In 2018, Uber's $6 billion exit from Southeast Asia wasn't just a business loss, it was a masterclass in how to lose trust.
The global giant arrived with its Silicon Valley blueprint, cashless rides, sleek sedans, and a one-size-fits-all app, ignoring how 80% of Southeast Asians paid in cash and preferred motorbikes for Bangkok gridlock or Jakarta floods.
Meanwhile, Grab, founded regionally, embedded itself like a local mate with cash payments from day one, with motorbike 'GrabBike' for urban chaos, and partnerships with street vendors for instant food delivery. It moved at market speed, launching GrabPay amid cash dominance and tailoring promos to festivals like Hari Raya, while empowering on-the-ground teams to tweak for Thai vs Filipino vs Vietnamese quirks. Uber clung to its app-only, cashless playbook amid motorbike-clogged streets and cash-dominant wallets, while Grab hustled with local haggling and regulatory savvy to claim 90% market share.
As Edelman's 2026 Trust Barometer flags foreign brands trailing locals by 28+ points across APAC, Grab's win shows how decision-making lag turns into lost consumer loyalty and trust.
"The domestic trust advantage over foreign companies is significant, and such a big gap will not be addressed by just having a local campaign," says Colleen Ryan, partner, The Research Agency. "Nor is trust just about how customers trust brands, it’s also about trusting the brand’s people on the ground to make culturally relevant decisions."
In Asia, a prime example is Grab. It didn't have to retrofit local understanding and cultural nuance compared to Uber that operated from a global playbook and didn’t align with the local market's actual behaviour.
"When local teams can't adapt or adapt fast enough, local operators can grab the space and occupy local hearts and minds," adds Ryan. "Decision-making lag becomes a trust lag."
As noted in the Harvard Business Review, the historical approach to localisation for many MNCs has been to treat it as a “surface-layer adjustment” where marketing, packaging, and pricing are adapted to suit local preferences while real control remains at the global HQ.
However, such superficial localisation is no longer enough to stay competitive in today’s saturated market where local brands are increasingly outmaneuvering global brands in achieving resonance with local consumers.
"Global brands today are likely at varying stages of that transition process to create a truly 'multipolar company'," says Joceline Yong, senior behavioural analyst at Canvas8. "But the ones that continue to resist giving local teams the autonomy to adapt the business to local needs may find themselves struggling to earn local consumer trust vis a vis domestic rivals."
In most cases, there’s still a gap between appearance and reality. Many multinational brands are good at localising creative, but the underlying decisions (around budget allocation, platforms, measurement, governance and even customer experience) remain centralised.
"The localisation theatre is real," says Jacopo Pesavento, CEO at Branding Records. "Most MNCs swap out the faces in the ads and call it cultural relevance. True local empowerment means local teams owning the brand positioning, the media mix, sometimes even the product offer. Very few holding companies are actually there yet. The P&L still reports to someone in London or New York."
The gap between 'being sold' and 'being trusted'
Brand trust and brand sales are interconnected, but one does not guarantee the other. In APAC, trust in a brand influences whether consumers are willing to buy from them, with 56% of consumers in APAC saying that they will quit brands they don’t trust. However, just because a brand has earned consumers’ trust doesn’t mean that it will translate into sales, given the competitive brand landscape and rising cost of living that APAC consumers are grappling with today.
A brand that is working hard to achieve both trust and sales in APAC is Adidas.
"Initiatives like the Creation Center Shanghai, a hub dedicated to differentiating Adidas products in China while maintaining the brand’s codes, seem to be paying off as the brand has seen a surge of popularity and sales in China, and it likewise ranks as the top fashion brand in Southeast Asia," says Yong. "It is growing trust in the region by investing resources in understanding and delivering on local trends and needs, and its sales numbers are also growing."
Edelman's 2026 Trust Barometer found that 67% of APAC respondents hesitate to trust those with different values or backgrounds. Moreover, when times are tough, people will often say that they favour local brands.
"In uncertain times, we gravitate towards the known," says Ryan. "We trust people like us; familiarity is often unconscious but that doesn’t mean we don’t feel and process it. In behavioural science terms the mere exposure effect shows that repeated contact with something familiar increases our positive evaluation of it, independent of objective quality."
In other words, local is a shortcut for safe and you don’t have to be actually locally owned. Instead, you have to feel local. KFC in New Zealand scores highly on “kiwiness" in The Research Agency's (TRA) Kiwicodes surveys because the brand has embraced Kiwi culture.
But are domestic rivals winning because of 'local values,' or are they simply outperforming foreign brands on basic reliability and transparency?
