“The Nomad” is a fortnightly published series where I talk to professionals in PR and Comms who are from a country but spend their love and life in different countries and cultures, then delve into the insights which might help other people to live or to do business in an inter-cultural world. If you or someone you know would be happy to share their perspective, please get in touch! I’d love to hear from you.
If you type “ASEAN” on the Google search bar, there are about 79,900,000 results in 0.64 seconds. What is it that makes this region so interesting and a competitive market? Ten countries, several ethnicities, and scores of cultural symbols flourishing across this region of over 628 million. The diversity extends to culture, language, and religion. This blog is not a ten-things-you-need-to-know-about-ASEAN one, but having said that, there are several things you do need to know. With a combined GDP of US$2.5 trillion, the region is already “an economic powerhouse and is set to grow to become the equivalent of the world’s fourth-largest economy by 2050.”
This is not a monolithic market. We share several things in common, but we are different in many different ways. We are becoming more integrated but we are proud of our own local and cultural preferences. We only came into existence 54 years ago but we are “a growing hub of consumer demand.”
There is no “one size fits all”.
Previously on The Nomad (Netflix, still waiting for your call!), we had the opportunity to discover each country through the eyes of our guest. In this episode, I had the opportunity to explore the ASEAN region with Raphael Lachkar, Chief Operating Officer of Vero, an ASEAN focused brand communications and PR consultancy. We discussed what makes this market so interesting, the influencer marketing landscape, trust, ethics and measurement in PR.
Having graduated in East-Asian studies in Montreal, and with work experience in Shanghai, Hong Kong, Yangon and now Ho Chi Minh city, Raphael has developed a sharp understanding of the region’s communication dynamics and is managing Vero across its offices in Vietnam, Thailand, Myanmar, and Indonesia. In 2020, Raphael was shortlisted as young SEA PR Professional of the year by Campaign’s PR Awards.
1. Hi Raphael, how are you doing and what’s been keeping you busy lately?
I’m doing great, we’re working on a lot of very exciting stuff at Vero!
First things first, we today have 130 team members across the region, each as motivated as the next, and a lot of my time is spent on bettering the support we bring to our people. At the end of 2020, we elevated wellness as part of the strategic goals of the group.Since then, we have been investing in capacity building, recruiting great creative and strategy professionals to strengthen the agency’s culture and our role in the APAC Comms industry. We’re now rolling out a set of exciting programs to help us be better at training, communicating internally and externally, accessing insights and data … A lot of very exciting stuff.
My role also demands that I spend time planning for growth. In 2020 we grew more than ever before. This reinforced our belief that Vero is on the right track. Because of this, we’re now stepping up the organisation’s access to data and insights, two regional research papers about to be published, and we’re also working on a new project that will grow collective intelligence of our consulting practice through technology, data and sentiment monitoring. It’s still in testing among a small set of Vero consultants, but what I can say is that we’re spending a lot of time on bettering our access to first-party insights, and on using technology to elevate our brand consulting capacity.
Finally, on top of investments in our employer and service offers, we’ve been looking to expand our geographical reach, beyond our offices in Bangkok, Ho Chi Minh City, Jakarta and Yangon. We’ll be disclosing more on this soon. Look out for announcements on Linkedin, the coming three months are packed!
2. You are the COO of Vero and managing its offices across the ASEAN region. How do you reflect on your journey so far at Vero?
I believe my personal journey reflects Vero’s general philosophy towards careers opportunities. I joined as an Account Executive in Yangon, and was given a lot of support, trust, and space to take on more responsibilities, not only locally, but regionally as well. This experience is far from being rare within Vero, on the contrary – it’s embedded in the way we build our employer offer.
To put things simply, we’re a consulting business, so 100% of our value resides in our capacity to convince and elevate the most creative and forward-thinking people in the countries we work in.
