Insights from Ecommerce in Asia, with Rebecca Xing, CEO at Trustana

Peter Crosby:

Welcome to unpacking the Digital Shelf where we explore brand manufacturing in the digital age.

Peter Crosby:

Hey everyone. Peter Crosby here from The Digital Shelf Institute, e-Commerce in Asia is such a vibrant mix of unbelievable scale, rapid innovation, and distinct cultures that together become a fascinating source of case studies for other markets to mine for opportunity. Not everything translates, but there is a deep well of experimentation and execution To learn from Rebecca Xing, CEO of Triana, join Lauren Livak Gilbert and me from Singapore to share with the DSI audience, the trends and opportunities in the Asia market that deserve the attention of brands looking to experiment with new consumer experiences and perhaps even expand to the Asia market. Rebecca, thank you so much for being here with us and specifically thank you for coming all the way across the world in Singapore in your evening hours to record this. We are really grateful that you're ending your day with us.

Rebecca Xing:

My absolute pleasure and excited to have this conversation with you guys. Thanks for having me.

Peter Crosby:

Yeah, we are so excited to dig into e-commerce in Asia and get the perspective. So often it's looked at maybe as more advanced in North America. I dunno whether you feel that way or whether just it's a different society, the different societies, different cultures, but whether it's things like delivery within hours or content updates and minutes or the big targeted e-commerce events that they have, it just seems like we're curious about what can our North American listeners, what should they know about and what can they learn about? So just start us off with sort of your view of the state of e-commerce in Asia now.

Rebecca Xing:

Yeah, I think it's a really exciting region because it's so diverse and there's a lot of different things that are going on in different places. So I think of it as big, it's just such a big region in terms of pure population, relatively young and very much growing rapidly and has really adopted digital ways with a veracity, with a real kind of hunger for it. But if I kind of break it down even further than that, I think there are nuances. So if we talk about China for instance, the largest e-commerce market by far, a kind of hands down, and they've got their own models of purchasing. They've got jd.com, they've got Tmall pin doin all these various kinds of channels. And from a pure numbers of buyers perspective, reaching the billions in terms of number of folks that are on e-commerce, three times the size of North America's or the US' total population.

Rebecca Xing:

If we take a look at Southeast Asia, also a little bit of a different ecosystem population wise, more like 600 to 700 million, and it is actually the third most populous region after East Asia and South Asia. So I think Southeast Asia sometimes doesn't really get onto folks' radar as much. It's not as talked about, but it actually is. I mean, the population of Indonesia is basically right behind the United States in terms of just number of people and the population in this region is generally younger. So Gen Z is playing a really strong role in how they're influencing purchasing online. And I think I read a stat somewhere that it's like in Thailand, something like 30% of the Gen Z population is making all online purchases for their entire family unit. So they're really, the younger generation is playing a big role. And then of course you've got Australia and New Zealand not to be forgotten as well, kind of the smallest I would say in terms of population size, but very much I think a lot of exciting things happening there from an e-commerce perspective as well, maybe a bit more culturally similar to the United States, but I think Asia as a whole, you can think of it as big, diverse and very hungry.

Peter Crosby:

And what's important to, and I know this talking about regional things, I know every country is different, everything, but what are kind of the trends or what's important to the shoppers in this region? What's their number one concern with their shopping? What is it that gets them engaged and gets them to conversion that might be different or

Rebecca Xing:

Yeah, totally. I think there's a couple of different aspects about speaking about APAC at a general level that we can touch upon. So one is that it's growing super rapidly. So the penetration of e-commerce and the amount of people that are buying on e-commerce is expanding rapidly every year, and it's one of the fastest growing regions globally speaking for that, but also specifically purchasing on e-commerce versus mobile is particularly prominent. So smartphones and tablets are much more popular than necessarily desktops, which tend to be, I think the predominant thing that people are using in the us. The second thing is really the buying behavior. It's very omnichannel and very price conscious. So I'll give you an example. I mean everybody's familiar with Black Friday, and so Asia has kind of this black Friday on steroids thing called Singles Day, which is 1111, and the reason it's called Singles Day is because the one looks like basically the last branch, the family tree, basically you're alone. It's almost like the anti,

