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The future consumer: Aware, confused, information-bloated
What does the future consumer want and need? Choice and guidance. PhoCusWright's Ram Badrinathan, speaker at WIT, gives his take on trends that are driving consumers in the region.
“Extremely aware but confused, keen to learn but information-loaded, wants choice but also looking for guidance but, in the end, will develop particular interests.”
That’s how Ram Badrinathan, Senior Analyst Asia Pacific, PhoCusWright Inc, who will be speaking at WIT on November 29-30 describes the future consumer.
Badrinathan, who keeps watch on Asia Pacific trends in the online travel space for the global intelligence and consulting company, said that other than these consumer characteristics which were driving the marketplace, a few key trends were also having their impact.
Firstly, the adoption of eticketing in the Chinese air space. Says Ram, “As with most things in China, when things happen the situation changes so dramatically that rules of the game completely change.
“In the past 12 months, e-ticketing has been very aggressively rolled out by all the leading Chinese carriers, thus solving a massive obstacle in automation of online travel transactions.”
Secondly, the explosion of the Indian online travel market has been nothing short of spectacular. Says Ram, “The past 12 months have seen the Indian online travel market explode with airlines and OTA meta search all investing at least $30 to $50 million in driving consumers to purchase travel online.”
Additionally, the low cost carrier expansion in South-east Asia namely Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore and Vietnam has created fragmentation in airline choices while Australia and New Zealand are now firmly entrenched as a full service (corporate/ leisure) mature online travel market in Asia/Pacific.
According to PhoCusWright, which is a strategic partner in this year’s WIT, a mature online travel market has the following characteristics: Aggressive online distribution of air by the major airlines; both leisure and corporate market for online booking entenched in the market; presence of well funded online intermediaries; non air categories seeing traction and automation in fulfillment on both the demand and supply side.
On the longtail phenomenon in Asia Pacific, the subject of a panel that Ram will be moderating at WIT, he said, “Asia Pacific is all about longtail if you had to address it at the regional level.
Defining the longtail as ‘travel content that heretofore has been uneconomical or inefficient to access, aggregate, shop, book and confirm”, he said, “Consider, local markets with different behaviourial dynamics – Australians and New Zealanders travel maximum to each other, Koreans to China, search engines in Korea are different to those in China, Cambodian government is leapfrogging immigration procedures by offering electronic visas, virtual cash is emerging as a powerful online driver in India and China.
“Each market is a long tail unto itself. In my opinion, Asia Pacific is only long tail – that is why no major Pan Asian travel player has emerged whether it is offline or online.”