Inside Brand Japan

Most global teams that struggle to gain traction in Japan believe they have an execution problem. They look at the quality of the deliverables, the speed of turnaround, or the lack of independent initiative, and they conclude: We need better executors. They don’t. They have a context problem . When people receive only a mechanical task, Do this. Update that. Deliver tomorrow. They are reduced to a...

A friend working in regional marketing told me a story that exposes a mistake many founders and CMOs still make. Her APAC headquarters is in Bangkok, managing Southeast Asia with speed, flexibility, and confidence. When they decided to enter Japan, they followed a familiar, seemingly logical structure: Strategy, decisions, and brand logic remained firmly anchored in Bangkok, while the local Japane...