Executives talk endlessly about growth. Perhaps they should spend more time going to where it’s happening.

(From my Marketing Week column).

Five weeks ago, I attended the World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing. In front of me, a robot ran 100 meters faster than Usain Bolt’s world record—twice. Impressive!

What really surprised me was the audience. Not tech nerds like me. The stands were full of families and children watching robots run, box and play football (less good, though). The atmosphere felt like a family day out.

What still looks futuristic from London, New York or Sydney (e.g. robots) can feel quite ordinary in Asia.

Perhaps the West is starting to notice. At least when Xi Jinping visited the US last week, Donald Trump was smiling. A lot. After years of tariffs, threats and talk of decoupling, America may have discovered it still needs Asia.

China certainly has problems. A property crisis, debt, an aging population and weak demand at home. Then there’s Taiwan. Yet it sits in a part of the world with something Western executives desperately want: growth.

The IMF expects China to grow 4.6% this year and India 6.4%, versus 2.3% in the US, 1.9% in Australia and 1% in Britain. China and India alone are expected to add some 500 million consumers by 2030.

Want another clue? What is the world’s leading region for technology patents?

Silicon Valley?

Not even close.

Tokyo–Yokohama comes first, then Shenzhen–Hong Kong–Guangzhou, Seoul, Beijing and Shanghai–Suzhou. California doesn’t even make the top five.

Asia isn’t “emerging.” It has arrived.

Asia is home to 4.8 billion people—nearly 60% of humanity and more than half its young people. It now drives almost half of global online retail sales. And its influence no longer stays in Asia.

For decades, the West exported its way of life, from McDonald’s to Porsche to Hollywood. Now the current increasingly runs the other way. K-pop fills Western stadiums. KPop Demon Hunters became a global phenomenon.Thai food hardly requires an introduction. Asia-Pacific already accounted for 44% of global cultural exports in 2019, Boston Consulting Group has found.

Then there is beauty. A few years ago, few Western consumers had heard of COSRX. Today, the Korean skincare company’s snail mucin products sit on the shelves of Boots, Sephora and Superdrug.

Growth elsewhere doesn’t just create new markets. It changes the market at home.

For executives, that suggests three things.

Look East for ideas.
Western marketers tend to benchmark western brands. Brits study Brits. Germans study Germans. Australians study Australians. Everyone studies Americans.

That makes life comfortable. It doesn’t necessarily create growth.

Asia offers a view of what consumers and companies are doing differently. Which products are taking off? Which business models are scaling? Which technologies are consumers adopting first? Korean skincare, for example, has influenced ingredients, formats and routines—and what Western beauty companies now develop themselves.

Asia isn’t merely a destination for products. It’s a source of ideas.

Anticipate what Asia will bring home.
Products, brands, technologies and habits travel. Sales of Japan’s Uniqlo across Europe and North America have more than tripled since 2021. China’s BYD and other Chinese electric-car makers are pushing into overseas markets. COSRX, Beauty of Joseon and Medicube are entering mainstream Western retailers. After searches for Korean skincare on its website soared nearly 800%, John Lewis launched 20 K-beauty brands.

The important question is what Asia is doing today that everyone else may be doing tomorrow.

Join the growth.
Western companies have sold (or been talking about selling) to Asia for decades. The problem is that many still approach it with an old formula: develop something at home, then find somebody to sell it to in Asia.

That worked rather well when globalisation mostly meant Western companies exporting Western products and Western ideas.

That world is disappearing.

Participating in Asian growth means understanding local consumers, competitors, price points and habits. Sometimes it means changing the product rather than translating the advertising. And it certainly means abandoning the wonderfully convenient idea that 4.8 billion people across 46 countries constitute one market called “Asia.”

Nobody in London, Berlin or Sydney has to book the next flight to Shanghai.

But maybe they should.

