Australia is failing to crack the Asian market, publishers told
Roshni Mahtani, CEO and founder of Asian parenting website Tickled Media, told Australian publishers at yesterday’s Mumbrella Publish conference that they’re missing a trick by failing to tap into the Asian market.
“That’s the beautiful thing about Australia – even though this room doesn’t really represent it if you look around – but 50% of the market here are immigrants or have been born to immigrant parents. That’s great – it means you can probably launch to a lot of countries out of this one country,” she said.
Mahtani: “I don’t think Australia is that far away from the rest of Asia”
“You don’t have to be in Hong Kong to launch a Cantonese website – we launched out of New York.”
The comments were made during a keynote session at the conference during discussing how to run a profitable online publishing businesses without relying on display advertising.
When asked how Australia can tap into the rest of the world’s markets when it’s so geographically far away, Mahtani responded: “I don’t think Australia is that far away from the rest of Asia – Perth and Singapore is three-and-a-half hours away.”
A member of the audience then asked Mahtani if she knew of any Australian brands are tapping into the Asian market really well, she responded: “No. Actually, I do think it’s a great opportunity to tap into the Asian market here in Australia, especially if you’re looking at things like property and investments or things like travel.
“If you’re a Chinese person, or someone from Hong Kong living in Australia, chances are you might be open to buying property from Hong Kong.”
Mahtani also discussed the difficulties she’d faced when expanding into the varied countries around Asia.
“In some markets we’ve chosen not to revamp our designs, because when we did a lot of user testing we realised that in a market like Thailand they don’t want a clean website, they want to see pop ups, they want to see blinking things, they want to see jarring colours and big fonts and big stickers… that’s the whole thing about not being judgemental, not coming in with your own perception,” she said.
She talked about the importance of “non judgemental culture”, which can be achieved in part by “hiring people from the company you’re trying to target”.
