Jacquelyn Yang is the Senior Marketing Manager at a young Singapore company, Funding Societies, in the nascent debt crowdfunding scene in the island city-state. Debt crowdfunding, also referred to as peer-to-peer (P2P) lending, represents an alternative source of loans for businesses to borrow money. P2P companies are different from banks in that they operate through online platforms, utilise data analytics and algorithms for credit risk assessment, and have much shorter turnaround times for loan approvals than the banks. Moreover, while banks lend money to companies using customer deposits, P2P companies play the part of a matchmaker by enabling individual investors to put money directly towards funding a particular loan. Crowdfunding is part of a growing worldwide trend in FinTech innovations. It is perhaps unsurprising then that there were no fewer than seven P2P lenders in a mere three years since the first company, MoolahSense, was founded in Singapore in 2013. The rivalry is intense and exacerbated by the fact that business loans tend to be a product that does not differentiate on non-price factors. In addition, all of the competing companies, with the exception of CoAssets, appear to be competing head-on for the same general SME market. To improve the effectiveness of their marketing efforts, it would be helpful for Funding Societies to move away from a 'shotgun' approach to marketing to more carefully identify the segments or types of SMEs that would be more inclined to borrow from the crowdfunding market. These SMEs would represent the 'lower hanging fruit' so-to-speak, and identifying who they are will help Funding Societies better focus their marketing resources. Understanding the factors that influence an SME's decision to borrow from a P2P lender will help Funding Societies build a strong competitive advantage, giving it an edge over its P2P competitors as well as banks. What should Yang focus the marketing strategy on?

The case is set in 2014, from the perspective of Pyra, a Singaporean subscription box company for beauty products. Subscription-box services are a fairly new business model that involves the delivery of product(s) to the consumer on a periodic basis. A more recent variant of subscription-box services personalises the selection of products delivered, by closely matching products with customers' preferences. The company, in essence, becomes a personal shopping assistant for the customer. Pyra falls squarely in this last category. Pyra relies on data analytics and proprietary algorithms to personalise its selection of products. Given that customer data is central to the operation of the business, a platform that provides ease and convenience to customers in the provision of their feedback and preferences is paramount. Pyra developed a mobile app for this very purpose. The fact that its target segments are millennials and centennials, consumers who are tech savvy and always connected, makes this a sensible move. The app also makes it easy for customers to share the curated boxes they received on social media. Pyra was launched in early 2013 and has had reasonable success in its first year of operations, with double-digit month-on-month growth in customer base. There are nagging doubts, however, about whether the business will continue to be viable in the longer term. For one thing, retention of customers might prove to be a challenge, as customers' interest in accessing novel products could wane with time. In addition, with the entry of direct competition becoming an imminent event, there are looming questions about the sustainability of Pyra's competitive advantage.