Right now, Asia is where it’s at.
And it’s easy to see why. Asia is booming like never before. Between 1990 and 2022, India’s productivity increased more than fourfold, while China’s surged fourteen times. South Korea’s Hallyu Wave is driving a cultural explosion across the globe, from Parasite and Squid Game to Blackpink and BTS. On social media, China’s Douyin (TikTok) now reaches 1.5 billion users worldwide.
The future, more than ever, is Asian.
In the words of the World Economic Forum, the world has entered the Asian Century.
But even as the region’s power and influence expand, so its audiences are fragmenting.
When it comes to media habits, Asia is at the epicentre of the worldwide shift from traditional, unifying mass media to algorithm-driven social media and short-form video. In the Philippines, for example, the average smartphone owner now consumes more than 20 hours of online video content a week.
At the same time, studies point to widening cultural divisions, with growing rifts between young and old, rich and poor, men and women, metropolitan elites and provincial outsiders. A recent international survey highlighted the internal divisions in Korea, India, Malaysia and Singapore. South Korea in particular emerged as the world’s most culturally-divided nation, with almost 9 out of 10 adults saying there are deep fractures in their society across numerous different dimensions.
All of which brings us to the role of brands, and the opportunity waiting to be seized.
The Asian economy is booming, but brands aren't keeping pace
For many Asian marketers, brand-building has historically taken a back seat to immediate sales.
Campaigns in APAC are 36% more likely than in North America and 67% more likely than in Europe to prioritise short-term sales growth. The result? Only ten of Interbrand’s World’s Top 100 Brands are Asian, with just Samsung and Toyota in the top ten. Kantar’s BrandZ list tells a similar story, despite Asia contributing roughly 55-58% of global GDP.
To which you may be tempted to say, so what? Asia’s economies are now bigger than the rest of the world put together, so they must obviously be doing something very right.
This may be so. Yet at the same time, Asia has seen a growing price-led and feature-led commoditisation, and a steady erosion of brand loyalty. According to McKinsey (2024), 60% of all Asian consumers, and a remarkable 86% of all Chinese consumers, regularly switch brands and retailers in pursuit of better value. This trend has been turbocharged by the growth of cheap, locally produced copycats of international branded products. The result is a downward spiral of prices and margins.
The point about brands is that they have always been much more than just badges on products. As Seth Godin put it, a brand is the set of expectations, memories, stories and relationships that, taken together, account for a consumer’s decision to choose one product or service over another. In every market in the world, brands are as much a cultural phenomenon as an economic one, and as much a repository of shared values as a guarantee of quality and value.
As human beings, we are social animals. We dislike isolation. And one of the ways we establish belonging and connection with others is by buying into our chosen brands and their values. This is true for Western brands like Harley-Davidson, Apple, and Louis Vuitton. It’s also true for the new wave of Asian cult brands like Solid Homme and Girlcult. Not to mention Pop Mart’s Labubu phenomenon.
Brands that get it right not only resist copycats—they create loyalty, social connection, and long-term growth.
A new approach
The question now is what mainstream Asian businesses should do about all this.
It’s not completely wrong, in the short term, to carry on just as we are. A rising tide lifts all boats, as they say, and Asia’s growing share of the world economy is the tide that keeps on rising. The problem for the future will be what to do when the growth stops.
An alternative might be to adopt a Western-style approach to branding, as epitomised by Binet and Field. In their model, 60% of the budget should be invested in long-term brand-building and the remaining 40% in short-term sales activation. But that might not go down well in Asia, either with clients providing the budgets, or, probably even more importantly, the consumers who have come to expect rational pricing and feature-led messages before they will part with their money.
So where do we go from here? In the situation that Asia finds itself in right now, we need a new Asian-specific focus on branding. The right approach can help forge the connections of shared values and understanding that audiences across the region are crying out for, enabling businesses to keep on making money while resisting the downward pressure on margins. But to do that, we must first invest. It may not be a 60:40 budget split between branding and short-term sales. It may, instead, be closer to 50:50 or thereabouts.
But to truly reap the benefits of the region’s extraordinary economic and cultural success, it’s time for Asia’s brands to stand up, be counted and take their rightful place on the world stage.
Warwick Cairns is the partner at The Effectiveness Partnership. Catherine Moustou and Chris Baker are strategy directors at The Effectiveness Partnership.
