Moving beyond demographics to true understanding: Key insights from Grow with Braze Seoul 2025

Customer engagement is only growing more important to brands and their customers—but making the most of it requires the right data, technology, and teamwork. To explore the future of customer engagement in an increasingly AI-driven landscape, Braze brought together over 500 attendees, including thought leaders, senior executives, innovative marketers, and customer engagement subject matter experts, at Grow with Braze Seoul.

During the event, held March 19 at the Conrad Seoul, attendees explored the ins-and-outs of the hottest topics in marketing, from loyalty and AI to personalization and cross-channel engagement. Let’s take a quick run-through of the key sessions and the key takeaways.

Digital body language: The foundation of customer understanding

You can’t build a strong relationship with someone you fundamentally don’t understand—and the same is true when it comes to customer/brand relationships.

Ju Yeon Ko, AVP of Braze Korea, opened the event with a thought-provoking analogy about restaurant ordering systems, describing how a restaurant's shift from personal service to digital kiosks resulted in confusion for customers and staff alike. "Just as physical body language helps us understand customer intentions in person, we must now learn to read digital body language through emails, chats, mobile interactions, and social media," Ju Yeon explained.

This concept of "digital body language" became a recurring theme throughout the day, highlighting how brands must go beyond traditional demographic data to truly understand customer intentions and needs in a deep, actionable way.

The state of customer engagement in 2025

The marketing and technology spaces are rarely static, but the past decade has been a particularly fast-moving one, with major shifts in data strategy, the rise of new messaging channels, and an overall evolution away from traditional ways of reaching consumers.

In his remarks, Shahid Nizami, VP of APAC at Braze, explored how consumer engagement has evolved in recent years. "Life of a marketer in the past was simpler. They relied on traditional media such as print ads, billboards, and TV commercials to reach their audiences. But their lives have since evolved dramatically," Nizami noted. He pointed out that South Korean consumers spend an average of 4 hours and 39 minutes weekly on online shopping, second only to China globally.

John Heywood, Director, Product Marketing at Braze, expanded on these insights with data from the Braze 2025 Global Customer Engagement Review. The report, which surveyed 2,300 marketing leaders worldwide, revealed three critical trends:

1. Trust through transparency — Clear value exchange is essential when collecting customer data, and brands’ efforts to embrace advanced personalization are being held up by concerns about user consent.
2. Messaging requires both content and technology — What brands say is equally important to how and where they say it; brands must combine approaches and be both content-driven (e.g. incorporating pop culture references or humor) and technology-driven (e.g. using send-time optimization).
3. AI as an enhancement to customer experiences — AI is the future, but brands need to think about how they’re leveraging it to optimize user experiences over time—and make a point of using AI as a copilot rather than a replacement.

Heywood emphasized that "85% of marketing executives expressed concern that their messages aren't hitting home," a finding that underscored the need for more personalized, channel-appropriate engagement strategies.

Advanced personalization success stories from Yellow Balloon and BeBeCook

With all the focus on personalization and relevance in the marketing space, seeing how other leading brands have found ways to leverage technology to make customized experiences a reality can be a powerful thing for marketers. To that end, attendees explored impressive case studies from brands that have successfully implemented advanced personalization strategies:

Yellow Balloon's travel recommendations

Hyun Ju Kim and Eun Sung Kim from Yellow Balloon, alongside Ju Hee Park from CJ Maxonomy, demonstrated how they've built hyper-personalized recommendation algorithms using Braze. Their team created three key recommendation engines:

1. Search-based recommendations — Converting search terms into product metadata to suggest relevant travel packages
2. Similar product recommendations — Using Jaccard distance calculations to recommend alternatives for customers who viewed but didn't purchase
3. Shopping cart recommendations — Implementing topic modeling algorithms to suggest complementary products

These personalization efforts yielded impressive results, with click-through rates up to 6.8X higher than standard campaigns.

