My friend Alan shared this JWT presentation with me, it’s a good read. The truth is, even if companies here, both the locals and internationals, were given this report, their staff wouldn’t really consider it.
The biggest problem in Vietnam is not that brands / companies are incapable of understanding. It’s just that they don’t need to. Understanding online and social media is acknowledging that online could propel a existing brand to greater heights, or it could take a nothing product to become the new star. Sure, I understand that conventional media could do the same, but there’s one key difference: very few companies really compete when it comes to online in Vietnam. And it’s not like Vietnam is small. Vietnam has 85 million people (13th in the world!) with 25 million of them online. Over half the country is under 30, and most of those are online or using their mobiles; they’re out and about. They’re doing stuff.
They’re spending. They’re talking. But there’s little connection that companies here want to cement between those two actions. And though there’s incredible opportunity online because no one is really strong here, no one really wants to consider what that means.
Imagine if you had come out with a service like the Facebook of today back in 2000. The competitors in communities and web services back then were sites like Xanga, Geocities, etc. Can you imagine Xanga facing off with Facebook? No, there would be absolutely no competition. But in 2000, we never knew there would be a Facebook, we wouldn’t have been able to imagine it, so of course we couldn’t see the possibilities. It took 10 years to fully realize the potential of Facebook 2010.
And that’s a little what Vietnam is like today, in terms of online marketing and social media. Online marketing today is Geocities. But the major difference is that, we all know Facebook 2010 exists. We can use it to take out Geocities here. But most companies in Vietnam don’t want to, almost as if they shouldn’t peek, like it would be cheating, even if they’re part of internationals whose other branches are already using Facebook 2010 (and those other branches face the other Facebook 2010’s from other companies, they don’t have an opportunity like facing Geocities as they do in Vietnam) .
If you showed Facebook to Vietnam, they would say, but we have Geocities, it’s the same right? People truly do feel that Internet advertising is random, unknown, inconsequential – you can see in how they approach it, how they budget for it, how serious they take online versus traditional media. How they talk about it when they meet you.
TVC, Print Media, companies here do go all out and compete, and I won’t comment more on those because I’m not really knowledgeable about that side. But online is completely open, waiting for someone to think, hey if we can dominate in this, we could just completely take over – no one else is here or cares.
The Vietnamese people are already there. Young Vietnamese are all over the Internet watching videos, listening to music, reading random news. You could say Vietnamese internet usage is almost caught up- if the US and Europe are in 2010, then they’re 2007 or 2008.
And yet Vietnamese online advertising is still 2002. The age before social media.
“Let’s put up banners and count the impressions”
“Let’s make a microsite, spend a ton of money to fuel registrations and gather personal data, and then what we’ll do is never use that data. Never follow-up. Never contact and see what opportunities are there for brand advocates. Sales conversion. Etc. And we can do this all over again next year too.”
If Vietnamese businesses lack anything which I think would be indicative of the attitude here, it’s attention to detail, with a key example being customer service. Understanding of why customer service is important, not just for general companies and shops, but even to the most expensive of restaurants here, is extremely lacking in Vietnam. And to me, if social media is anything, its core is at Customer Service.
If Customer Service is not important, then Social Media cannot be important either.
“I have a website that advertises my shop and goods. I put my email so anyone can contact me. When people do email me, however, I don’t reply.”
“When people run into an error on my website, I tell them to try again later. Or I tell them they did something wrong.”
“When someone makes an order on my ecommerce site, and it’s out of stock, I just don’t do anything. When they email to ask me what’s going on with the order, I tell them it’s out of stock and I ask them to pick something else.”
That’s how it should be right? Isn’t this how it works everywhere else? I mean, that’s just business.
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