Bain & Company's Asia-Pacific Consumer Products Report 2025 reported that local brands across the region have largely matched or surpassed multinational competitors in innovation, marketing, sales, and digitalisation. More importantly, according to Bain, they are more agile and more closely attuned to local consumer needs than globals, therefore they innovate faster. So while cultural relevance is key, performance is what makes the difference.
"Performance is the real trust driver, not provenance," says Ryan. "In Australia, the trust data supports the argument about performance. Aldi, which is German, ranks second nationally on trust. Cultural origin is irrelevant when you consistently deliver on price and promise. Woolworths and Coles are genuinely local yet are the most distrusted brands in the country. Performance beats provenance."
The brands closing the trust gap aren't the ones with the best brand tracking scores. They're the ones with the lowest complaint rates and the fastest response times.
"Trust gets built in the boring middle: delivery, service, consistency," says Pesavento. "Nike in China is a good example of a brand that had to relearn this the hard way after years of assuming the swoosh was enough."
Nike in China thought the swoosh was a trust passport, until it wasn't. Once a status symbol, the brand stumbled hard from 2023–2026 as local rivals like Anta and Li-Ning outflanked it. Top-down calls from the US jammed local agility, pushing premium pricing without fresh reasons to pay up, overstocking slow-movers, and discounting into brand erosion.
"The domestic advantage is mostly an execution story, not a values one," adds Pesavento. "Local brands in Japan or Korea aren't more ethical, they're more reliable. They've also had decades to build distribution, retail relationships and CRM data that foreign brands are still trying to catch up on."
In many APAC markets, domestic brands build trust quickly because they naturally reflect local culture, faith and lifestyle.
"A strong example is Wardah in Indonesia, which gained significant traction by aligning closely with values and local beauty ideals through certified-halal products that many international players did not offer," says Cheong Tai Leung, CEO, APAC, Kantar. "That cultural alignment immediately made the brand feel more relevant and trustworthy to consumers."
'Foreign' is no longer an automatic shortcut to being aspirational
Now that 'foreign' is no longer an automatic shortcut to being aspirational, how do you pivot a global brand's strategy when its heritage is no longer a premium asset, or has become a potential liability?
"We’re seeing a clear shift from 'global = aspirational' to 'global must prove relevance and be accountable'," says Jessica Dervyn, senior principal analyst in the Gartner Marketing Practice.
According to Dervyn, achieving relevance and accountability requires three changes. Reframe the value of “global” toward consistency, innovation and accountability. Embed local relevance into the core offer, not just marketing but into product, service and customer experience, and decouple heritage from relevance, ensuring brand meaning is co-created with local markets rather than imposed from HQ.
"Redistribute decision-making, giving local teams authority over how the brand shows up and adapts in-market," says Dervyn. "Leading brands are also investing in local talent, local data, AI models and regional innovation hubs, which makes the brand feel genuinely embedded rather than externally imposed."
Building brand equity that transcends the 'foreign’ story is also key. If the value story is anchored in provenance like New Zealand’s clean green image, or French elegance, or German engineering, and that provenance is now generating distrust rather than aspiration, the brand needs a new centre of gravity.
"That might be performance, transparency and accountability, technological superiority, community investment, or supply chain transparency," says Ryan. "The nationality aspect doesn't go away, it just stops being the main headline and the solitary driver of trust."
In Asia, especially China, New Zealand baby milk formula has been valued by customers over the long term. But the premium positioning wasn't built on aspiration. Instead, it was built on the reputation of New Zealand as a source of clean, safe dairy. The 2013 botulism scare showed how fast that can change. The pivot required building brand equity that transcended the New Zealand story. Building a reputation for transparency and accountability that holds even when something goes wrong is a stronger safeguard of trust.
While the domestic trust advantage for local brands over foreign companies is significant, there plenty of global brands still performing well, sales strong, loyalty intact, market share growing. So what's going right?
The brands winning in APAC are not just hiring locally, they are letting local teams actually run the playbook. Western MNCs that are doing this well include Coca-Cola, which has built local relevance by integrating with everyday culture and McDonald’s because they tend to empower regional execution and adapt products, messaging, or distribution by market. In Australia for example, McDonald's McCafé is a local team's initiative, not a global directive. The McCafé concept emerged from Australia's distinct coffee culture so was therefore culturally relevant and commercially successful.
"What separates the ones still growing is structural, not creative," says Pesavento. "Strong local teams, real budgets, short feedback loops between market and HQ. The brands getting it right have essentially decentralised their brand management, which goes against everything the holding company model was built on."
In short, what’s less visible (but most decisive) is the operating model underneath. "When brands design for local speed, credibility and learning, trust becomes scalable," says Derby. "When they don’t, even strong global brands start to feel distant."
