The Second Edition of Unbox Extra Is Set for June 16, 2022

This year, the Gokongwei Group’s innovation festival is all about the customer

Building a company-wide culture that takes a “customer-first” approach has become especially relevant during the pandemic, which ushered in massive changes in the way people live, work, play, and consume.

As JG Summit President and CEO Lance Y. Gokongwei noted in the conglomerate’s 2021 Annual Report, “Apart from Digital Transformation, Sustainability, and Leadership and Development, Customer-centricity is one of the pillars we have identified as crucial to our next phase of growth.”

It is against this backdrop that the JG Summit Digital Transformation Office is mounting the second edition of Unbox Extra: The Gokongwei Group Innovation Festival on June 16, 2022.

During the whole-day affair, local and foreign startup founders, global thought leaders, management gurus, and Gokongwei Group key executives are set to tackle the theme “The Voice of the Customer: Are You Listening?”


Matthew Cost, Morgan Stanley’s Executive Director of Equity Research, kicks off the event with Welcome to the Metaverse: How Customers Will Interact in the Future. In this introduction to the Metaverse, Unbox Extra attendees may glean how customers will be engaging with virtual worlds in the future.

This will be followed by JG Summit President and CEO Lance Y. Gokongwei’s opening remarks, which will dwell on the importance of building the conglomerate's organizations and processes around the customer, including its very own internal customers.

Later in the morning, Sophia Edelstein and Nathan Kondamuri, the co-CEOs and co-founders of New York-based startup Pair Eyewear, will present how they made purchasing eyewear more fun for consumers. In Technology to Enhance the Customer Journey, the duo will share how they employed empathy for their customers as well as available technology to create a positive customer experience.

In the two years since the outbreak of the pandemic, have you wondered how Filipino consumer habits have changed? In their talk The Filipino Customer, Post-COVID, Julian Cua and Anthony Oundjian from Boston Consulting Group present the latest findings on this fascinating subject.

The pandemic also changed working habits around the globe, which will be explored later in the day through The Six Worker Archetypes for the World Ahead, presented by James Root, senior partner of the American management consulting firm Bain & Company. This session will be of interest to people managers involved in developing the No. 1 internal customer – the organization’s own employees.

In the morning’s final session, Bea Camacho, design director at IDEO, the company that introduced design thinking to the world, elucidates more about this concept in the talk Design Thinking and Prototyping in Creating Great Customer Experiences. Here, she will also discuss how prototyping helps to launch hit products into the market.

We’ll then hear from Rachel Lim, the founder of Love, Bonito, one of the fastest-growing fashion companies in Asia. In How Deep Customer Understanding Leads to Customer Love, Lim talks about how her company was built to cater to a particular customer, in her case, the Southeast Asian woman. In this talk, find out how a brand’s purpose, culture, and understanding of a customer ultimately lead to success and most important of all, repeat business. 

Closely related to this topic is the session Customer-led Product Innovation in URC, led by the food company’s Co-Managing Director and Chief Marketing Officer Mian David and Chief R&D Officer Krishna Mohan Suri. Want to learn how the new Cloud 9 Gold became an instant hit with customers? David and Suri will show us how to innovate with the customer in mind.

Shifting the focus to digital products, Nel Laygo, the founder and CEO of Peddlr Philippines, shares his experience in Building Five-star Products for the Customer. In this talk, Laygo teaches how to deploy an imperfect, though usable product into the market, and how working closely with a group of alpha customers can spell the difference between failure and success.

Improving digital products is also the theme of Customer Metrics that Matter, presented by GoCart’s Head of Customer Service, Pauline Quianzon. Here, she talks about the metrics that led to the improvement in operations, customer ratings, and product offerings of GoCart (formerly GoRobinsons), the online store of Robinsons Retail Holdings, Inc. In her talk, Driving Customer-Centric Innovations, Grace Vera Cruz, country head of Grab Philippines, also speaks about how gathering and analyzing data correctly is crucial to achieving customer-centricity.

To further understand the customer journey, make sure to listen to How Southeast Asia’s Largest Car E-Commerce Platform Solves Car Shopping Pain Points. Here, Eric Cheng, the co-founder of the Malaysian-based Carsome, discusses how experiencing the troubles of buying a used car led to the creation of a customer-focused car-selling platform.

The world may have changed drastically since the onset of the pandemic, but what hasn’t wavered is the Gokongwei Group’s commitment to providing its customers with better choices. This year’s Unbox Extra is further proof of this commitment to fostering customer-centricity across all aspects of the conglomerate’s operations. It’s an event that Gokongwei Group employees can’t afford to miss.