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Breaking Down Silos: How PR, Marketing, and Customer Experience Are Converging in 2026

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Trust isn’t built by what brands say. It’s built by what people experience. Across Asia, consumers interact with brands in multiple ways: news coverage, social media, websites, WhatsApp messages, and customer support. Yet many organisations still operate in silos, with PR, marketing, and customer experience functioning independently. Here’s the challenge: if your press release sounds inspiring but your support replies feel robotic, people notice. If your ad promises one thing and service delivers another, trust quietly erodes…… often before you even realise it. By 2026, silos won’t just slow teams. They can limit credibility and loyalty. But the path to integration isn’t straightforward. Differences in team priorities, tools, budgets, and culture mean seamless collaboration is aspirational, and achieving it requires more than wishful thinking. Why Convergence Matters Consumers Experience Brands as a Whole Audiences don’t separate PR, marketing, or customer service. They experience your...
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Phygital Isn’t the Answer. Strategy Is.

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This article is a deliberate counterpoint to our earlier piece, “Phygital Experiences: How PR Bridges Physical and Digital in 2026.” Together, they reflect a reality most communications leaders face today: phygital is powerful, but only when strategy leads and experience follows. Phygital has become one of the most overused words in communications. Too often, it is treated as a shortcut to relevance rather than the outcome of clear strategy. The uncomfortable truth is this: most phygital campaigns fail. Not because the technology is immature, but because the thinking behind them is. AR filters do not fix weak narratives. Hybrid events do not rescue unclear positioning. Virtual experiences do not compensate for brands that lack meaning or momentum. In many cases, phygital simply amplifies confusion faster and at greater cost. There is also a fatigue that few are willing to admit. Audiences are selective. Not every interaction deserves immersion. Not every campaign warrants participatio...
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Phygital Experiences: How PR Bridges Physical and Digital in 2026

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What if your next PR campaign didn’t just tell a story, but expected people to step inside it? By 2026, the line between physical and digital is no longer blurred. It is functionally irrelevant. Audiences do not experience channels. They experience continuity or they disengage. This is where phygital stops being an innovation play and becomes operational reality. For PR teams in Asia, this shift is uncomfortable because it exposes an old truth. Most communications strategies were never designed to be experienced. They were designed to be distributed. That model is breaking. This piece looks at what phygital really means for PR in 2026, why it matters now, and how to use it without confusing technology with progress. Why Phygital Matters Now Immersion is no longer a differentiator Audiences in Asia have moved faster than most brand strategies. They are already comfortable with: AR-enhanced discovery Hybrid participation without friction Experience-led value, not message-led persuasion T...
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Dark Social and Private Communities: Where Brand Trust Is Actually Built in 2026

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What if the conversations shaping your brand never appear on your dashboard? In 2026, the most influential discussions about brands are no longer happening on public platforms. They are unfolding quietly inside WhatsApp groups, Telegram channels, Discord servers, and closed communities you cannot see, scrape, or track in real time. This is dark social. And in Asia, it is not a fringe behaviour. It is the default. For PR leaders, this changes the job fundamentally. Visibility is no longer the main challenge. Relevance is. If your strategy is optimised only for public platforms, you are managing optics, not reality. Many organisations still confuse activity with influence. Why Dark Social Now Dark social has existed for years. What’s changed is its weight. More than 70 percent of online sharing now happens through private channels. Across Asia, platforms like WhatsApp, LINE, WeChat, and Telegram dominate daily communication. Gen Z and Millennials, in particular, prefer private spaces for...
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Brand Visibility in the LLM Era: Why PR Holds the Advantage in Southeast Asia

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Brand discovery is changing, whether most organisations are ready for it or not. As large language models like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity become default starting points for questions, visibility is no longer about who ranks highest on a search results page. It’s about who shows up inside an answer. Adweek* recently described LLMs as the new information gatekeepers, synthesising content rather than pointing users to links. What matters to these systems isn’t volume or optimisation tricks. It’s whether information looks trustworthy enough to repeat. That distinction is subtle, but it changes everything. Globally, Reddit has emerged as one of the most-cited sources across major AI platforms. Not because it is polished, but because it is messy, opinionated, and visibly human. The conversations there follow real questions, real disagreements, and real consensus-building. That’s how models learn what “helpful” looks like. But Southeast Asia doesn’t have a Reddit equivalent. And that’s ...
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