Rebecca Xing:

I know Asia, I love it, but it's like the anti Valentine's Day, and there's a whole cultural phenomenon where people are getting married on Singles Day for ironic reasons. The whole situation, oh my gosh, kind of very intelligently, like 10, 15 years ago, Alibaba started doing these 24 hour sale events on 1111 on Singles Day, and these were widely popular things were discounted to the hive heavens and people bought so much stuff. Now what's happened is that it's led to these spinoffs now they're six June 6th, seven, seven, July 7th, 8, 8, 9, 9, et cetera. What's now happened is that consumers are almost trained to wait for these sales and discounts. So they know that every month this big event is going to happen where the marketplaces and the e-commerce sites are doing this bonanza or whatever you want to call it, this big event. And so they're waiting for those discounts and really playing into that price conscious price sensitivity that the consumers have. Do the

Peter Crosby:

Retailers kind of regret the monsters that they've created by driving that behavior or they're just happy to take the momentum of it all?

Rebecca Xing:

There definitely are questions. I think one big question that retailers are wondering now is how do you lower that cost of acquisition for customers kind of holistically speaking? And so for instance, one of the things that's really top of mind for a lot of retailers is loyalty programs. How do we incentivize people to keep coming back and repurchasing? So that cost of acquisition, even if it came at a steep discount to start with, kind of pays off over the lifetime value of that consumer. So definitely I think something that now the next stage is all that's kind of the situation for how the consumers are behaving. How do we now start to build that loyalty and that fan base for the longterm? And kind of relate to that is that these marketplaces are really growing rapidly in Southeast Asia. And more recently, as I think has been the case globally speaking, there's been this push for profitability.

Rebecca Xing:

And so that means that these marketplaces are offering more services and becoming more of these super app type marketplaces where they're offering financing and insurance and all sorts of things on top of buying goods, but they're also increasing the commission take rate that they're taking from the sellers, the brands or the manufacturers who are selling on these platforms. And that's leading to a kind of resurgence in this idea of investing your own.com. People are thinking, okay, let me then start to build my own e-commerce site. Again, playing into that loyalty factor as well to make the acquisition just more economical for the brand manufacturer side. And of course there's, other than the marketplaces, there's also these social selling, live selling, all of these optionalities, which we'll talk about I think a little bit later in the podcast, but definitely very unique to the Asian region in particular

Lauren Livak Gilbert:

Would say that. So it sounds like price isn't a number one factor for a consumer. Would you say that convenience would be number two, or what are the kind of two and three? Because I know I've heard stories about ordering something online and you get it in 15 minutes where here that would be incredible, but we settle for two days. What would be the consumer's desire, I guess, as the two and three options beyond price?

Rebecca Xing:

Yeah, I think price is very much number one, but there's also these dichotomies, right, where the Asian population also loves brands, and then that's kind of the opposite of price in a lot of ways. But convenience definitely is a big factor as well. The thing that I think needs to be kept in mind for a lot of the Asian countries is that the cost of labor is relatively cheap. So in many cases, maybe it's not even from a consumer perspective, you who's going to be picking up the package or getting the package, it might be somebody who's in your household helping you or a driver or something like that. And so in those cases it's a little bit less about convenience, it's more about maybe value is a better word than price, right? Value overall.

Lauren Livak Gilbert:

I love that. Great, thank you for sharing that. So let's think about if a brand wants to expand to Asia, maybe they're thinking about it, they're building out a plan. What are the things that you would suggest they think about or kind of watch outs that they need to incorporate into their strategy?

