DMA 2026 podcast: How this fashion brand stays fresh with you (and your mom)

As a global brand with a 16-year history in Singapore and 2,529 stores worldwide, UNIQLO has no problem when it comes to brand awareness. Its latest objective in Singapore is staying fresh without losing what got it here.

"The challenge here is not a matter of awareness, it's actually about how we keep ourselves fresh, and engaging new customers while staying rooted to what has made us successful so far," said Paulene Ong, marketing director for global and APAC markets at UNIQLO.

Speaking on Marketing Connected's podcast hosted in partnership with Analytic Partners', Ong tells Nikki Taylor, the firm's APAC marketing and communications director, what her teams’ priorities are when it comes to long-term brand building.

Catch the full interview here: 

Taylor: You described UNIQLO’s strategy as balancing interest-driving activity with a very strong core business. What does that look like in practice, and can you describe what you describe as interest activity?

Ong: At UNIQLO, everything starts from what we call the LifeWear philosophy. When we explain LifeWear, it’s essentially clothing designed from the customers’ perspective – and the ultimate goal for us is to make the consumers’ life better.

In practice, when we talk about balancing our core business with what we call interest-driving activity, a good core business is staying rooted to what has made us successful – things like good quality, innovation, and function.

These things are going to be mainstays and it’s going to continue day on day, year on year.

But we do recognise that there is a whole new generation of customers we need to reach out to. That’s where the interest driving aspects come in.

To give you an example, we have been doing a lot of activity relating to what we call the under-30 customers. We created something we call the Style Creator Group. It might sound like your typical content creation, influencer network, but it’s a lot more than that. It’s really a dialogue where we learn from them, and they get to understand us as a brand. […] We want to learn from this group.

Taylor: One of the most important lessons we’ve had at Analytic Partners from ROI Genome is that channels rarely work in isolation. We know actually around 30% of paid search activity is driven by brand and upper funnels. With live commerce, the value is not just the sale, but what happens during that live streaming event. And it also may help someone discover the product, visit the store, and come back through search and convert on UNIQLO’s own platform.

So the challenge is in that journey, how you measure it, because it’s not the final click.

With that, I’m going to move to measurements. You told me that: “In retail, we’re really fast, but we have vast amounts of data. More so than others. We can see hourly sales and review our performance weekly.”

How does that change the way you make marketing decisions?

Ong: It is true, when it comes to retail we have access to a lot of data points. It’s not hourly, we get it by the second. We are so rich in data, data is everywhere. But how we use the data is that we use it to get an understanding of what is going on in the minds of our customers.

I’ll give you an example. Now, we’re nearing the end of the year where people are planning holidays and family trips, ideally in a winter country because we have a great winter lineup.

If we think about that through all the datasets that we have, we are able to get a sense of what are customers searching, and where do their interests lie?

We have a lot of access to first-party data or platform insights or search trends or buying behaviours. Through all these insights, we actually pool them together to consider what category, what product, and what is the media and channel mix we should use to best react to these customers in real-time.

Taylor: That speed is very powerful. But it can feel like a temptation sometimes to optimise what moves every week. One of the biggest lessons that our multiplier effect report says is that brand makes performance work harder.

At Analytic Partners, our research suggests that 30% of media investment is a minimum for brand building. But actually, a typical range should be 40% to 60%. In fact, the brands that are very performance-led strategy versus a balance mix, if you have the balance mix you can deliver 90% of your ROI.

So, talk me through some of the brand building activities that you do as UNIQLO.

Ong: When it comes to brand building, we have been taking part in quite a lot of different initiatives. One such initiative is that we are looking to actively build what we call the “Arts pillar” within UNIQLO.

Earlier this year, for the very first time in the 16 years that we’ve been here, we had a partnership with the Asian Civilisations Museum. We collaborated with the museum to showcase the stories of several artifacts that are part of the history of the ASEAN region. We brought them to life in our UT-me! T-shirt collection collaborating with local artists.

On top of that, we built a pop-up store that was there for three months.

I think when it comes to brand building, it’s really about how do we reach out to new customers, how do we help them to understand what our brand is really about? Having that cultural relevance, that local relevance is really important to us.

Also tune in to the full conversation on Spotify:

Tune into the rest of this conversation on your favourite podcast platforms, by searching up Marketing Connected. For all the visual people out there, we’ve got your back as well, with our vodcasts on YouTube.

This article is done in collaboration with Analytic Partners.