer standpoint just as Suzy mentioned, take action, right? Let's create a small campaign, you know, few 100 buck 1000 bucks give a shot surprised at that.

Thank Thank you, Kenna. Thank you, Suzie. I think there's, there's a lot of great content there and, um, I've been watching as we've been going through, there's been, uh, quite a lot of questions showing up in the Q and A I, I'm not sure that we will have time to go through all of them. Um, but I'm going to pick out a couple, uh, and I will direct them to both you Kenneth and Susie. So as we discussed earlier with the poll, we saw

that there was a lot of brands that hadn't tried e-commerce. First, one of the questions was an organic search for a particular brand is low unless consumers are already aware of the brand, product or services, how can new brands take advantage of social commerce to build awareness? Should they even be looking at social commerce as a market strategy?

you know, and then you look for options. Uh you, you kind of really narrow it down. But discovery lab commerce is surprising users with something that they didn't know you think about it, right? So if you are new brand, actually, I I would encourage you to really embrace uh social commerce instead of fighting it out there with the search words and all that, right? I think it's worth a battle to create content because at the heart of the matter is can you create the content?

Can you create that experience? Can you find the network? Right? The three categories I spoke about, right? So start somewhere. And um the beauty of social commerce is actually the content is not expensive to create. There's so much tools, the card, you do your videos, your filters and all that, right? So much support, right? So content creation tools are there driving down the funnel? The tools are there too because

the platform is enabling you to click through, right? You know there's a banner there that clicks the catalog catalog leads to your product page, right? You just need your um to do it at the back end to to set it up properly. So that the transaction from point of inspiration to check out is all very simplest, right? So I I would say that even if you are a known brand uh embrace it because I, I think it's a much uh much more uh OK, I feel there's there's a chance that if you do the content right?

You're very authentic about your brand attributes, the offer you're making it will resonate.

Yeah. So um I commented about first principles on the brand's essence, right? You only need to raise the bottom when you intentionally targeting a group of users that come in for discounts, right? So, in fact, for most of our customers, uh we see loyal, really loyal viewers who come in not because they want the sp but because they are really interested in understanding more about the product and the ambassadors to talk about the product, right? So the ambassadors are really important.

Um the streamers and the people who are always the first comments, right? So a lot of times when you look at social problems, you look at the streamers, but you also need to be aware about the people who comment the most, the people who stay on the stream the most try and engage them a bit more, right? Because then you will have a group of super super angels who will kind of kind of come to every

single stream and help you defend the product. And when people catch that kind of enthusiasm in the live stream, that's the power of life on social, right? You can catch even the comments, right? They will be infected and then you can have a really strong following and, uh, you know, I think it sounds quite, I, yeah, I know. It sounds eventually nothing both have to be spent but where you spend a buck dollars, I think, focus on getting the right customers. Mm. Thank you, Kenneth. I

think that's really interesting. It goes back to even traditional social, you know, 10 engaged users are better than 100 viewers as well. Yeah. Thank you. I, I think that's all we have time for today, but it's been a very interesting and enlightening conversation. I just want to thank Kenneth for joining us from being live, um, and Susie as well. Uh, I wish everyone, uh, a fantastic day ahead. Thank you very much.