Rebecca Xing:

Yeah, I think with every expansion there's always going to be the logistics and warehousing part of it. I think everybody will be thinking about that even if they're expanding from state to state in the states. But I think two particular areas about international expansion that I think are important to think about is number one, compliance and number two, localized marketing, right? Cultural adjustments to the product for that particular for the target geography. So from a compliance perspective, Asia is many different countries that don't have a European union thing to help you almost have some sort of regulation, overarching regulation for compliance. And so that means if you want to enter the tile market versus the Indonesian market versus the Malaysian market versus the Chinese market, those are all going to be a different set of compliance that you have to overcome. And in some cases, let's say you're trying to import food into Thailand, you've got a great chips company or a chip snack company and you want to sell those into Thailand or Indonesia, you're looking at three to six month processes to get those chips approved from a compliance perspective by the requisite authorities in order to get those chips into the market, let alone start selling actually to the consumers.

Rebecca Xing:

So I think compliance is really something to not be underestimated. I would really advise folks to do your research and at least do a bit of a sense check. You may think it's going to take you a month, it may actually take you half a year, and that's something to really take into account when you're planning. I think the second thing is really around the localization. So if you are selling in Thailand, you of course need to be able to describe your product in Thai, and they may also have their own desires for what kind of marketing images that they like to look at. I'll give you another example. Korea and Japan really kind of descriptions that are not text-based. They really like these graphical ways of depicting the product, and that's how they're used to looking at products and assessing whether something is worth buying or not.

Rebecca Xing:

So if all of your data is text-based because you're used to selling maybe on Amazon or one of these other US-based retailers where it's like the five bullet points and that's kind of how you describe your product, you would have to think about localizing your content in a way that appeals to those local markets, not just from a language perspective, but also from a presentation perspective. And in both of those cases, both for compliance and for localized marketing, I think having a strong product data backbone is super essential. You've got to have the fundamentals about your master product data before you can really think about, okay, now how do I do these expansions and do these transformations on top so that I can start selling these products in new markets and explore new customer bases.

Lauren Livak Gilbert:

So Rebecca, when you talked about the visual content, can we dive into that a bit? Because I think a lot of brands, at least in North America, try to have the carousel images be super appealing and they work on enhanced content, but I know there's a lot more real estate on a lot of the websites in Asia where you can add more visual content. Do you have any sense of what has been the most impactful or what you see that is the most appealing that maybe we could translate into the smaller space that we have around imagery, unlike the Amazon's Walmart's targets of the world? But I'm just curious because I know it's so visually appealing and it makes it so easy to understand the brand and the product.

Rebecca Xing:

So if you look actually at the images themselves, they're not necessarily displaying any information that you wouldn't have in a pretty well designed PDP page in the west that has all of the attributes that you're looking for. So it's not that they're necessarily expressing new information, but they're just expressing it from a graphical perspective. So instead of saying like, Hey, there's three colors, they'll legitly have the shoes in all three colors, those images part of the product description in the actual thing in the actual product description page itself, or another example is the size. So they may actually have an image of the product and then the kind of lines that indicate this is how long it is, this is how tall it is, this is how wide it is. And then of course the other part of the image is just what's the human or individual who's in that product, in that image displaying that product? What do they look like? So for instance, in Indonesia is a predominantly Muslim country as an Islam country, so that means that the women should be wearing hijabs for instance. Now, that's not a hard and fast rule of course, but it is something that you should keep in mind.

Rebecca Xing:

If you are selling particularly fashion things to women in Indonesia, then that's definitely a localization that I would recommend you make and look into.

Peter Crosby:

So Rebecca, I don't know whether you've heard of this thing called ai, it's something new.

Rebecca Xing:

Oh, what's that?

Peter Crosby:

Lemme take a moment to explain. I think what we see from a lot of our members at the DSI is there's a combination of wary, excitement and fear and it's overwhelming and a lot of hype, and there's a legal and regulatory component to, so there's a lot of complexities in thinking about being able to harness the opportunities of ai. And I'm wondering how is the Asian region and brands and suppliers and retailers sort of trying to figure out their path with AI

Rebecca Xing:

For that? I think maybe a little bit more of, let me talk a little bit more about the landscape on the retailer side for Southeast Asia in particular. And I'll kind of tie it back to your question afterwards. So retailers and brands actually sometimes, especially if they're let's say from the west or from Europe, from the us, they may not actually operate their own stores or their own brand in Southeast Asia because it's a region with a lot of different countries, and each country has their particular nuances, their own logistics systems, their own ecosystems in terms of the buyers, but also the tech stacks and retail connections. And so what we see for instance, is on the retail side, there are often these retailers will be essentially pulled under a portfolio for and operated by a local provider. So for example, Zara, Indonesia is not it Zara, it's not operated by Zara.

