Top 25 eCommerce leaders 2022: Caitlin Nguyen

Caitlin Nguyen (pictured) is the former director of digital marketing and eCommerce at Philips.

Her role saw her enable the APAC region through building and implementing the right capabilities in digital marketing, digital advertising, content, measurement, CRM, owned media, consumer engagement and consumer care, and direct-to-consumer online sales. In essence, her responsibilities entailed a digital and tech-enabled end-to-end full-funnel delivery for the consumer brands portfolio.

She was also heavily involved in Philips’ global strategic programme of marketing transformation which began a few years ago. Like its global counterparts, Philips embarked on a journey to adapt a relevant strategy for the APAC region, taking into account the great diversity of local market conditions and maturity, digital and commerce platforms, and consumer behaviour.

A key strategic intent in eCommerce for Philips was to build and strengthen the direct-to-consumer (DTC) ecosystem, with a focus on venturing into the DTC space and learning and testing to improve profitable growth.

What Nguyen and the teams at Philips saw was that some markets in the region have a higher level of readiness and maturity for DTC, while other markets represented growth opportunities.

She and her team know the DTC model sits alongside other eCommerce models such as e-retail. As such, a key approach with each major campaign – be it an awareness, consideration or a full-funnel campaign, or a pure direct response sales conversion campaign – was to ensure that each one was designed and set up with a clear and intentional digital ecosystem in mind. This was to ensure effectiveness and efficiency of spend, content, and messaging.

Over the past year, the company has used various digital marketing levers to drive eCommerce acceleration – from programmatic, to social, influencer marketing, live-streaming, affiliates, and on-platform search. The mix of these value levers depended on the campaign strategy and objective.

Nguyen believes that a key pillar of eCommerce success and acceleration lies in the test-and-learn mindset of a team.

Some test-and-learn strategies she has been proud of included experimentations on TikTok, and understanding how to deliver differentiated content at velocity on eCommerce platforms, especially during mega shopping seasons.

“For us, 2022 was a year of strengthening the foundation in digital and eCommerce, and focusing on brilliant basics while building the plan for more advanced DTC eCommerce capabilities such as subscription models,” she said. But, of course, the arena didn’t come without challenges.

One key challenge was around making choices and being razor-focused on a few big bets and to execute obsessively against those choices. 2022 was a year of growth in eCommerce versus 2021, and the team at Philips remains steadfastly committed to improving the eCommerce of the online channel while delivering best in class differentiated experiences for the end consumer.