#MobExAwards 2021 spills: Grab's personalisation journey with first-party data

Launched in 2012, Grab is a superapp based in Singapore, offering a suite of services such as deliveries, mobility, financial services and enterprise, among others. During the pandemic, the company sought to help small businesses which were hit the hardest. It was shortlisted as a finalist for Best COVID-19 Response and Best User Experience, and won Silver for Consumer Goods at MARKETING-INTERACTIVE's Mob-Ex Awards 2021.

Ken Mandel (pictured), regional managing director for GrabAds and head of brand insights, Grab told MARKETING-INTERACTIVE that there is an increasing demand among brands and marketers for first-party data. He also explained how personalisation will be a "critical differentiator" for brands, moving forward.

This interview is done as part of MARKETING-INTERACTIVE’s winners' and finalists’ interview series for the Mob-Ex Awards 2021. To find out more about the awards, click here. 

When it comes to mobile marketing, what are some of the shifts you are seeing?

Mandel: Brands and marketers are paying more attention to where their data is sourced in order to provide personalised experiences for today’s mobile-first consumers.

Those who have the capability to build their own data science models or first-party data capabilities are already actively doing so, while others are looking for partners that can provide them with deep insights on the audiences that they want to reach and target to meet business goals.

This is something that we at Grab take pride in as a leading superapp in Southeast Asia and a one-stop platform for everyday essential services such as transport, delivery and finance. We have a highly engaged user base who use and transact on the app frequently giving us a rich view of consumers’ purchasing preferences and habits from across the touchpoints on the Grab ecosystem.

Through GrabAds, the advertising unit of Grab, brands can tap on our rich and deep reservoir of insights from our first-party data to reach and engage consumers through smart targeting and personalised experiences.

For us, the key to personalisation lies in creating a positive value exchange between the brand and the consumer. Research from the EY Global Consumer Privacy Survey tells us that half of millennials are willing to exchange their information for more personalised online experiences. This shows that in order for consumers to be comfortable with exchanging their data, brands need to look at providing a fair or positive value exchange. This can come in the form of a benefit or a reward, like how GrabAds works with brands to offer GrabRewards points or discount vouchers when a consumer clicks on an ad on our platform.

How have clients' expectations changed this year? What did you do to pivot?

Mandel: The constant shift between lockdown and reopening pushed many of our partners to actively rethink their strategies and look for new and meaningful ways to reach their ideal target set of audiences, be it in the comfort of their homes with the increased shift among digital-first consumers to home delivery options through services like GrabFood or GrabMart, or driving them back in-stores.

At Grab, we have been working hard to help brands solve the challenges they have been facing, especially during this unprecedented period, and to creatively engage with their consumers on our platform.

We provide our partners with the ability to compress the marketing funnel through driving awareness, engagement to conversion, all on a single platform. We do this via the various touch points on the Grab ecosystem such as GrabMart and our merchant partners.

For example, in a recent campaign that GrabAds worked with Unilever’s Knorr on in the Philippines, we looked at ride hailing trends and noticed that more people are staying at home for longer periods of time.

With more people staying at home, this means that more are also whipping up their meals at home. As such, we worked with Unilever brand Knorr to come up with a creative campaign that drew consumers in via a selection of tantalising recipes that they can cook using Knorr products at home, before directing them to continue their journey to GrabMart to "shop the recipe".

Not only were the ingredients required to create the dishes automatically listed to consumers, this experience also allowed them to easily add the ingredients into their cart and have everything conveniently delivered to their doorstep.

This created positive value to consumers through the inspiration that was provided to spark new thinking for their cooking, as well as value to our merchant partners by creating a positive brand experience.

And it’s not just the online space that we play in; Grab also has the ability to drive online-to-offline traffic to physical stores.

Following the Circuit Breaker in Singapore, beauty brand Laneige wanted to drive consumer traffic back to its physical stores islandwide. We then worked with them on an online-to-offline (O2O) mobile campaign that targetted female Grab users aged 18-34 and fans of beauty and skincare, alongside real-time tactics targetting users within the vicinity of Laneige stores. Users were able to click on the in-app ad, incentivised by a Grab-exclusive beauty sample and a 10% discount voucher saved into their Grab Rewards Wallet which can then be used for in-store redemption.

This campaign not only enabled Laneige to reach high quality audiences in a targeted manner, it drove increased football to Laneige physical stores, and provided users with a positive experience through the provision of rewards.

Ultimately, we want to provide our users an engaging and quality experience with Grab where they can have greater flexibility and control of how they’d like to interact with the app to suit their needs, which will in turn create more opportunities for repeat engagements.

Mobile is one of the key priorities for brands these days. What is one advice you have for brands to cut through the clutter?

Mandel: Make good use of the data you have access to understand your consumers, as well as reach, engage and drive them to action on the right platforms.

Super apps such as Grab have increasingly become an integral part of consumers’ lives considering the everyday services that they offer, from transport, delivery to finance. This presents brands with huge opportunities to leverage one-stop platforms and harness insights from first-party data to reach, engage and move consumers to action across a single platform. This has proven an effective and efficient strategy for brands who want to take the shortest route from awareness to conversion and stand out in the consumer landscape.

Amidst the continued rise of mobile, offline channels will also remain highly important to the marketing mix. So it’s important that brands have an omnichannel strategy in place and work on closing the loop. To do this effectively, leveraging a channel that helps you to compress the marketing channel to drive awareness, engagement and conversion on a single platform, such as Grab, would be ideal for this.

What are your plans for the coming year?

Mandel: At Grab, we are always working on understanding our partners and consumers, with the aim of delivering “positive value exchanges” through the interactions that we have with them.

For our partners, we do this in many ways but one important example is our ranking and recommendation engines.

Over 50% of GrabFood users leverage the Search function to determine what to order. With this, we introduced Rankbooster to our merchant partners to help them increase their brand visibility. By improving these ranking and recommendation engines for our partners, this means that, without any effort put in on their part, their ads are always getting better and more effective.

Beyond always-on advertiser optimisation, we will continue to ramp up our efforts and invest more in personalisation for our users as we truly believe it will be a critical differentiator for us going forward.

To continue enabling positive value exchanges, we think about how we can leverage the data our partners and consumers share with us to improve their experiences. For us, the goal of personalisation is to make sure that every user has a user interface that suits their personal tastes and preferences.

No two user interfaces should look exactly the same and they would be optimised with each dwelling, click, and transaction. The purpose of this is to create a customised user interface which leads to favourites as well as recommendations. This will enable us to enhance the experience for the user first and foremost and in turn benefit brands who can correctly position themselves in front of their target audience.

We are also continuously exploring ways to build audience insights that inform our partners about important trends they should be capitalising on.

One such example is Grab Commerce Audiences, which pulls together insights from user behaviours to help brands reach their target consumers more effectively. Through Grab Commerce Audiences, brands can target certain demographics, sociographics, interests, intent and past purchase behaviours for their campaigns.

We also help our partners isolate their high-affinity audiences to create creative-centred audience-first strategies that drive tangible outcomes. A good example of this would be tapping into campaign engagers from past campaigns or audiences who have previously purchased products via our GrabFood or GrabMart channels.

In the near future, we’re making these key insights more actionable by enabling more sophisticated ad targeting, as well as precise, real time, conversion attribution.

This will allow our partners to leverage the GrabAds platform for messaging testing and audience definition, as well as to reach those audiences with highly personalised and effective messages to drive tangible impact for businesses across Southeast Asia, a trend that will only continue to grow in a privacy-first mobile era.