Exploring Indonesia + Understanding Business Messaging

Challenge

Helping a major tech brand gain a deeper understanding of its Indonesian audience’s mental model for business messaging.

Our client wanted to understand the relationship its Indonesian audience have with business messaging – the motivations, barriers, and values of communicating with businesses on their platform. However Indonesia was a country and culture they knew very little about! In order to truly understand their users’ relationship with business messaging and how they connect with businesses, they knew they would need to root into who these individuals are, what their daily lives entail, and what their culture is like.

Approach

To gain a meaningful understanding of who these people are, we needed to grasp the broader cultural context. We designed a week-long immersive experience for our clients, integrating them into the daily lives of various users and providing a deep dive into Indonesian culture.

Traveling to Jakarta, we facilitated discussion groups across different socioeconomic classes to uncover the current drivers, barriers, opportunities, and gaps on the platform, when messaging with businesses. We also conducted ethnographic research in users’ homes, allowing us to meet and observe the people who rely on the platform daily. Additionally, we engaged with business owners to gain insights into their perspectives of the platform and how they wanted to leverage it to grow their businesses.

Finally, we organized immersive shopping tours with our clients, visiting local wet markets and trendy shopping centers, to provide a more comprehensive cultural understanding of the businesses that Indonesians frequent.

The week concluded with a debrief session where we discussed all the valuable insights gathered!

Impact

Our clients gained a deeper understanding of their users’ needs when it comes to business messaging, and the opportunities for future growth. They also gained rich, first-hand user narratives and personal stories, that would be helpful to the brand moving forward. And of course, they developed a deeper understanding for one of their largest markets. The project culminated in a deck filled with insights and images from the week’s activities, adding color, texture, and a personal touch to the final deliverable.