The Changing Face of the Asian Consumer

As Asia continues its economic growth, Asian consumers and branding in Asia are becoming the focal points of business and commerce.

How do Asian consumers shop? What kind of brands do they prefer? And how can you grow your business with Asian consumers?

Our Faculty Director Professor Bernd Schmitt launched a new book titled “The Changing Face of the Asian Consumer,” to help companies navigate and maneuver the complex and diverse landscape that is Asia.  Schmitt has more than twenty years of experience in Asia as a professor, researcher and consultant. He wrote the book while he lived in Singapore for the last two years, on a special leave from Columbia Business School, as the Executive Director of ACI, the new Institute on Asian Consumer Insight.

In his book, Schmitt presents key insights about the Asian marketplace, which together with his strategies will help you grow your business in Asia:

• Find out what middle-class consumers want—and what they buy—when their incomes rise.
• Learn why Asians are collectivists who are becoming increasingly individualistic.
• Discover that Asian consumers are driven by contradictory desires; they are, at the same time, Value Shopaholics, Functional Hedonists, and Traditional Futurists.

The book also includes useful tools such as a strategy map to plan market entry, a lifestyle tool to analyze consumer motivations and trends, and an omni-channel metric to assess the right mix of online and offline media.  Finally, he presents benchmarks and best practices from multinational and local companies for various industries and markets in Asia—including consumer electronics, fashion and lifestyle, food and beverage, airline, hotel, skincare and e-commerce.

Enjoy Prof. Schmitt speaking at our BRITE ’13 conference on many of the concepts he was developing in the course of writing the book.

By MATTHEW QUINT