To do that we’re very straightforward about two things:
- We provide fast-growth opportunities: If you want to work with driven professionals, you need to be very clear about growth prospects within the company – we push our teams to step out of their JDs, we provide a lot of exposure to Jr. employees, and we invest in capacity building and training so that everyone can grow and reach beyond what they thought possible. The NextGen initiative launched last year is an example of how this may take place for junior consultants, but the recipe is the same for everyone within the company really.
- We provide regional exposure, as we believe that regional consulting should be part of every consultant’s JD. We do not have a regional HQ, nor do we have a regional team. Every single consultant has regional responsibilities and is involved in projects and with people reaching beyond the geographical boundaries they are set in. We today have consultants in Yangon coordinating creative campaigns across 10 countries in APAC, and the same in each of our offices.
This is to say that while I feel fortunate for the opportunities and the support I’ve been given at Vero, I also understand that it’s today an integral part of my job to ensure this experience is shared by my colleagues every day.
3. What is the common theme across the region?
Indonesia, Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam, and the rest of Southeast Asian countries have at least one thing in common: their large, and incredibly ambitious young populations. To me, this core demographic feature is steering everyone in the region towards the future, towards progress. I believe that this is what makes our work so exhilarating. It also shapes Vero’s mission: to tell the collective stories of progress.
4. Can you expand on that, please? What are some similarities and differences among those markets?
Southeast Asian consumers’ youth makes them a lot more eager for change, and more specifically for social and technology-powered change. All our campaigns across the region tackle at least one of these two expressions of change. We help our clients position on crucial social movements, adapting to the rise of consumer activism and becoming advocates for the shifts in gender norms, in their access to information and education, and in the rise of sustainability as a consumer concern. One example could be the work we do for Korean razor brand Dorco: for the past two years, we’ve been aiming to break traditional stereotypes around manhood in Vietnam, rethinking what brings a Boy to become a Man.
At the same time, we help brands adapt to the extremely complex, fast-moving changes in information technology and new media. We’re helping the Estee Lauder Group turn their audience into ambassadors through interactive filters for instance, or we’re educating businesses across Southeast Asia on the risks associated with illegal software use.
Of course, there are cultural specificities, and the media landscapes are not identical from one country to the next, but overall, we see that the younger generations are experiencing increasingly similar shifts, and are therefore responsive to similar expressions of change and progress.
5. Let’s talk specifically about Vietnam where you are based at the moment. In 2020, Vero published a white paper: “Vietnam’s New Influencers: Gen Z, Gen Y, and the Shift of Trust”. Can you describe the Influencer Marketing landscape in Vietnam, please? Is it particularly different from other countries?
Not fundamentally different – The research we did on Influencers in Vietnam was also conducted in Myanmar and Thailand and we see that the trend is the same: Influence is drifting away from traditional media towards a fragmented ecosystem of bloggers, influencers and community leaders. In short, consumers trust influencers more than traditional publishers, or ads.
Adding to this, and this is especially true for Vietnam, we now see that there is a growing influence from micro-communities, which has been accelerating during and post-pandemic – because digital content has become such an integrated part of people’s lives, users don’t look for influencers as much as they look for relatable publishers. Engagement rates tend to drift away from macro profiles towards publishers with smaller audiences, but with content that is a lot more targeted and hence: relevant. For example, when working with German design bath-ware brand Duravit, we don’t only engage with traditional trade media but also help it enter communities about design, interiors and sustainability, through industry events, or partnerships with community leaders.
We’re also seeing that emerging personalities conveying influence today are made thanks to the quality of the content they put forward, not necessarily because of TV/music stratification like it used to be. These publishers are made within communities that are secluded from brand content, or at least from openly advertised branding. It’s now really about the stories. Which is an outstanding opportunity for PR firms to take the lead on brand strategy.
I would add that we’re also preparing for a lot of disruption in the traditional roles played between brand content creators, ambassadors, and audiences. The other day, a Gen Z colleague showed me the very cool interactive filters she had designed about her experience working at Vero. She is not part of the creative team and yet she learnt about the process, and spontaneously created brand content and went ahead to broadcast it to her audience on social. This highlights how audiences are now empowered to not only become brand ambassadors, but also creators for brands. A consumer may be very influential within his very niche network, and may also be equipped to create brand content better and faster than the brand itself.The ecosystem is a lot less linear, and increasingly “Meta” to use a Gen Z buzzword.
