Emotion-First Products
Builds demand through identity, fandom, and emotional attachment rather than purely functional utility.
ExamplePop Mart, HYBE
April 21, 2026
Managing Partner
Six business models pioneered in Asia span creator-driven commerce, emotion-engineered products, microproduction, education-led acquisition, digital ecosystems, and AI-native services. These have produced growth that leaves traditional approaches behind. Global leaders who adapt now have a closing window of first-mover advantage. The question is no longer whether these models will spread, but how fast each company can move.
Asia is rewriting the rules of global commerce. The region is on a trajectory to represent as many as 60 percent of Fortune 500 companies within the next decade and already functions as the world’s primary engine of trade. Its population scale, depth of advanced manufacturing, and unusually high levels of digital adoption and public–private cooperation have created conditions that few other regions can match. But structural advantages alone do not fully explain Asia’s rising global influence. What truly sets the region apart is what companies choose to build on those conditions: new business architectures that unlock asymmetric growth and, increasingly, incorporate artificial intelligence into their core design.
Over the past three to five years, six archetypes have surfaced repeatedly across Asian markets, sectors, and companies of varying sizes. These models, broadly focused on harnessing trust, emotional resonance, and personalization, with AI as an accelerant, are the product of deliberate strategic choices, not accidental consequences of a unique local environment. That distinction matters enormously. Because these models emerged from human decisions, they can be adopted by human decisions elsewhere. Creator- and network-driven commerce, for instance, has powered mega-corporations such as Douyin and individual content creators alike. The same foundational infrastructure exists in Western markets. The potential remains almost entirely untapped.
We map the conditions that made Asia ripe for experimentation. It describes in detail the six transferable business model archetypes and the lessons global companies can learn from them. Companies in Asia that use these models have achieved compound annual growth rates above 15 percent and have quickly doubled gross merchandise value. The first global media platform, retailer, or financial institution to harness these models could define the next frontier.
Four conditions created the environment in which these models could take hold, though none of them are prerequisites for applying the models elsewhere.
Scale and speed. Asian markets combine enormous user bases with some of the world’s highest rates of digital adoption. A livestream format, a new product concept, or a digital service can reach tens of millions of users almost instantaneously. New propositions can be tested at a national scale within days, a feedback loop that compresses the traditional innovation cycle by years.
Public–private digital infrastructure reduces friction and expands inclusion. India’s Unified Payments Interface delivers real-time payments to millions. The Open Network for Digital Commerce helps even small merchants access national demand. China’s digital identity systems, Singapore’s Government Tech Stack, and Indonesia’s QRIS network lower onboarding costs and raise digital participation.
Super-app ecosystems host hundreds or thousands of mini apps. They combine payments, identity, logistics, messaging, and credit. This structure lowers the cost of adding services and changes how users interact with everything from fraud detection to healthcare triage.
Regulation as a catalyst. In several Asian markets, regulators have moved deliberately to encourage digitalization while establishing clear frameworks for data use and identity security. The result has been fast and responsible scaling of digital services, from financial inclusion initiatives to healthcare triage platforms and logistics networks, at a pace that other regulatory environments have not yet matched.
These four conditions created fertile ground. What grew on that ground, however, reflects strategic imagination.
Across markets and sectors, six archetypes have powered growth for Asian companies of all sizes, generating CAGRs that routinely outpace underlying market expansion.
The first archetype starts with a deceptively simple premise: emotion is not a brand-building by-product. It is a core economic driver.
Companies using emotion-first models build anticipation, identity, and community into product design. Across Asia, they have industrialized emotional engagement, scarcity drops, fan rituals, collection loops, live cocreation, and IP narratives. What were once soft brand signals have become real revenue drivers.
Pop Mart is a clear example. Its blind-box collectibles, led by the Monsters line and the Labubu plush toys, have quickly turned anticipation into commercial scale. In the first half of 2025, Pop Mart generated about $1.9 billion in revenue. The Monsters' IP generated over a third of this total. The company leads its peer group, with annual revenue growth of nearly 180 percent.
The K-pop ecosystem uses a similar approach in a different way. HYBE, which represents BTS, earned over $1.6 billion in revenue in 2023. This came from building communities through concerts, digital content, and curated experiences, not just music sales. That sense of belonging leads to steady recurring spending. Fans buy merchandise, albums, digital items, and tickets to reinforce their identity and community membership.
The message for global companies is direct. Emotional engagement can be designed, measured, and monetized at scale. Data on user-generated content or community sentiment often outperform traditional brand metrics. IP can become a multiproduct engine, bringing revenue from new categories beyond the original product.
This model turns trust in creators and communities into a main distribution channel. In Asia, it moves past influencer marketing. Consumers now shop inside chat threads, livestreams, and short videos, merging transaction and content.
Livestream commerce in China shows the possible scale. Douyin’s e-commerce value grew sevenfold from $75 billion in 2020 to $490 billion in 2024. Conversion rates and order values beat traditional product pages. In Southeast Asia, TikTok Shop’s GMV grew fourfold in one year, from $4.4 billion in 2022 to $16.3 billion in 2023. By 2025, this figure reached $45.6 billion, showing rapid compounding.
What makes this commerce sticky is not technology; it is intimacy. Livestream hosts sell in local dialects. They embed cultural context, answer questions in real time, and demonstrate genuine product expertise. The experience feels less like advertising and more like advice from a well-informed neighbor. That distinction, subtle as it sounds, drives measurable commercial outcomes.