Rebecca Xing:

The way that you and I know it's actually under the portfolio of an Indonesian company called Micra, ADI Picasa, and at Micra Picasa also has in its portfolio of Starbucks Marks and Spencer's, Reebok, a lot of these names that I think you and I would know, but what makes sense for them is not to necessarily own and operate their own stores in Indonesia, but actually to partner with Metra Picasa because they're the ones who are local there and they know where to have the real estate, where to open the stores, et cetera. The relationship therefore that these brands have with the retailers is also maybe not quite the same because you're kind of adding another layer of translation there. That often means that sometimes these retailers may not be getting the products the same way as if you were to directly be interacting between the brand and the retailer.

Rebecca Xing:

And so sometimes actually these retailers have maybe even poor product data because there's not quite that data bridge that's being built or it's not as strong because there's another layer in between. So it goes back to thinking about how you're going to be selling your products, understanding this ecosystem, have your backbone of your product data needs to be pretty solid, and you need to have that flexibility to be able to share that data so that you can be sure that it's going to be represented well in any of the countries that you're selling, not just kind of the ones in the west. So that's definitely one part On the brand side, actually, it's a similar story, but a slightly different solution. So again, some brands, they don't know how to operate in the Philippines and that's not necessarily a strong suit. And so what they have is what we call e-commerce enablers, and you can think of them as digital distributors.

Rebecca Xing:

So they will buy your product, they'll hold the inventory, they'll do everything including the content, the advertising, the marketing. They'll work with you to ensure that there may be selling on the correct channels either through these retailers or through various marketplaces. And it really helps the brands because it kind of takes that localization, that local knowledge component away and enables them to still enter that market and reach a new audience. Of course, when those brands become a certain size, they may decide that they want to take those operations into their own hands instead of having it handled by an e-commerce enabler, but that could be a way to think about how to Asia to enter the Asian market with an expert, with a partner who knows the ecosystem. But in both of these cases, I think what basically you can see is that there's just a lot of different channels, a lot of different sales channels that are available for folks to buy on.

Rebecca Xing:

We haven't even talked about social selling and live selling yet, but these kind of factors combined means that there's a lot of different outlets that people are using to consume information about their product information. So when it comes to ai, I think what I see is really solving that problem because you need two kind of parts to make this really work from a data perspective. When you're speaking about product data in particular, the first is that you need a data master, and the second is that you need to be able to transform that data into the formats that each of those sales channels is looking for. And so we've actually seen examples of retailers and brands here utilizing AI to solve this problem. So I'll give you an example. Maybe your brand recognizes Turquoise and Teal, but maybe this online retailer only recognizes teal and retailer B only recognizes blue, not even turquoise or teal.

Rebecca Xing:

So if you have thousands of products, it's going to be quite a task for you to then have to translate every attribute to match the required attribute formats that each retailer in this market is requiring. And if you're talking about now 50 retailers instead of 10 or five, you're talking about quite a bit of manual work in order to just get your products online just to get your product selling in those departments. So we actually spoke to a fashion retailer and they're using AI to do this, right? They're using AI to basically say, okay, now all these words, turquoise, teal, blue, whatever, they all mean blue. And we can automate that transformation and that makes the listing process a lot easier and more efficient, and I think that's a really clever way that AI has been used here.

Peter Crosby:

Those are familiar themes. I think we're seeing a lot of the same things here in North America. I was wondering sort of in the background, are you seeing how companies in Asia are building rigor around AI or how is it a free for all or are the companies sort of as cautious or at least careful as many of the companies we see here?

