Under the relentless pressure of new customer realities, the future is now in focus.
COVID-19 affected Asia Pacific first, and global analyst firm, global analyst firm, Forrester expects the region will also emerge from the crisis first in 2021, before Europe and the US.
Forrester predicts that 2021 will be the year that every company will double down on technology-fuelled experiences, operations, products, and ecosystems.
According to its Asia Pacific 2021 Predictions, released today, the success of organisations will depend on how quickly and how well they harness technology to enable their workforce in the new normal and build platforms that differentiate them.
Forrester’s Predictions reports analyse the dynamics impacting different industries and disciplines, including changing consumer behaviours, customer experience, employee experience, marketing, and technology.
Key 2021 Predictions from Forrester for Asia Pacific include:
- Platform wars will heat up in the region. With the battle for supremacy heating up in Asia Pacific, most companies will become platform businesses to survive in the digital era. Twenty-five percent of firms will shift from experimenting to pragmatically connecting the ecosystems essential to their customers. APAC is already home to some of the largest platforms in places like China and India. However, we will see this battle ratcheting up in intensity, especially in India. Reliance’s Jio Platforms has already blazed the trail with a more than US$20 billion investment in their digital business. They are simultaneously lining up more investments for their retail platform. Tata in India has thrown its hat in the ring with an announcement of its super app. With Paytm, Walmart’s Flipkart in the fray, India will see some serious competition among these platforms. Likewise, Alibaba, JD.com, and Pinduoduo in China and Gojek, Grab, and Shopee in Southeast Asia will be competing in their respective regions to win digital customers.
- Chief marketing officers will assert control over the full customer lifecycle. CMOs will put the customer at the centre of everything they do: leadership, strategy, and operations. As a result, spend on loyalty and retention marketing will increase by 30 per cent.
- COVID-19 will reduce workplace engagement. The physical, mental, and economic challenges that employees had to contend with in the face of the pandemic will extend into 2021, causing business innovation to drop in 25 per cent of firms in Asia Pacific.
- Chief information officers will embrace cloud-first and platform strategies for speed and adaptiveness. In 2021, 30 per cent of firms will continue to accelerate their spend on cloud, security and risk, networks, and mobility — including struggling firms looking to leapfrog and gain advantage coming out of the pandemic.
- Asia Pacific finally catches up on Zero Trust adoption. Zero Trust adoption in Asia Pacific has lagged its global peers, but the acceleration of cloud adoption and an explosion in remote work, as well as changing regulations and consumer behaviours, make it ripe for change. At least one government in Asia Pacific will embrace a Zero Trust cybersecurity framework in 2021. “We expect firms to sharpen their focus on employee experience as they struggle to deal with the people aspect of the pandemic,” said Sharma.
“The pandemic accelerated the need for digital transformation,” said Ashutosh Sharma vice president and research director at Forrester. “The current economic climate has increased the urgency for every enterprise to embrace technology as a strategic asset. Asia Pacific is finally entering a decade of a digitally levelled playing field. Firms in the region will be at par with or even exceed the rest of the world in terms of technology-driven business model innovation. COVID-19 affected Asia Pacific first, and we expect it will also be the first to emerge from the crisis.”
According to Sharma, 5G will finally make an impact, and China will be its epicenter.
Markets have been hearing about 5G for some time. With low latency, high throughput, and many more technology promises, 5G has caught a lot of attention. However, it still doesn’t have much to show for it in terms of business impact.
“This is going to change. In China, with heavy government support, rapid rollouts across the country, and evolution of supporting tech, 5G will find an ideal breeding ground for innovations across various verticals,” said Sharma. “China’s experimentation and adoption of 5G-enabled business models and 5G-led innovation will offer valuable lessons to other countries and enterprises.”
Sharma also believes, values-focused firms will deliver higher profits than those focusing on profits alone. Up to one in three customers in the APAC region make values-driven purchase decisions.
“This generation of asserting customers is now beginning to vote for brands with their wallets. Brands can no longer work in the shadows with a constant spotlight on each of their actions, statements, and associations across social media,” he said. “They must show their explicit commitment to respect customers’ privacy, for example. They must tackle complex economic, environmental, and social challenges that impact all of us. They must do so with integrity, competence, and transparency to earn the trust and loyalty of these values-conscious consumers.”
