A lot of companies in Asia are still very sales-focused and not marketing-focused, which leads to a challenge when it comes to brand building. This was one of the key takeaways from the session on ‘Asian Creative? A New Brief' on Day One of AdAsia 2011.

The engaging session, moderated by JWT North Asia Area Director Mr Tom Doctoroff, saw sparks flying between the panelists – Ms Kitty Lun from Lowe China, Mr Piyush Pandey from Ogilvy & Mather India, Mr Bruce Haines from Cheil Korea and Mr Akira Kagami from Dentsu Japan - as they debated what ailed the Asian creative scene.

Ms Kitty Lun, CEO, Lowe China, highlighted the difficulties of brand-building in as vast a market as China, where the costs of advertising are very high. “Given the high price of advertising, you cannot afford to make mistakes, and hence invest in a lot of research,” she said. The result of so much research, she said, was that you end up having commercials that pass the test but are not innovative.

Mr Haines said in Korea the creative scene was “a work in progress”. A lot of businesses are sales-focused but beginning to get interested in marketing, he said.

Mr Akira Kagami described how in Japan brand-building activities were focused more on the corporate's image than on the product because of the perception that consumers in Japan would buy products from a company they trusted.

But the scenario painted by the North Asian countries was not true for India. Mr Pandey said India was a brand-building market in the classic, timeless sense and MNCs who had been here for 60 years and more had certainly invested in these activities over a long period of time. “There is a lot of fantastic work happening here,” he said. All the panelists said that the digital age companies were attuned to the need for brand-building and investing in it. Ms Lun gave the example of Ali Baba Group in China, while Mr Haines pointed to Samsung's work.

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