Rebecca Xing:

Yeah, I would say that there's definitely a healthy dose of skepticism as well with retailers and brands alike that are considering AI in this region. And there's also a lot of practicality, which I think is really great and very much though with the way forward in these cases. So the adoption of ai, other than the individuals experimenting with chat GPT in their free time and et cetera, I think there is a lot of, Hey, what's the business case? What's the true problem that I'm trying to solve? Not just looking at a shiny object of AI and getting excited about that and throwing it in the company. And they're also, because again, because of this kind of low cost of labor for many of these countries, especially in Southeast Asia, there's also much more of a focus on revenue uplift. So what does this mean in terms of my conversion? So what's the ROI I'm going to get on this AI technology? And if you are an AI provider not able to prove that you don't have the case studies or you don't have the kind of practicality to back up what you are promising, then these companies are very happy to continue on the way that they are because there's that practicality. And there again, that value, that focus on value and price that is quite prominent through the culture.

Lauren Livak Gilbert:

Are you seeing AI being used around packaging for, I can imagine that you might have a product shipped to Asia to one of these larger companies that might be owning multiple brands and maybe they don't have the right language on it or it needs to be translated or the packaging doesn't match the way that you're shipping. I'm wondering if there's any use case around AI and packaging. I've heard it a little bit in North America, but I'm sure it is much more prominent just based on coming from North America and being sold differently. Is there anything you've heard around that?

Rebecca Xing:

Totally. I think AI can be used as almost the, what's the word? The kind of first draft, but I think we all can be realistic about AI and say that it is not perfect. And for instance, in China, if you get the label wrong, the penalty is very high. So I've got to go back and recheck this, but I'm pretty sure it was if a consumer catches you with the wrong label on the product, they can demand 10 times the price of that product to be compensated.

Lauren Livak Gilbert:

Oh my goodness. Wow.

Rebecca Xing:

So it's super strict and people in China will definitely go and hunt for these opportunities because it can be lucrative.

Lauren Livak Gilbert:

If you bought a thousand dollars tv, I mean, hey,

Rebecca Xing:

Yeah, and you check every line item and you're like, Hey, is this exactly what they promised? So the cost of not getting it right is pretty high, and AI is not perfect yet. And so I think there very much is a okay, maybe it can do a first draft, but for some of these things that are really heavily regulated, you still need a human in the loop and you definitely still need to be double checking the work to ensure that you're not exposing yourself unnecessarily to risk.

Lauren Livak Gilbert:

Wow, I had no idea about that rule. I can imagine people hunting things down, especially high value products and checking the label.

Rebecca Xing:

Yay.

Peter Crosby:

It reminds me of Will Wonka and the chocolate factory where I've forgotten whose father it is, the guy that owns the factory and has all of his workers stopped doing chocolate and instead, stop doing it. Bianca instead, look for the golden ticket. I could see them filling rooms full of people doing nothing but checking labels to have the golden ticket. I think I have a new business idea.

Lauren Livak Gilbert:

Great visual Peter. Great visual.

Peter Crosby:

Thank you. Thank you.

Lauren Livak Gilbert:

So Rebecca, let's chat about social commerce. We mentioned it a couple times. We know it has taken off in the Asian market. I mean, I've seen pictures of people on bridges with cameras just showing off products and tell us more about it, tell us how it works and how it's taken off so much more there than it has in North America.

Rebecca Xing:

Yeah, it's really interesting. And social selling is definitely really big, especially in China and Southeast Asia, I think less so in a NZ, but let's talk about there's different kinds of social commerce and I think what you've been talking about with you seeing the guy on the bridge displaying products is live commerce, which is this combination of live streaming and shopping. I mean, if you guys grew up in the US, it kind of reminds me of QCQC.

Lauren Livak Gilbert:

Yes,

Rebecca Xing:

Kind. The concept is sort of similar except instead of dialing into placing an order, you are doing it through an app or through Facebook or something like that. But it's basically incorporating this see click, buy experience into a social platform as opposed to necessarily creating a platform that is dedicated to just e-commerce. Right? So there's an example, I think one of the biggest kind of live streaming, live selling platforms in China is called Xhu, which translates to Little Red Book. And it's basically, think of it like Instagram. You can kind of post photos, you can scroll through them. There's clips, it's 85% women, a ton of women, and they do a crazy volume of selling cosmetics, fashion, jewelry, those types of products. They introduced an e-commerce component to their platform back in 20 14, 10 years ago. Oh wow. You can think about also we talk about why is it so big?

