The world is looking intensely at Asia today. Not for its spirituality or its exotic cuisines, but as a critical contributor to the sustenance of its core economic superiority. Having reached a “launching pad” level of economic growth (or getting there real fast, depending on the specific country), and with its very large young populations, Asia is moving rapidly towards becoming not only the world’s largest producer and consumer, but also the largest productive workforce. Marketers and policy makers everywhere are keen to know how to exploit the rapid transformation happening here.
We begin with a macro perspective on the big environmental changes occurring in Asia today, then examine the consumers more closely with selected insights about youth and women, and finally end with a discussion on some thoughts on how marketers can devise strategies to deal with this exciting new opportunity - Asia. We have resisted the temptation to quote extensive demographic data and focus instead on consumer issues. Nonetheless, ‘Asia’ is not one entity, and any attempt at addressing it as one, must necessarily become a little panoramic in nature.
1. The Meta Trends
To simplify the myriad changes taking place here, we will use the concept of Meta Trends. A meta trend is a transformational or transcendent phenomenon, not simply a big, pervasive one – it implies multidimensional or catalytic change, as opposed to a linear or sequential change. It happens as a result of evolutionary, system-wide developments that occur simultaneously in a number of individual demographic, economic, and technological areas. Instead of each being an individual free-standing global trend, it is a composite of trends. A brief description of these trends at a macro level will be followed by a more in-depth exploration of the impact of these trends on consumers and their consumption behavior.
Three meta trends transforming this region today are discussed below:
Economic growth and globalization:
High GDP growths throughout most of the region and impressive increases in exports and outsourcing income have led to higher incomes and better living standards. Real average household incomes will continue to increase between 1.3% and 4.9% per annum between 2002 and 2012. High income segments are projected to grow even more rapidly in size. For e.g., the number of households earning over US$30,000 in 2001 will increase by 8.6% in urban South Korea, 3.3% in Taiwan, 4.9% in Singapore, 3.7% in Hong Kong and even 1.3% in Japan (Asian Demographics Ltd). Needless to say, there are vast differences between countries in levels of economic development – from the cheap, high quality labour of China; to the high technology-high value consumer market in Japan; the increasingly wealthy ASEAN consumers; the potential alliances with the highly developed Korea and Taiwan; or the relatively poor, but highly optimistic, talented and fast developing Indian business outsourcing market.
(source : ACNielsen - India )
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