Go hard or go home

The Asian market is both vast, and fast. You might think you are flavour of the month, but this can change in a minute. Consumers in the Asian market are as fickle, connected and scrutinising as anywhere else in the world, perhaps even more so.

“You need to understand the market backwards,” Gestro says. “You might look as though you are growing and increasing your market share, but you can be upended quite quickly.”

The solution is to fast iterate your ideas in to the market and constantly test and retest your company’s proposition, while holding strong on your quality and authenticity. All that requires resources and people with passion to carry it out.

More than ever, it now also requires brand building that goes beyond the old fashioned channels of TV, radio and point-of-sale. This is now being replaced by the high-speed, highly interactive marketing approach that has social media at its heart.

Baker describes how this requires a more “complex choreography” in marketing, while Blackwell points to the fact that there is now nowhere to hide in terms of your brand offering and how well you deliver on it.

“The customers are the brand holders, not the company,” Baker says. “They are the ones who will define your reputation, in real time, on social media.”

The speed at which this is developing in Asia is something that can only be fully understood by going there and immersing yourself in it. It’s not just about a social media strategy, it’s about gearing the entire company so that it can operate well in the social media age, getting its message across fluently in all of the new media and channels and understanding how this technology is transforming the entire buying experience.

“You have to absorb, assimilate, adapt and react very quickly to bring that back into your business,” Gourdie says. “That is what creates the fast iterative process that is required.”