The activation imperative: Turning fragmented data into measurable ROI

In Singapore’s highly mature digital economy, brands are rarely short on customer data. The true challenge lies in tech stack bloat, where a complex web of legacy systems, customer relationship management apps, and new software-as-a-service tools trap valuable insights in disconnected silos.

At a recent MARKETING-INTERACTIVE roundtable in Singapore, held in partnership with Supermetrics, senior marketing leaders across retail, hospitality, finance, and technology gathered to discuss how organisations can navigate these hurdles to build an agile and connected data ecosystem.

The foundational data challenge

Before brands can orchestrate real-time, omnichannel journeys, they must ensure their data foundation is reliable. FairPrice Group has operated for more than 50 years, accumulating vast amounts of data from point-of-sale systems, loyalty programmes, and net promoter scores.

Alvin Neo, FairPrice’s chief customer and marketing officer, noted the organisation has intentionally prioritised investing the time and effort to get its data foundation sorted out first to enable hyper-personalisation to work safely and well at scale.

“As they say, if you automate a mess, you just get a faster mess,” he said.

Similarly, many organisations in highly regulated industries face stringent requirements regarding data reliability and privacy.

A senior digital transformation leader at one such organisation emphasised that maintaining the sanity of a single customer view is critical, as sending the wrong highly sensitive document to a client would create severe trust issues. To navigate this, it breaks its digital transformations down into bite-sized projects, focusing on proving value and securing small wins before scaling up and embarking on complex integrations.

Moving from push to pull marketing

The discussion highlighted a necessary mindset shift from sales-driven push marketing to a more authentic and human-led pull approach.

Singtel has traditionally possessed a wealth of customer data and connectivity signals. Lynette Poh, head of brand, engagement and loyalty at Singtel, pointed out the industry often fails to look at the human insights behind the data.

“The real understanding of your customer, what they want, what they need, predicting that and making them a personalised journey, because it feels so seamless... I think that is the biggest challenge to solve,” Poh said.

Neo added that brands should anchor engagement around customers’ real-life aspirations – whether that is eating healthier, saving more or living better.

“The future of marketing is not about targeting people more aggressively. It’s about helping people achieve goals they care about,” he said.

“When customers give you permission to help them improve their lives, marketing stops feeling intrusive and starts becoming genuinely valuable.”

However, Jan Willem van Walsum, data activation lead APJ at Supermetrics, observed that executing a pull mechanism is difficult in reality due to fractured internal ownership and dependencies across different teams.

“By the time you’ve figured out how to respond to the pull, the pull has disappeared,” van Walsum said, noting the customer has often already moved on to something else.

The need for centralised decisioning

To overcome these execution barriers, organisations need to move away from siloed decision-making. Even with a beautiful single customer view, having external media agencies, social agencies and email teams all making different decisions on that data at the same time creates conflicting customer journeys.

Van Walsum advocated for implementing a decisioning layer that acts like an air traffic controller across different platforms. This enables centralised decisions that tell various channels what to do and when to do it, without necessarily having to replace existing systems. This prevents frustrating consumer experiences such as retargeting a user with ads for a hotel booking they have already completed.

In the financial sector, where customer journeys are highly unique and sensitive, understanding intent is paramount. Endowus is focused on unifying its client view to activate data quickly across various scenarios, such as when clients deepen their engagement on specific topics through owned channels.

Jason Huan, chief marketing officer at Endowus, said the firm takes defensive and offensive stances based on market volatility, leveraging data to know when to elevate performance marketing and when to pull back and focus on allaying investing fears.

Orchestrating complex omnichannel experiences

The complexity of the customer journey is especially pronounced for brands managing multiple touchpoints and partners. The Kallang Group manages one of Singapore’s most dynamic precincts, serving vastly different customer profiles – from active community members to concert-goers.

Michelle Yip, group head of brand marketing and communications at The Kallang Group, highlighted the need to consolidate user profiles and leverage first-party data to deliver a seamless, connected experience, that caters to diverse audiences across sports, entertainment, lifestyle, and community offerings.

Starting small to prove return on investment

With so many competing priorities, proving the value of personalisation to stakeholders remains a universal hurdle. Byron Munson, vice president, APJ at Supermetrics, advised marketers not to try and solve everything at once. Instead, brands should start with a single use case that has a strong return on investment metric attached to it.

By enriching customer relationship management data with real-time behavioural signals – such as preferred media channels or time of day – brands can begin driving genuine bottom-line revenue.

“The challenge is, it’s the action, what do I do, and then how I stitch the KPIs to validate the investment I’m making to get it going,” Munson said.

By securing a hard return on investment early on, marketing teams can influence internal stakeholders, secure further investments, and gradually expand their hyper-personalisation efforts.

Acknowledgements

This roundtable and article were made possible by our partner, Supermetrics.

Supermetrics is a marketing intelligence platform that helps organisations move from understanding past performance to driving future action.

Trusted by more than 200,000 companies in 120 countries, Supermetrics unifies the marketing intelligence workflow from data connectivity to insight to activation, enabling confident, revenue-focused decisions. Processing 15% of global advertising spend, Supermetrics helps brands and agencies navigate marketing with confidence in today’s evolving data landscape.

To learn more about Supermetrics Data Activation please visit: https://supermetrics.com/platform/activate-data or scan the QR code.