Singapore is a bridgehead, not a market
Companies keep buying Singapore-weighted programmes and reading the results as regional. The two things are barely related.
Singapore is where the regional headquarters sits, where the English-language content lands, and where the marketing team lives. It is therefore where most APAC B2B programmes are strongest, and it is a market of six million people whose buying behaviour tells you very little about Indonesia, Vietnam or the Philippines.
The distortion is in the reporting, not the strategy
Most teams know Singapore is small. What quietly goes wrong is that Singapore supplies a disproportionate share of the measurable activity — the traffic, the form fills, the event attendance — so it dominates the regional numbers, and the regional numbers set next year's plan.
The programme then optimises towards the market it can already measure, which widens the gap. Two or three cycles of that and the company has an excellent Singapore programme labelled as an APAC one.
Separating the two
- Report Singapore separately, always. Not as a market within a regional roll-up.
- Set market-level targets in local terms. A Vietnamese pipeline target expressed as a share of a regional number is not a target.
- Fund one non-Singapore market properly rather than four partially. Partial funding in this region reliably produces nothing in all four.
- Check where the buying committee actually sits. For a lot of categories the regional HQ influences and the local entity decides.
Singapore is the best place in the region to run a programme from, and the worst place to judge one by.
