In this episode of The CMO Office Podcast, I sit down with Mark Khoo, Digital Activation Lead APAC at Versuni, the company behind Philips home appliances across Asia Pacific.
Versuni may not be a household name, but the products certainly are. From air fryers and coffee machines to irons, steamers, fans and dehumidifiers, Philips appliances are part of many homes across the region. That gives Mark a fascinating marketing challenge: how do you take a 150-year-old legacy brand, famous for certain trusted products, and stretch it into newer categories where consumers may not yet make the connection?
Mark is refreshingly candid about the opportunities and frustrations. Versuni has strong data foundations, including business dashboards, media dashboards, brand health data and market share data. The hard part is connecting all of it together, then working out what is correlation, what is causation, and what is genuinely moving the business.
That is where the conversation gets especially useful for marketers.
We talk about why ROAS can be a red herring, especially when it looks brilliant inside a platform but fails to show up in top-line growth, margin or market share. Mark shares why incrementality testing is so important, how marketers should approach MMM outputs with judgement rather than blind faith, and why senior stakeholders care far more about business impact than media metrics.
We also get into the fast-changing world of retail media in Southeast Asia. Platforms such as TikTok Shop and Shopee are no longer simply places to capture demand at the point of conversion. They are increasingly becoming discovery, consideration and validation channels too. For any marketer trying to understand the messy middle in Asia, this is a conversation worth hearing in full.
What I really enjoyed was Mark’s honesty about the human side of measurement. Data is vital, but marketers are still hired for their judgement. The dashboard can point you in a direction, but it cannot always tell you whether the answer makes commercial sense. It cannot always explain the role of weather, distribution, pricing, government stimulus, inflation or a competitor suddenly changing gear. It certainly cannot always translate marketing metrics into the language of the CFO.
That is our job.
So, if you are wrestling with platform data, retail media, MMM, incrementality, AI, or simply trying to prove that marketing is doing more than generating clicks, this episode is packed with practical, grounded advice.
Listen to the full conversation here or on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube.
Highlights include:
Why Philips’ long-standing brand strength is both an advantage and a challenge when building newer categories across APAC.
How Versuni is using business data, media data, brand health data and market share data to build a more complete view of performance.
Why ROAS can look impressive while still failing to prove real business impact.
Why incrementality testing is critical for understanding whether marketing has genuinely changed the outcome.
How retail media platforms such as TikTok Shop and Shopee are moving beyond conversion into discovery and consideration.
Why marketers need to challenge data outputs when they do not make sense commercially.
How to explain last-click attribution to commercial leaders who may otherwise assume all budget should go into search.
Why market share is one of the most important signals to watch when platform metrics look strong.
How brand health measures such as consideration and preference can act as leading indicators of future market share.
Why offline retail still matters deeply in APAC, even as ecommerce continues to grow.
How AI and predictive modelling could help marketers bring fragmented data together, while still requiring human judgement.
Why marketers need to speak the language of top line, margin and market share if they want to earn credibility with leadership.