6. One thing that has been on discussion for a while in the PR industry is that it’s time for us to bin vanity metrics and to focus on the importance of evaluation and measurement. Quite often, agencies use headline figures of reach or OTS (opportunities to see) as a form of evaluation/measurement of success for campaigns. What’s your take on that? How can we do better at evaluation and measurement in PR to make sure we are not lagged behind?
I couldn’t agree more with the fact that PR should adapt fast. In part because of how trust is being redistributed, but also because brands are increasingly exposed (see here a recent article from our Media and influencer Lead in Vietnam on how brands should assume they are in permanent crisis), PR consultants are more than ever positioning as the main brand advisors. We’re no longer solely talking to the Head of Comms, but we also now advise organisations’ top leadership so we need to formulate strategy and success using indicators they can use. A CEO will expect tangible indicators on a campaigns’ ROI, results that he will be able to show to his board, and use to qualify the brand’s larger business strategy. The reality is that we now have access to tools that allow us to be a lot more precise and tangible when devising strategy and reporting on results. This is why we’re bringing sentiment analysis and monitoring at the heart of our consulting practice, success is now measured with new KPIs: sentiment rating and qualified share of voice (the percentage of conversations taking place online and using a set of messaging identified by the brand).
7. The reason I asked that question is that there’s been a debate about the evaluation and measurement of influencer marketing activities. What do you think would be the best way to measure the impact/effectiveness of influencers’ activities? Is it reach? Is it the number of likes/shares?
Adding to my previous reply, our KPIs differ according to set brand goals, should it be sales, leads, engagement, share of voice, brand sentiment… Influencer marketing and PR, in general, can help achieve all – it’s just a matter of crafting campaigns that answer the brand’s business objective.
I can add that influencers are also feeling the heat and are adapting to the changes in expectations, not only building awareness but also offering online sale solutions, and accepting to be paid through sales incentives. It’s still nascent, but some very successful influencers have recently proved that they could do more than just be fancy digital billboards.
Something that I find very interesting is how advanced sentiment monitoring can help identify influence before it becomes media (is that meta?). We now have tools and resources that help us screen deep conversations and assess engagement opportunities for brands. We may for instance realize that engaging with fifteen specific non-professional personalities online will give us better reach, and convey more trust than if we hired one larger big-shot celebrity. These observations are quantifiable through sentiment monitoring.
8. One thing that was said frequently in the white paper is trust, what do you think is the role of Trust in PR in general and in the Influencer Marketing landscape in particular?
Thank you for asking this question.
I believe trust is the absolute, ultimate goal for PR, awareness and empathy are only tactics along the way. Trust is what brands work very hard to earn, and trust is consumers’ strongest weapon. No positive brand relationship can exist if it’s not built on consumer trust, it’s the core base for any engagement and the end goal for any campaign. We measure trust in everything we do, global agencies invest in trust barometers, consumer trust is what influencers and media mine and sell, and what consulting firms craft.
Today, and for influencers specifically, trust is associated by customers with transparency and authenticity; followers won’t trust reviews if they don’t know whether the post is sponsored or not, and whether the influencer genuinely connects with the product’s identity and mission.
On a broader level, to me, trust is what allows the world to innovate, to create, to progress. As it’s intrinsically connected to risk and therefore in one’s capacity to change. Trust is also one of the three founding values of Vero, alongside kindness and curiosity
9. I think to build that trust boils down to ethics. Earlier this year, Vero confirmed it would no longer work for any companies linked to or owned by the military and I read the news about what happened in Myanmar. What were you thinking at that moment?
As stated earlier, our people are the organisation’s priority. Because of the events in Myanmar, our consultants there did not want to engage with military-owned businesses anymore, so we followed that call and made it part of our strategy in Myanmar.