BeBeCook's food & beverage retention strategy

Do Kyoon Kim from BeBeCook and Chan Hee Kim from Martinee shared strategies for increasing repeat purchase rates in the food and beverage sector. They highlighted the importance of converting first-time buyers into second-time purchasers, as data from multiple food and beverage (F&B) companies showed that customer retention rates stabilize significantly after the second purchase.

Their campaign, which targeted first-time buyers with personalized recommendations based on previous purchases, drove a 14X conversion rate increase compared to control groups. By carefully timing follow-up messages (optimal at seven days post-purchase) and implementing cart-value personalization, they successfully increased both repeat purchases and average order values.

Mastering AI and cross-channel integration

AI can play a major role in the success of your customer engagement program, but only if you use it thoughtfully. To that end, Justin Guan, Senior Manager of CRM MarTech at foodpanda, presented a framework for scaling AI-powered customer engagement through infrastructure-based automation. Justin emphasized the importance of a foundation that allows marketers, designers, and campaign managers to launch campaigns directly without constant technical modifications.

Sang Kim, Senior Customer & Partner Trainer at Braze, demonstrated the power of the Braze platform’s Canvas customer journey feature when it comes to creating comprehensive cross-channel experiences. Kim showcased a retention strategy using Experiment Paths, decision splits, and Intelligent Channel filter that marketers could use to optimize message delivery based on individual user preferences.

The evolving messaging landscape: Generational shifts, the rise of rich messaging, and the role of AI

As the customer engagement landscape evolves, new advances in automation and messaging are opening up more opportunities for brands to achieve true conversational commerce. During the event, Kyung Shik Sung, Country Manager at Infobip Korea, highlighted three key trends shaping conversational commerce:

1. Demographic shifts - With Gen Z comprising nearly 30% of the global population and 27% of the workforce by 2025, messaging preferences are changing dramatically, with younger consumers moving away from phone calls and traditional ways of connecting and increasingly expecting seamless digital experiences (Source: Infobip’s MessagingTrends 2024)
2. Rich business messaging - Technological advances and shifting consumer preferences are powering an ongoing evolution from text-only to interactive messaging with images, carousels, and embedded purchases
3. Gen AI integration - To see the strongest results, brands need to explore AI-powered customer interactions across the entire purchase journey

Additionally, John Heywood announced that Braze will introduce native support for KakaoTalk later in 2025, allowing marketers to seamlessly incorporate Korea's most popular messaging platform into their cross-channel customer journeys.

Key channels and thoughtful campaign planning: Korean market insights

While the Global Customer Engagement Review is known for its top-level insights into the ways that marketing is evolving, attendees at Grow with Braze Seoul got a special sneak peek at some of the report’s unique insights into the Korean market:

• Korean marketers lead globally in using modeling (propensity scores, predictive purchase modeling) for campaign planning, with 65% of respondents employing these techniques
• Email (51%) and messaging apps like KakaoTalk (50%) remain the most important channels for Korean marketers
• Korean brands allocate 52% of marketing budgets to acquisition and 48% to retention, the lowest retention allocation globally (compared to the US at 51.1%)

Looking ahead

While the opportunities being opened up by data and AI are exceptional, brands today still find themselves facing a competitive market, making it essential for them to do the work to build a solid foundation for successful customer engagement and put their best foot forward with consumers. In that vein, Ju Yeon Ko emphasized the importance of continuing to learn from customer data and refining engagement strategies. "The most successful brands will be those that understand digital body language and respond with relevance, timeliness, and value," she concluded.

Forward-Looking Statements

This blog post contains “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of the “safe harbor” provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including but not limited to, statements regarding the performance of and expected benefits from Braze and its products and features. These forward-looking statements are based on the current assumptions, expectations and beliefs of Braze, and are subject to substantial risks, uncertainties and changes in circumstances that may cause actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. Further information on potential factors that could affect Braze results are included in the Braze Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal quarter ended January 31, 2025, filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on March 31, 2025, and the other public filings of Braze with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The forward-looking statements included in this blog post represent the views of Braze only as of the date of this blog post, and Braze assumes no obligation, and does not intend to update these forward-looking statements, except as required by law.