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Asia’s economies are booming and its cultural exports are sweeping the world, but its audiences are more divided and less brand-loyal than ever before. It’s time to step out of our comfort zone and invest in the power of branding.

Right now, Asia is where it’s at.  

You can see why. Asia is booming like never before. Between 1990 and 2022, India’s productivity increased more than four times over, while China’s rose by an astonishing fourteen times. Meanwhile, South Korea’s Hallyu wave is at the forefront of an Asian cultural explosion winning over audiences around the planet, with movies like Parasite, TV shows like Squid Game and bands like Blackpink and BTS. In social media, China’s Douyin (TikTok) is now one of the planet’s leading platforms, used by 1.5 billion people worldwide.

More than ever before, the future 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 expands, 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.

Historically, brand-building has often come further down the list of priorities for Asian marketers, whose focus is more on immediate sales. Recent data shows that campaigns in APAC are 36% more likely than those in North America and 67% more likely than those in Europe to prioritise short-term sales growth as their primary objective.

As a result, only ten of Interbrand’s World’s Top 100 Brands are Asian, and only two of those brands, Samsung and Toyota, make it into the top ten. This is despite the fact that Asia’s share of global GDP is estimated at around 55-58%. Kantar’s BrandZ Top 100 paints a similar picture.

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 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 Westen 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 connect with consumers on an emotional level enjoy long-term economic benefits. They can resist copycat rivals. And in their own way, they create a degree of social connection and cohesion.

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 approach might be to adopt a Western-style approach to branding, as epitomised by Binet and Field. In their model, 60% of budget should be invested in long-term brand-building and the remaining 40% on short-term sales activation. But that might not go down well in Asia, either with the clients providing the budgets, or, probably even more importantly, with 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.

First published in Campaign Asia September 2025