“Your package was shipped: 1 Nutrition & Wellness, 1 Wireless Accessories.” Some Amazon customers are wondering why their confirmation emails suddenly read weird. Didn’t I order one shampoo and one USB charger? It’s a sign of things to come. Asked about the change, Amazon told a US reporter: “This also reduces customer information shared outside the Amazon app and website to further improve customer privacy.”

When big tech suddenly discovers “customer privacy”, it’s worth digging in.

Amazon has good reason to “protect” its customer data. AI is beginning to squeeze itself between brands and customers. The more data AI systems gather, the easier it becomes for them to advise customers on what to buy—and eventually make the purchase decision.

AI decision making sounds futuristic. It isn’t. Gemini Spark, Google’s personal AI agent, can scrape information from Gmail and other Google services to, for example, compile itineraries and build trips. In May, Google unveiled a “Universal Cart” that works across Google apps. Nike, Sephora, Target, Walmart, Wayfair and others have signed up. Amazon, notably, hasn’t.

For customers, the attraction of an AI interface is obvious. Let the system deal with your purchase of “four packs of kitchen towels on promotion.” Fine. Let it find your favorite holiday package cheaper. Even better. Customers like things to be easy. DoorDash and Deliveroo have already made shopping easier. If AI removes another step, consumers will use it.

For brands, an AI intermediary could range from a business accelerator to a complete disaster.

Brands have always had intermediaries. Most consumer brands never enjoyed much of a direct customer relationship in the first place. People buy juice and diapers through retailers, physical or online. Brands create consumer pull through advertising and retailer push through promotions. It’s „pay for salience“. Service brands have traditionally been closer to customers. Take travel. Traditionally, people booked holidays through an agent. Digital allowed the best travel firms build even stronger customer relationships and get people to book before they shop around. Others ended up paying Google and TikTok ever larger sums to send customers to their websites.

Now a new intermediary is arriving. If AI starts buying, recommending and assembling products for us, brands and retailers enter a different marketing game. Strong brands should have an advantage. So should those with excellent direct customer relationships. Everyone else risks becoming a row in a comparison table: “sort by price.”

B2B isn’t immune. Historically, long negotiation cycles and complicated contracts made great salespeople enormously valuable. Digital already made suppliers easier to find and compare. Now imagine AI running much of the procurement process. If AI systems are good at anything, it’s digesting complicated problems, comparing options and checking complicated contracts.

Which brings us to the uncomfortable question. Will AI turn the customer interface into something brands eventually have to pay for? There’s a very large reason to think it will. Money.

Current AI revenues don’t remotely justify the capital being invested. Infrastructure spending by the biggest US tech firms is projected to rise from roughly $450 billion in 2025 to around $1.4 trillion in 2027. The Economist has calculated that covering AI capital expenditure would require annual AI revenues on the order of $2.5 trillion. That’s more than the entire tech industry generates today.

Meanwhile, CEOs aren’t yet seeing AI productivity gains at scale. Some companies are even cutting back on AI spend. Microsoft is now cracking down on token overuse among its own staff. And most consumers still use AI for free. Wonderful technology. Terrible economics.

Someone has to pay.

For AI firms, finding much larger sources of revenue is becoming existential. Google became the world’s largest advertising business after discovering how valuable control of the consumer interface could be. AI may be about to discover exactly the same thing. Once AI systems begin influencing which products consumers see, compare and ultimately buy, that access becomes extremely valuable.

Monetization is already happening. 200 days after introducing ads, Open AI just reported 1bn US$ Chat GPT advertising revenue. A press release hints at more: „Our next phase of growth will bring ChatGPT Ads to more markets and introduce additional formats, objectives, buying options, and measurement capabilities.” Gemini is experimenting with AI shopping. Anthropic has told the world during the Super Bowl that Claude will remain ad-free. But ad-free doesn’t mean monetization-free. There are other ways to charge brands for access, transactions, services, or placement.

Yet many executives are looking in the wrong direction. Around the world, they are flocking to AI tool courses just as they flocked to digital tool courses twenty years ago. Everyone worries about AI replacing basic activities such as Seach Machine Optimization (SEO) or social media campaigning (it probably will). And everyone wants to become an expert in the new tools.

