BORN Group garners recognition at Agency of the Year Singapore 2020

This post is sponsored by BORN Group.

BORN Group, an award-winning global digital agency, took home top honours at this year’s Agency of the Year, Singapore 2020.

The promising agency was honoured to be shortlisted for four categories among other elite and competing agencies in Singapore, where it won two awards, positioning itself as a niche leader in experience management and enterprise commerce.

BORN proudly donned the hat of being the best CRM & Loyalty Marketing, and Digital Agency of the Year at the 2020 AOTY Singapore.

BORN Group: Big experiences at the crossroads of art and science  

Traditional agencies focus predominantly on traditional channels: print, broadcast, radio, stores, events. Of the 15 channels, including mail, packaging, gaming, displays, radio, broadcast, stores, websites, campaigns, newsprint, IoT, voice, social media, word-of-mouth, and adverts, we can consider eight of these the “older” channels.

BORN Group was created not just to address those eight channels, but also to breathe life into brands using the “newer” channels. This is where the agency’s name comes from.

“The name ‘BORN’ is all about giving birth to brands in modern channels – IoT, gaming, mobile, social, and web, to name a few,” said CEO Dilip Keshu.

“We are one of the agencies that is trying to crack the code of not just surviving, but thriving in a largely digital economy.”

This award-winning agency is one of the biggest global players in this space. BORN was recently acquired by IT services giant Tech Mahindra.

In its nine-year journey, BORN has occupied a unique position – being at the intersection of art (creative design) and science (tech skills).

MD of APAC, Prakash Gurumoorthy, said: “We’re in the business of creating something (connected experiences) that hasn’t been created before. This is all about creating the digital asset, telling the brand story, and selling their products or services.”

Evolving ahead of the curve

Brands that focus primarily on traditional channels of communications such as ads have been going through a sort of forced evolution globally, as consumers prefer mediums such as web and social to print media. This decline has enforced a revolution in communication models and approach.

“We aren’t facing that paradigm,” Gurumoorthy said. “We are helping brands transact on showrooms that are entirely digital: websites. For instance, one of the four marketplaces we have built grew from a standing start to become Singapore’s biggest digital marketplace.”

BORN was one of the first agencies to realise that Singapore wasn’t just a source of creative talent to serve global markets, but a giant potential domestic market in itself. Early success in helping Singaporean brands develop entirely new digital marketplaces has been a big contributor to this agency’s nine-year growth.

BORN’s Stella: Perfecting an approach

BORN believes that in the world of eCommerce, competency doesn’t have to mean a compromise on beauty. The agency describes four principles that shape its approach. Each of these is influenced by four factors that drive consumer behaviour online.

Attraction: Enticing an audience through creative design and navigation.

Interaction: Through creating personalised content.

Transaction: Enabling a marketplace through eCommerce expertise.

Reaction: Ensuring that brands delight customers, through analytics and feedback.

Gurumoorthy explains these four principles: “We combine these aspects of customer interaction with a brand into one integrated experience. We call this the ‘brand experience’ wheel. Our goal is to progressively improve the customer experience with each turn of the wheel.”

Evolving this “experience wheel” has helped BORN to combine experience management and enterprise commerce. Having done more than 500-plus digital transformations with over 40 end markets, BORN came up with an industry-leading CX framework named Stella. Stella is all about combining brand experience, behaviour experience, and book of record experience.

Stella today aligns with connected experiences for Tech Mahindra. Stella believes that brands look at connected experiences in a connected world and our capability spans across:

• Cx (customer experience)
• Sx (service experience)
• Px (physical experience)
• Ox (operational experience)
• Dx (data experience)

The customer experience defines a consumer’s experience of the brand, while the service experience helps the brand live up to the promise of Cx.

The physical experience recognises the importance of brick-and-mortar stores, reimagining them as experience centres – much more than mere transaction points. Since strategy means very little if not coupled with a solid execution, all of this is governed by the operational experience. Underpinning these drivers is the foundation of data, labelled data experience.

Past successes, and the path forward

BORN has conceptualised and developed service frameworks/accelerators on established digital and commerce platforms in-house. A few examples include Arctic Fox (SalesForce Commerce Cloud Accelerator); BullDog(Adobe/Magento Accelerator); Bison (Headless Commerce Accelerator); and EAGLE(SAP Commerce Cloud Accelerator), which all work on top of leading B2B, B2C, B2B2C platform providers.

Each of these are designed to help clients achieve a faster go-to-market on the pivots of time and costs.

The agency has worked with the best names in the industry, with clients in more than 40 end markets: F&B, hospitality, services, distribution, discrete manufacturing, CPG, retail, education, auto, defence, insurance, financial services, and more.

BORN’s client roster includes iconic and award-winning brands covering coffee, shoes, drinks, outerwear, luxury, fashion, semiconductors, gaming, machine tools, travel, hospitality, pet food, marketplaces, filters, auction houses, airports, and diamonds.

For more information, please reach out to Aditya Basu corporate marketing – APAC, at BORN Group.

About BORN Group:

BORN Group is an award-winning global agency that focuses on enterprise commerce and experience design. It is a Tech Mahindra company.

With over 500 digital transformations under its belt in over 40 end markets covering the B2B and B2C segments, it is one of the largest digital agencies in the customer and brand experience space with offices and operations in eight-plus countries. Click here to learn more.