January 2025 Bonfire Marketer of the Month: foodpanda’s Justin Guan

Each month, Braze selects one individual as our Marketer of the Month in order to celebrate the exceptional work being done by members of our Braze Bonfire community. Whether it's providing support for their fellow marketers or going above and beyond by sharing their innovative ideas and strategies, these individuals are making essential contributions to their companies, their users, and the customer engagement space as a whole.

This month, we’re recognizing Justin Guan, Senior Manager of CRM MarTech at foodpanda, a subsidiary of Delivery Hero. foodpanda is a leading delivery platform in Asia and selected parts of Europe that is dedicated to bringing consumers a wide range of food, groceries, and more, quickly and conveniently. Let’s dive in.

Tell us about your background and the role you’re in now.

If you’d told me a few years ago that I’d end up at the intersection of marketing and tech, let alone championing Braze on a daily basis for a living, I’d have laughed. My background is in chemical engineering, and I spent a good part of my early career days trying to figure out what I was passionate about. Funny enough, that passion was hiding in the mini automated projects that I’d build for fun at home, mostly out of sheer frustration with manual tasks. What began as random passion projects turned out to be the foundation of an entire industry I didn’t even know existed. Let me share two examples.

During COVID-19, I was working on getting my motorcycle license. Booking practical sessions at the driving school was a nightmare—slots were released randomly and filled up in seconds because of social distancing rules. So, I built a script that checked for slots at regular intervals and sent me a Telegram notification when one opened up that matched my preferences. It was basically a real-time “push notification campaign”… for myself. The result? I got every slot I wanted without the stress.

Another project came from my workout routine. The body composition scanner at my gym was linked to an app, but the app’s clunky design made it impossible to track changes like weight or body fat percentage over time. Kind of the whole point of using it! To overcome this, I wrote a Python script to pull my data after every scan and update it in a Google Sheet with a simple dashboard. Without realizing it, I’d built an API “Connected Content” pipeline to manage and analyze my progress, anytime, anywhere.

Fast forward to 2022, I joined foodpanda’s regional growth strategy team. I was managing demand and incentive strategies for the Philippines, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, and part of my role involved working with CRM. That’s when I discovered the CRM team was setting up a new MarTech and Automation team… and everything they were doing was exactly what I’d been tinkering with on my own. It was a serendipitous opportunity, and I jumped at the chance.

How do you and your team use Braze on a daily basis?

At foodpanda, our CRM team operates across three distinct areas of focus:

1. MarTech: This is my team, and we are responsible for building automation tools and developing innovative engagement strategies, often leveraging untapped channels or crafting highly personalized campaigns.
2. Lifecycle Growth: They focus on user management, strategically guiding how users are treated based on specific triggers and behaviors to cultivate loyalty and high-quality engagement.
3. CRM Operations: This team ensures that all campaigns run seamlessly across our markets, handling the intricate details of daily execution and troubleshooting.

So, who uses Braze? Honestly, all of us! Braze is at the core of our CRM operations, and everyone on the team interacts with it regularly. While the depth of usage varies, Braze is integral to the work of all three teams.

Here’s a very simplified view of how we collaborate: The MarTech team might build a new engagement feature (such as a dynamic in-app message) and define its functionality and use cases. The Lifecycle Growth team then incorporates this feature into existing user flows, ensuring it aligns with our strategic and broader business goals. Finally, the CRM Operations team takes over, ensuring the campaigns using this feature are executed flawlessly and that users receive the intended messages on time.

Braze acts as the glue that connects our teams, enabling harmonious teamwork and the delivery of impactful, data-driven campaigns.

How do you see Braze as a career accelerant?

I see Braze as a career accelerant in two key ways: Through technical growth and interpersonal development.

1. Technical Growth: Braze is a powerful customer engagement platform that’s rapidly evolving, designed to empower marketers of all skill levels to deploy meaningful campaigns. Its comprehensive suite of features exposes us to a wide range of campaign options, from leveraging native tools to exploring advanced, fully customizable functionalities.What’s truly exciting for me is that new features are regularly introduced, challenging us as marketers to push boundaries. For example, tools like AI content testing, behavior predictions, and the recent integration of LINE as a communication channel create endless opportunities for us to experiment with and innovate.
2. Interpersonal Development: One of the standout strengths that I must highlight is the vibrant, global Braze community of like-minded, creative professionals from diverse industries. In 2024 alone, I attended several conferences and seminars organized by Braze, each offering opportunities for meaningful exchanges with peers from different backgrounds.I vividly remember a conversation with marketers from a cryptocurrency exchange. We bonded over a painful shared challenge of managing increasing unsubscription rates. We brainstormed ways to encourage users to resubscribe, which then led us to explore ideas for integrating subscription actions into promotional campaigns. This, to me, was extremely refreshing and fruitful, even though we had barely just met. It was reassuring to really see that marketers, regardless of industry, face similar obstacles and are united in finding innovative solutions to drive impact. Additionally, my team had the privilege of attending Braze Connections, an intimate gathering where we engaged directly with Bill Magnuson, the Braze CEO. This gave us firsthand insights into upcoming innovations and strategies, empowering us to stay ahead in our field.

Have you taken any of the Braze certification exams?

Yes, I took the Level 3 Digital Strategist Certification back in October 2024. I skipped Levels 1 and 2, thinking that my experience derived from creating multiple campaigns and Canvases had prepared me well. But I quickly realized that there was so much more to learn.

While studying the course materials, I uncovered areas that rarely come up in my day-to-day work, such as data management, SDK integration, and data allotment. These insights deepened my understanding of the infrastructure behind running Canvases, and highlighted how thoughtful coding practices can optimize data costs and consumption. I also delved into the Braze platform’s analytics features, like retention and revenue reports, which are built into the platform but rarely utilized given how we rely on external dashboards. Yet, these reports are equally insightful and helpful in understanding how our campaigns perform in real time.

Fortunately, I passed the examination, and the experience proved to be incredibly worthwhile. It allowed me to solidify my holistic understanding of Braze and, more importantly, to legitimize my expertise with an official certification.

What is a campaign that you’ve worked on this year that you’re most proud of?

In the last quarter of 2024, we rolled out a revamped prospect lifecycle flow for users with zero lifetime orders across 11 APAC markets. This was a big milestone for our broader Single Customer Journey initiative, which aims to bring all our fragmented lifecycle flows into one unified system. The goal is to enhance communication reach and build an ecosystem that could give local campaign teams the flexibility to test and optimize content instantaneously.

I led the technical strategy, making sure Braze was integrated with our internal tools , and worked on building the infrastructure to support this. The consolidation of the prospect lifecycle flow was our first step, and we're already planning to extend this to other user segments for a fully unified customer journey.

The results have been great so far. Since switching to the new prospect lifecycle flow, monthly orders from the segment have increased by 3.7%, even though we reduced incentive spending. This was thanks to better communication visibility and shifting our messaging from being solely incentive-driven to a more balanced approach, including educational content.

Interested in collaborating to build the future of customer engagement? Join a collective of experts to forge connections, share ideas, and accelerate your career at the Braze Bonfire Community.