For most of my career, marketing was organised around a funnel: awareness at the top, conversion at the bottom, and a lot of hopeful arrows in between. The last five years dismantled that model for me.
Commerce grows fastest when content, community, and shopping fuse together.
On a content-first platform, discovery and purchase happen in the same second. Someone watches a creator use a product, believes them because a community already vouches for them, and buys before the video ends. Nothing about that is linear.
What actually changes for brands
- —Creative is the media plan. A weak video cannot be rescued by budget.
- —Creators are distribution, not decoration. Treat them as a channel with its own economics.
- —Community is retention. The cheapest repeat purchase comes from people who already feel like insiders.
- —Measurement has to follow the behaviour, not the org chart.
The brands that grew fastest in South East Asia were rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. They were the ones willing to publish like a creator, respond like a community manager, and merchandise like a retailer — all at once.