Rebecca Xing:

Part of it's also because it's just been around for a lot longer and this has become very much part of the norm. It's a way to buy. Now other than live shopping, there's also a group buy that's also something that's quite popular in Southeast Asia and also in China. And basically this really took off during the pandemic when people were trying to acquire supplies of any sort. So if somebody could get access to a bunch of whatever it is, eggs, milk, cheese, whatever, then everybody kind of wanted to get in. And if you got a big enough volume, then maybe the supplier on the site would pay attention to you. And this one's largely organic, so it's usually done through WhatsApp. Somebody sets up a group and that person may or may not be taking a commission off of the actual selling itself. In live shopping, there's an influencer usually, and that influencer does need to have some personality traits that makes it fun to watch them, that makes it enjoyable, that makes the person who's watching them want to buy.

Rebecca Xing:

And these influencers can garner followership of tens of millions of folks who are just basically, we call 'em key opinion leaders or KOLs in China in particular. Now the benefit for this is in live shopping you be shocked, but the conversion rates are amazing. That's really the big benefit. And so these companies will hire these influencers to essentially sell their products through live shopping in order to basically get that sell through rate. And in group buy, the benefit is mostly on the user side where it's essentially you get a bulk discount for grouping together a bunch of people. Maybe you all live in the same apartment locked together, or maybe you live in the same neighborhood. You can decrease the shipping costs as well since it's one dropoff point. And then you can get to a wholesaler purchase. It's like Costco, but in your apartment complex. Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. And it's definitely, I think a part of the right, it's kind of monetizing a community. That's very much the theme of this social selling part. And I think this kind of community where you're sharing great deals with your friends and there's very much a community aspect to what you purchase and why you purchase it, especially in Asia, that's why it's really taken off also because it's been around for a lot longer too.

Peter Crosby:

Another movie reference comes to mind when I listen to this, which is in North America. I mean, if you've ever seen the movie Mean Girls where she'll say, stop trying to make fetch happen, it sort of felt like stop trying to make live shopping happen in the us. I don't know, maybe it's just to your point, it just hasn't been around long enough or we just haven't sort of found the right way in. But do you have a sense of why it's a lower adoption rate? And certainly I don't believe that we're having the same conversion rate magic that you are having. Do you have a sense of what the unlock would be for North America?

Rebecca Xing:

Yeah, I mean this is no data behind it, just gut. But my gut would be that some of it's cultural and then another part of it is the density of living of where folks are living. So I mean, you can imagine the China population 1.4 billion people and these cities like Shanghai and Beijing are bigger in population than some countries. So things like group by where you can really get that density of folks who are all together living in a similar area to place an order together, there's more opportunities for that because people are just living in a more densely packed area and these cosmopolitans have these higher concentrations of population. I think it's partially that. I think it's also partially cultural. There very much is a community is obviously really important in Asian cultures. And I think that whole sharing of good deals, seeing what other people are buying as a way to validate whether this product is good or not, those are those kind of important elements to the purchasing decision decision cycle.

Lauren Livak Gilbert:

I wonder if another element of it is fulfillment. I am thinking back to when I've worked with some brands who are trying to sell on Instagram, the way that they fulfilled Instagram orders versus how they fulfilled orders for the past 100 years with all of their retailers and built with Amazon. It was just so much more complex and they couldn't ever plan how much was going out, what they needed to have ready in stock. And where I can imagine in China or in Asia in general, it might just be easier to fulfill based on proximity, based on the products being created there, shipped there and less expensive, probably too less expensive labor. Yeah, I'm wondering if that has an element. I don't know if you would agree in any way

Rebecca Xing:

About that. Yeah, I think that's definitely part of the equation for sure. Right. I mean if you look at essentially these, I mean Temu I'm sure has been the talk of everything at this point. And a large part of that is just basically taking advantage of the factories in the manufacturing base in China. And if you live in China, then that's even a different story that factory could be in the next province over. So very much I think the logistics definitely play a role in this as well.

