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Q A HOWIE LAU
CMO
What are your key tasks and responsibilities as the new CMO?
StarHub is an exciting brand, and my role is to continue to excite and
engage our customers through StarHub’s brand and marketing across
both our consumer and enterprise businesses, as well as customer value
management. Over and above Marketing functions, I also oversee the
Entertainment & SmartLife and Media Business Unit divisions.
Marketing today is no longer about taking big advertisements in traditional
media like newspapers and TV channels. Online platforms and digital
marketing are fast becoming the future and they are proving to be great for
us to build upon into a stronger competitive advantage. In line with that,
Digital Transformation is one of the pillars of our strategy to build mobile- content appealing but they will likely complement
first and social-first, integrating digital, mobile, web, online and social
media technologies and management, with the aim of enabling better
customer experience and engagement with higher online transactions.
Increasingly, data analytics also play a key role for smarter use of our
marketing dollars over a bigger number of platforms. The result of mining
big data from StarHub’s multiple networks is that you get a massive
amount of data. The challenge is in building the right data library in
leveraging these data meaningfully for precision marketing.
In addition, as we continue to make inroads into the Enterprise space,
we need to build and tap on relationships with the CIOs and other key
decision makers, speak their language, empathise with their concerns and
show that we have effective solutions to offer.
The pay TV space has seen new entrants from OTT providers like
Netflix. Is your pay TV service still relevant?
The customers’ changing content consumption habits and existence
of OTT providers have created some buzz for a few years now. These
providers tend to only have a limited range of content to offer. We believe
our StarHub TV, with over 200 channels, caters to a much wider range of
tastes and preferences. We have a strong line-up of US-centric content as
well as a wide portfolio of multi-cultural Asian and local programming.
We believe we have built a strong, loyal following of customers watching
global content as well as Asian content like Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese,
and Korean content, among others. We are constantly curating new
content so that we can offer a bigger variety of TV content.
Technology and content goes hand in hand in bringing about a smarter way
of life. In April, we introduced Fibre TV for consumers, an all HD platform
offering over 200 channels. In addition, the technology powering IPTV is
smarter. For example, viewers can use a better recording service, which
allows simultaneous recording of two programmes into a hard disk drive.
StarHub Ltd Annual Report 2015
Interactive functionalities on Fibre TV are also Overview
aplenty. They include ‘Social TV’, where viewers
can conveniently recommend and post comments Strategy
about programmes on their personal Facebook
and Twitter accounts on their TV screens. ‘Picture- Performance
in-Picture’ lets our customers view content
airing on other channels without disrupting the Governance & Sustainability
programme they are simultaneously watching.
Financials
In August, we had also launched our own OTT
app called StarHub Go. This gives our customers
the flexibility to catch the shows they want, on
the devices they want, where they want, when
they want.
Viewers, perhaps, will find some OTT provider’s
it with what we have. In January 2016, we made an
announcement that we are working with Netflix to
bring their content to StarHub TV customers.
In the Broadband space, competitors tend to
compete on pricing, what is your strategy to
counter that?
We are pleased that our residential fibre
broadband base is expanding steadily as
customers continue to affirm their preference
for Hubbing with us. Our HomeHub and
HomeHub Go packs, which bundles content into
our broadband and even mobile proposition, are
very popular.
Our vision is to be the preferred provider and
backbone of Singapore’s smart homes where we are
able to deliver a seamless and premium experience
for wireless home networking, home entertainment
as well as home control and monitoring services in
future. We will continue to strive to deliver a reliable
and consistent broadband experience as we are able
to leverage our ubiquitous HFC network besides the
Next Gen NBN.
Today, we are the only operator that is able to
provide customers with Dual Broadband (cable and
fibre), and give them the ‘always on’ proposition.