There’s much bigger question: when machines squeeze between us and our customers, how do we maintain those relationships? When the machine recommends, how do we become the brand people still want?

Executives need to step back from the tools and start doing their actual job. Help the organization work out how to thrive in an AI-mediated world. Decide where AI intermediaries can help the business, where the direct customer relationship must be protected, and where the company risks becoming interchangeable.

Knowing AI tools is tactics.
Knowing how to win as AI changes the game is strategy.

Few courses teach people how to mobilize senior leaders and people across an organization to create growth. That is what the Marketing Leadership Masterclass is about. Not another collection of clever frameworks. Practical tools to turn ideas into impact.

We’ll run another 12-week online sprint. People work as a community, debating real issues and solving problems together.

Our brilliant mentors make the experience special: top marketers who contribute alongside demanding day jobs.

Take a look at the details at marketingleadershipmasterclass.com. Or message Olli at learn@marketingleader.com.

Companies don’t create growth. People do.

For decades, companies relied on a proven growth playbook: top-down management. Bestsellers like In Search of Excellence, Built to Last, and Good to Great had a comforting promise: leaders can build companies and steer growth top-down with clever strategies and replicable processes.

Unfortunately, in the decades after publication, the companies celebrated in these books barely outperformed the market, McKinsey found. Many, including Amoco, Circuit City, Kodak, and Kmart, went bankrupt, were acquired, or downsized.

Top-down worked, until it didn’t.

The old playbook was designed to control change, not respond to it. Today, top-down management simply can’t keep up. The faster the world moves, the harder it becomes for a handful of leaders at the top to see every opportunity.

What organizations need now is people who make growth happen without waiting to be told. People who act from the bottom up. Seth Godin called them “Linchpins.” Lois Kelly and Carmen Medina described them as “Good Rebels.” Adam Grant studied them as “Originals.” Different names for the same pattern: people who dare to challenge the status quo and make new ideas happen—against the Resistance.

During those 25 minutes, hundreds of people stop working, producing, and selling. Add the cost of the venue, production, travel, and choosing the right speaker becomes a consequential decision.

I spoke with ten conference organizers about what separates a great keynote speaker from someone who merely owns a microphone. From what I have learned, here are eight tests for finding one:

• Real issues. A good keynote addresses one of the audience’s top two or three business or life priorities. Otherwise, people will start scrolling through their phones.
• Credibility. The business world is littered with “experts” who have assembled a talk from a few books. That can work. But a speaker with direct leadership experience or credible research—ideally their own—is far more likely to make an impact.
• Audience proximity. Listening to an astronaut or a wingsuit diver can be inspirational. But when the distance from the audience’s real life is too great, people go home inspired while thinking, “That’s not me.”
• Keynote speaking—not just speaking. Many people enjoy jumping onto a stage and talking, often slide by slide. Keynote speaking is different. As in an opera or a play, the speaker must hold the audience’s attention from the first second for 20 or even 45 minutes—through stories, strong transitions, surprises, pauses, and tension at exactly the right moments. This takes weeks of writing and rehearsing—and a speaker willing to make that investment.
• Fresh content. Even the best speakers can fall into the trap of repeating the same talk for years. It may still be powerful, but eventually it will bore both the audience and the speaker. A professional speaker researches the audience and meaningfully adapts the talk and creates at least one major piece of content for every event.
• Practical tips. Talks are nice. What people really want are two or three things they can apply tomorrow morning.
• Paid to perform. Plenty of speakers will come for free because they have a product or service to sell. That’s legitimate, but it creates an implicit tension. Their first priority may not be the conference—but themselves. Free speakers can add value, but mix them with professionals.
• Real feedback. Conferences and speakers know they may not work together again for months or years; few conferences hire the same speaker two years in a row. The best speakers don’t leave it there. They ask for honest feedback because they want the next keynote to be the best one they have ever given.

Many people can speak. Few can create a moment an audience remembers—and then turn that moment into action.