Peter Crosby:

Alright, Rebecca, close us out with some wisdom. So from your perspective for our North American listeners, what are two or three things that you think they could learn from how e-commerce is practiced in Asia?

Rebecca Xing:

Yeah, so I think what we were talking about and towards the end there around monetizing communities is a really interesting concept. And if you think of it kind of broader than just live shopping or group buying, but you think of it as how do you build a community around your product and your brand as part of your way to build that connection and eventually sell more product. I think that's something that Asia has done very well and maybe something that could be learned from. I think the second thing is just that agility and willingness to experiment that's really prevalent in all of the Asian countries that I've really had experience with. They're always on the lookout for where consumers are going. There's always some new platform, some new way that people are interacting with products that are buying products and people and companies are really quick to try them out and to try to follow where the consumers are going. In a lot of ways, some of that agility is facilitated by low labor costs, so you can just get people to help people with the problem,

Rebecca Xing:

Get people to help you try out new things pretty quickly. But I think that can also be replicated with technology. If you have a really solid technology stack. If you've got your master data in order and you have the capabilities on top to transform that, then it also gives you the capability to also try out new channels, new ways of selling in a relatively quick way. And I think that agility is really essential, especially with how competitive things are these days. And the last thing that I would say is the adaptation to local tastes and the personalization that is really essential in Asia. I know the US is one country, but I think we can all agree that not all Americans are the same as other Americans.

Peter Crosby:

I think we can agree on that. 

Lauren Livak Gilbert:

We can agree.

Rebecca Xing:

And in some ways it kind of seems like there's a lot of little different communities that are all in the melting pot that is the US and that's something that's really beautiful about the US for sure. There's an obvious cultural difference between Thailand and Vietnam from a language perspective, but I think that adaptation to different communities, different preferences, et cetera, is also something that can help to deepen that connection and also help the product to find the right consumer set. And again, I think that's something that AI can help with. That's an area where the technology of the day and the new things that are happening can really help to bridge that gap at scale in a way that wasn't possible maybe a year or two ago.

Peter Crosby:

Yeah, it's exciting really. I mean once you get over the hype and everything else, I'm just excited to see how these capabilities develop to really achieve the kind of personalization at scale sort of that you're describing here. I dunno what it's going to look like, but I can't wait to see it come to life because I do think hopefully it will be less obnoxious than kind of the blunt force personalization that has been thrust upon us through email market. It just feels full of effort and not authentic. But in some ways AI can help us with the authenticity hopefully over time as these models get better. Do you agree?

Rebecca Xing:

Yeah, I think it's overwhelming the amount of stuff that's coming through these days. And I think a lot of that is because you really need several different sets of data in order to do personalization well. And if you are missing, so in my viewpoint, it's these three sets, which is order data. You need to know how much was bought customer data, who bought it, and product data, what did they buy? And if you don't missing one of those pieces of the equation, then your capability to be nuanced in your recommendation goes down, but you still want to do recommendations, so maybe you take more of a brute force method of implementation. And that I think works because in the past that was better than what we had previously. And now that we have better technologies to do more with, to basically have better clean data sets in terms of the master data, we can also now be a little bit more nuanced and a little bit more specific in the recommendations. So I think that's really exciting also from me, from a technology perspective, but also from a consumer perspective. I would like less noise in my life.

Rebecca Xing:

Agreed.

Peter Crosby:

Totally agreed. Well, Rebecca, we are so grateful to have your brain and spirit on this show and to share all this knowledge with us. We're just really grateful to get this perspective and thank you so much for bringing it to us.

Rebecca Xing:

No problem. It was my pleasure and I hope it was helpful.

Peter Crosby:

Thanks again to Rebecca for sharing her knowledge with us. For more trending topics from the best experts, stop by digital shelf institute.com and become a member. Thanks for being part of our community.