Part 2 of The Cultural Fluency Advantage
There’s a saying that used to do the rounds in global marketing circles: “America innovates. Asia copies. Europe regulates.” It feels neat. Familiar. Maybe even comforting. Especially to anyone sitting in a Western HQ. But it hasn’t been true for years.
If anything, the inverse is playing out. Commercially. Culturally. Creatively. TikTok taught the West what mobile-first content actually looks like. Vietnam’s fintech UIs are slicker than most European banks. And BYD overtook Tesla by building its own batteries, chips, and supply chain. No Silicon Valley hype. Just vertical strategy.
The truth is that Asia isn’t catching up. It’s pulling ahead. In strategy. In execution. In results. And if non-Asian brands still treat Asia as a localization challenge, they are not just playing the wrong game. They are playing last year’s game plan.
Asia’s Speed Isn’t the Story. Its Strategic Discipline Is.
There’s a popular myth, particularly persistent in Western HQs, that Asia’s pace is a symptom of looseness. That it favors hustle over structure. Volume over thinking. But spend some time on the ground, and that story crumbles.
Point in case: Singapore Tourism Board isn’t running a campaign. It’s running a country-wide strategy that extends to 2040. Vietnam now boasts over 3,800 tech startups and three unicorns. Its innovation isn’t a trend. It’s policy, education, and ambition fused. And BYD? That’s not just a manufacturing story. It’s what brand strategy looks like when R&D, logistics, and production are aligned. A level of structural fluency that makes a mockery of the West’s obsession with agility.
The comforting idea that Western marketing is more rigorous or more mature? Let’s just say: “Increasingly outdated”.
Platform Logic, Not Channel Logic
One of the biggest differences I’ve noticed in Asia isn’t just where innovation comes from. It’s how it’s built. In the West, strategy is still sliced into silos. Brand and performance. Upper funnel, lower funnel. Content and commerce. In Asia, that divide barely exists.
WeChat doesn’t live in a funnel. It lives in an ecosystem. Messaging, commerce, loyalty, payment, media – each reinforcing the rest. Think Walt Disney’s 1957 Synergy Map, reimagined for digital life.
Livestream commerce in China scaled to $700Bn while Western brands were still workshopping pilot decks. Why? Because it was treated as behavioral insight, not a campaign add-on. And apps like Grab, Gojek, Shopee don’t just serve ads. They serve needs – and do it with a fluidity the West still struggles to architect.
When Asia Shows Its Teeth
There’s also a new edge emerging. Not aggressive, but assertive. During the ongoing Trump tariff war, Chinese factories don’t hold press conferences. They open TikTok, post side-by-side product demos. One item with a Western logo, one without. Same materials, Same build. One 4x the price. It isn’t protest. It’s narrative control. Fluent, visual commerce – and it lands harder than any press release ever can.
This is what happens when storytelling meets pride meets precision. It’s not about defiance. It’s about relevance.
The Illusion of Control
“We’ve got local teams.” I hear this a lot. And it’s not wrong. But it misses the point. Proximity isn’t power. And translation isn’t strategy.
Too often, what “local” gets is a deck, a toolkit, and a fixed timeline. And a job title that suggests influence – but not the remit to exercise it. By the time anything lands, the only decisions left are “font size and subtitle length”. I’ve seen brilliant teams in-market sit on insights that never get actioned. Not because they’re wrong. But because the idea was locked six time zones away.
Worse still, the most resonant ideas – the ones that actually break through the clutter – Increasingly come from outside the system. Challenger brands. Creators. Startups. This isn’t a local execution gap. It’s a global permission problem.
What Needs to Change
Too much global marketing is built for consistency, not competitiveness. Systems are engineered to scale, not to adapt. Which is fine. Until they meet a market that’s moving faster, thinking longer, and operating on different rules. And that’s what’s happening now. While the center obsesses over templates, teams on the edge are making creative that actually lands. The problem? They’re not allowed to lead.
If you want to keep up with what’s working in Asia, not just what gets shipped there, you don’t need better localization. You need to restructure where power sits.
That means starting briefs in-market, not sending them there. It means letting strategy flow outward from momentum, not downward from hierarchy. And it means profoundly challenging the idea that global consistency creates strength. It doesn’t. Cultural clarity and fluency does.
The irony is, most global systems are designed to reduce risk. But in doing so, they remove the one thing that drives effectiveness in Asia: relevance. And when you remove that, you’re not streamlining. You’re dulling.
Final Thought
Some of the most effective creative systems in the world right now aren’t coming from global hubs or holding companies alone. They’re being built live. In Seoul. In Ho Chi Minh City. In Jakarta. Where no one’s waiting for global alignment. No one’s polishing a deck. They’re listening better. Moving faster. Building smarter. Not because they’re breaking the rules – but because they’re closer to the signal.
This isn’t about East versus West. And it isn’t about rejecting the center. It’s about recognizing that the edge is where relevance lives. There’s a huge amount that Western brands can learn from – if they are willing to treat Asia as an equal partner. And if your strategy doesn’t make space for that? You might already be losing.
Sebastien Lepez, Founder and CEO at JOLT Digital
