Yenny Yusra Journal

With more than 25 years of experience across Southeast Asia, Ignatius Untung has built a career at the intersection of marketing, consumer behavior, digital transformation, and business growth. His background spans leadership roles in retail, aviation, e-commerce, hospitality, and technology, giving him a broad perspective on how businesses grow, where they get stuck, and why they sometimes misread the real issue.

Today, Untung works independently as a consultant, advising companies on marketing, commercialization, and growth strategy. After years of leading large organizations, he stepped away from corporate life with the intention of taking a break. Instead, opportunities kept coming from former colleagues and business leaders who wanted help solving growth challenges.

“I wanted to slow down for a while,” he explains. “But people kept reaching out for help, so I decided to take on selected projects independently.”

A career shaped by different industries

One of the most consistent patterns Untung sees among clients is not weak marketing, but incorrect diagnosis. Many of the businesses that approach him are already sizable organizations. Yet when growth slows, the first assumption is often that marketing must be the problem.

“Most companies come in believing they have a marketing problem. But after looking deeper, marketing is often not the issue.”

According to Untung, the real challenge frequently lies elsewhere. The root cause may be product positioning, distribution issues, a misaligned pricing strategy, broken inventory management, or inaccurate customer segmentation.

“Sometimes the business has never properly defined its target audience. Sometimes the product is wrong for the market. Sometimes the distribution strategy is limiting growth. Marketing becomes the easiest thing to blame because it’s the most visible.”

Clients may initially ask for help increasing sales, improving awareness, or strengthening their brand. But the engagement often expands into a broader business diagnosis. His consulting work extends across the entire marketing spectrum, including digital marketing, content strategy, brand development, and commercial growth.

“My role is first to identify the actual problem before proposing a solution. If the issue is pricing, then we work on pricing. If it’s distribution, we address distribution. Solving the wrong problem only creates more problems.”

Learning from different contexts

The more unusual aspects of Untung’s career is the range of industries he has worked in. From airlines to fashion retail, e-commerce, and hospitality, he has consistently moved across sectors rather than specializing in just one. Many consultants prefer to focus on industries they know well. Untung sees it differently. Industries are simply contexts. The principles of understanding people remain the same. In fact, he believes limiting oneself to a single industry can narrow perspectives.

“If you only learn from one industry, you never fully understand consumers. Different industries expose you to different situations, different motivations, and different decision-making processes.”

He points to his experience at AirAsia and later at fashion retailer 3Second. The consumers may often be the same people, but their behavior changes depending on context.

According to Untung, the same person can make completely different decisions in different environments. The more contexts you understand, the better you understand human behavior. This mindset also explains why he is comfortable advising companies in sectors where he has never personally used the product.

“I always start with research. In fact, not being a user can be an advantage because I don’t carry any bias.”

Why branding and marketing are not the same thing

Another misconception Untung frequently encounters is the assumption that branding and marketing are interchangeable. In reality, he argues, they serve different purposes.

“There is a common belief that marketing is branding and branding is marketing. They are related, but they are not the same thing.”

Many companies have achieved significant revenue growth without investing seriously in brand development. For years, this may appear to work. Eventually, however, growth becomes harder to sustain.

“Some businesses reach excellent numbers in revenue without a clear brand strategy. Then growth starts slowing, and they wonder why. When we examine the business, we discover they have been doing marketing activities, but they have never actually built a brand.”

For Untung, the foundation of effective branding begins with what he calls a brand formula. Once that formula is established, it becomes easier to determine which marketing activities strengthen the brand and which ones risk weakening it.

“Not every marketing tactic should be used. Some activities may generate short-term results but damage the brand over time.”

Company obsession with sales

Untung believes one of the defining characteristics of the Indonesian marketing landscape is its overwhelming focus on sales. Almost every business claims to care about branding. Yet when discussions become more specific, the conversation nearly always returns to revenue. Everyone says they want stronger branding. But eventually they ask the same question: How much sales will this generate?Untung also adds, 

“Businesses survive through sales. That reality cannot be ignored.”

At the same time, he believes many organizations underestimate the strategic side of marketing. One reason is that marketing remains one of the few professional fields where people can enter and succeed without formal training.

“That is both the strength and weakness of marketing. Anyone can become a marketer. But because there are no universal standards, many people focus only on what to do instead of understanding why it works.”

For Untung, curiosity matters as much as execution. The important question isn’t only what should be done. It’s why it should be done.

Behavioral and data 

Throughout his career, Untung has developed a reputation for applying behavioral to business decisions. While he enjoys the behavioral side more personally, he sees data and behavior as complementary rather than competing disciplines. Untung also views data as quantified behavior.

Data can reveal patterns, trends, and outcomes, but it does not always capture the motivations behind them. While data shows what happened, behavioral understanding helps explain why it happened. Looking at one without the other can leave businesses with an incomplete view of their customers and the decisions they make. 

“If you combine data and behavioral insight, you can start predicting future outcomes more accurately because you understand both the numbers and the people behind them.”

Untung also sees a growing tendency among marketers to focus on tactics without understanding the logic behind them. A common example is content production. 

Many businesses conclude that producing more content automatically leads to better performance because platforms such as TikTok reward frequency and volume.  From a practical standpoint, that assumption is not entirely wrong. He added that the problem isn’t the tactic itself. The problem is when people copy what worked without understanding why it worked. He often sees marketers repeating recommendations they learned from others.

“They say, ‘I did this and got these results, so you should do the same.’ But they never ask what algorithm, mechanism, or consumer behavior created that outcome.”

As platforms continue to evolve, tactics that once delivered strong results can quickly lose their effectiveness. Yet many marketers continue to replicate what worked before without questioning whether the conditions that made it successful still exist. Untung believes this mindset can be risky, particularly because every marketing decision contributes to how a brand is perceived. A campaign can always be adjusted or replaced, but consumer perceptions tend to last much longer. 

“Once an impression has already been created, changing it becomes far more difficult than changing the tactic that created it”.

AI is a practical tool

Like many marketing leaders, Untung has spent considerable time experimenting with artificial intelligence. His view is pragmatic rather than ideological. According to Untung, every tool has a market if it fits the context. Even in his own work, Untung regularly uses AI for ideation and exploration.

“I use AI for brainstorming, but the decisions remain mine. Ideally, AI should be a partner. Not just a tool.”

He recalls implementing AI-generated video production for a client when the technology was still relatively new. The decision was driven primarily by budget constraints rather than technological enthusiasm.

“The budget was limited, and AI helped us create content efficiently. Business decisions have to match reality.”

Today, he sees AI becoming increasingly common, particularly in sectors such as e-commerce where content volume matters significantly. When quantity is the primary priority, AI performs exceptionally well for businesses producing massive volumes of visual assets or standalone product imagery without complex dialogue.

In contrast, when deep strategic quality is the priority, conventional approaches remain much stronger. This is especially true for brand content that relies heavily on natural human conversation and regional nuances, particularly within the Indonesian language.