What I can add is that we have a clear policy in place to ensure no one is compelled to service a brand that goes against their beliefs. We live in a complex world, and as PR consultants we’re connected to societies’ turmoil and shifts, nothing is black or white, if not our conviction that no one should be asked to act against their beliefs.
10. Do you think we should put more focus on ethics in the PR industry? What’s the progress to be made for ethics in the ASEAN market?
Great question. The industry is today facing two huge ethical challenges in its relationship to data privacy, and to fake news.
My point of view is that as PR advisors, our role and responsibility is to be on top of these questions to effectively help brands navigate their intricacies and find appropriate answers. To me, as long as consumer trust remains a brand’s core goal, there will be positive conversations emerging from the ethical challenges raised by data privacy and fake news. On data privacy, the key question remains: are users the customers? If users and their data are seen as commodities then brands won’t have incentives to act in their best interests, at least not as much as they would for their paying customers.
Facebook is paying the price for its approach to users’ data and has been called to congress repeatedly over the past years to explain itself. Twitter recently announced that they would create a paid service, to veer their model away from user data trading. And Apple’s latest OS allows users to block all user-data crawling. We work with a lot of great tech brands, like Intel, Microsoft, Razer, Dell, VNG, Line, TikTok … All these questions are central in their PR and business strategies. The New York Times did a great excerpt on the issue in their morning briefing the other day (listen: Apple vs. Facebook, the New York Times).
When it comes to fake news I believe that it’s more a brand threat than a possible asset. The liability is just too big for brands (and for their advisors) to openly lie. For us, it’s now more about helping brands understand the depth of the conversations that surround them, and equipping them with tools and support so they can effectively understand a conversation and make their position and truths heard to their audience. This is also why sentiment monitoring has become so important in our work. We’re about to release a new playbook on managing threats of fake News and disinformation attacks, it provides deeper insights on what brands can do to prepare, and how we can help – will make sure to share it across when it’s out! [The “PR Playbook for Managing Disinformation Threats” was released on the 1st of June 2021]
11. If someone or some brand wants to do business in the ASEAN market and comes to Vero for support, what advice would you give them and what do you offer?
First, we believe Southeast Asia is the world’s most exciting place to do business today. So, my first instinct would be to congratulate the brand for making the move.
My advice would be that they surround themselves with consultants who have a physical presence in the markets they aim for. A lot of MNCs land in Singapore hope they will be able to centralise decision making and use consultants there for the rest of the region. The reality is that Singapore is very different from the rest of the region, and firms there are often ill-equipped to support comms outside of the island. Instead, a brand may choose to work with a regional firm like ours or connect with local boutiques. A lot of our current relationships started this way, with clients based out of Singapore turning to us for Brand Consulting, PR, Creative or Data Intelligence support in Southeast Asia: Intel, WeWork, Razer, Under Armor, Lego, to name a few.
I can add that your interview with Clara is a great illustration of the value a small, local team can bring to a brand’s traditional PR ambitions in Ho Chi Minh city for instance. We know Clara well; she was a long-time Vero employee before she started EloQ in early 2019. It’s great to see her advocate for sustainable PR, and we hope for a lot more boutique agencies to open as they contribute to elevating the PR practice locally.
12. What is the best way to keep up with Raphael Lachkar?
I’m always keen to meet and learn from people from the industry, so if you’re around don’t hesitate to reach out on Linkedin – I’m on a constant hunt for the best coffee in Saigon and would be very glad to take you along. In general, I’d say the best way to keep up is to follow Vero on the agency’s newsroom or to subscribe to our newsletters!
Hi, it's me Son. I'm the one behind the blog Son Talks. I mean, I'm happy to verify I'm not a robot. Can easily spot cars or chimneys. I'm working as an Account Executive at Intent Health. You can reach me via LinkedIn at Son Pham or Twitter at @beyondson_ If you or someone you know would be happy to share their perspective, please get in touch, I’d love to hear from you. Over and out! See ya soon x