This year’s third economic forum entitled ”Consumer Market in the Philippines” was held at the German Club in cooperation with the German-Philippine Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Inc. and the German Embassy Manila on the 26th of April 2018. The distinguished speaker of the forum, Mr. Jose Victor Paterno, is the current president and CEO of the Philippine Seven Corporation.
The Philippine Seven Corporation is the company responsible for the operation of 7-11 convenience stores here in the Philippines. They currently have 2,300 stores present nationwide , supported by 11 distribution centres with a count of 14 million unique customers per week.
Mr. Paterno started his talk with a discussion of the company’s history and current position in the Convenience Store industry. He then proceeded to discuss the next generation of convenience retail, specifically how they planted the seeds for their current digital ecosystem – their road to digitalisation. Most of the 7-11 stores, particularly in greater Manila, are now WI-FI equipped which helps them realize their digital vision which is “To be the physical gateway to the virtual world for our customers. Loyalty digitizes our relationships with customers, partnerships with others who benefit from access to our infrastructure create an ecosystem...”, and with this they created the loyalty points system which has now evolved to the CLIQQ App.
With their new system, they placed online Point-of-Sale (POS) glass scanners and kiosks that are able to do barcode-driven transactions in their stores, which would ease customer transaction and at the same time help their consumers have more options in what the store can serve them. Using CLIQQ, the consumers will be able to garner loyalty points which they can exchange for CLIQQ rewards. As of now they already have 7 million CLIQQ loyalty card users and 500 thousand apps downloaded. They can also use it as their e-wallet to store and spend their points, use their phone for payment transactions, send remittances, and pay their bills in the actual stores by using the CLIQQ bar codes.
Furthermore, Mr. Paterno also compared and contrasted the advantages and disadvantages of the online and offline industry. With this, he explained the strengths of the offline industry in terms of logistics- lower marginal costs, easier customer acquisition and retention and lower competition, better product exposure and discovery, and reliable purchasing convenience/trust. On the other hand, he also considered the benefits of the online industry which include having lower fixed costs, unlimited assortment, and quick scaling.
The German-Philippine Chamber of Commerce and Industry, would like to extend its gratitude to Mr. Jose Victor Paterno, for sharing with us with his knowledge, experience and commitment on the consumer market and to the participants for their presence and active participation.