At the extreme end, individual creators generate returns that are almost incomprehensible by traditional retail standards. On the opening day of China’s 2023 Singles’ Day shopping festival, the influencer Li Jiaqi drove an estimated 9.5 billion renminbi, roughly $1.3 billion, in gross merchandise value in a single session. That figure exceeds 13 percent of total online Black Friday sales in the United States for the same year.
The lesson for global leaders is not to replicate Asia’s creators. It is to replicate the architecture of trust that makes those creators effective: transparent product claims, live question-and-answer formats, local cultural fluency, fulfillment clarity, and consistency of authentic voice. Specific structural elements can also be transplanted, shifting budgets from upper-funnel sponsorships to conversion-linked arrangements, and using SKU-level contribution margins (net of returns) to design host commissions and promotional calendars.
The third archetype resolves a tension that has defined mass manufacturing for decades: the trade-off between scale and personalization. Asian companies have found a way to deliver customized or small-batch products at unit costs previously only achievable at a mass scale.
Shein is the archetype’s defining example. The company grew revenue at approximately 29 percent annually between 2022 and 2024, roughly $23 billion in 2022, $32 billion in 2023, and an estimated $38 billion in 2024, while remaining profitable throughout. The key is its production model. Where traditional fast-fashion brands like Zara test new designs in production runs of 300 to 500 units, Shein tests in batches of 100 to 200. Designs move from concept to production floor in as few as five days. The company lists between 2,000 and 10,000 new SKUs per day, offering up to 1.3 million distinct styles annually, compared with roughly 20,000 to 25,000 new styles from H&M or Zara in the same period. Unsold inventory, the chronic drain on fashion economics, is minimized by design.
India’s Open Network for Digital Commerce demonstrates how the same philosophy can apply to the supply side, specifically, how digital infrastructure enables microproducers to scale nationally without the overhead that would otherwise make it impractical. Monthly transactions on the ONDC network tripled within a year of launch, rising from roughly five million in 2022 to 15 million in 2023. With more than 700,000 sellers, the network has created an on-ramp for local artisans, home businesses, and small retailers to access national demand through shared identity verification, payment rails, and logistics coordination that no single small producer could replicate alone.
For companies outside Asia, the playbook involves modernizing supply chains around small-batch experimentation, treating initial production runs as market tests rather than commitments, and identifying niches where personalization can generate incremental demand and margin that mass-market offers cannot capture.
The fourth archetype may be the most counterintuitive. In Asia, some companies treat education not as a corporate social responsibility initiative or a marketing vehicle but as a genuine competitive weapon, a primary acquisition channel that costs far less and performs far better than traditional advertising.
The mechanism is straightforward, even if the execution is demanding: offer free, high-quality knowledge to build trust, reduce customer-acquisition costs, and deepen engagement before the first commercial transaction occurs.
Zerodha illustrates the power of this approach. Founded in 2009, it became India’s largest stockbroker within a decade, a feat accomplished without a traditional advertising budget. The company built its growth engine on Varsity, a comprehensive, entirely free, ad-free educational platform covering markets, instruments, and investing psychology. By meeting prospective customers at the moment of self-directed curiosity, Zerodha attracted exactly the audience it wanted: financially engaged individuals already motivated to invest. The company now counts more than 16 million total customers, including seven million active users.
Groww later applied the same logic and overtook Zerodha as market leader for active retail clients in 2024, with more than 12 million users accounting for approximately 27 percent of active market share. The strategic parallel is striking: roughly 80 percent of Groww’s customers find the platform organically. Customer-acquisition costs represent only 12 to 13 percent of revenue, compared with 20 to 23 percent for competitor AngelOne. The education-first model does not just build trust; it structurally reduces the cost of growth.
South Korea’s Toss uses free financial tools, credit monitoring, budgeting aids, and investment education to establish a trust relationship before introducing monetized products. The company has built one of South Korea’s largest financial super-apps, where users arrive already trained to rely on Toss for financial guidance.
The agricultural sector offers an equally instructive example in ITC’s e-Choupal initiative. For more than 20 years, e-Choupal has published daily commodity prices and shared agronomy best practices with farmers across India via the internet, a form of radical transparency that is both genuinely useful and commercially strategic. The network now spans 35,000 villages and serves four million customers. Its flagship extension program, Choupal Pradarshan Khet, demonstrates cutting-edge farming technology in the field; the 34,000 farmers who adopted the recommended practices saw their incomes double. The initiative has become a cornerstone of ITC’s position as one of India’s 20 largest companies by market capitalization, proof that the education model scales across sectors, geographies, and customer sophistication levels.
The broader implication for global markets is that education is emerging as a differentiated acquisition channel, particularly in sectors marked by information asymmetry: finance, utilities, healthcare, and insurance. Companies that treat educational content as a strategic growth asset, and monetize adjacent services rather than the content itself, can achieve acquisition economics that advertising-dependent rivals simply cannot match.
The fifth archetype challenges a conventional understanding of what a conglomerate is and how it creates value. Traditional conglomerates pool capital, leverage brand credibility, and generate synergies through shared management expertise. Next-generation conglomerates do something structurally different: they integrate multiple verticals through shared digital assets, identity systems, payment platforms, data pools, and loyalty frameworks that create genuine incentives for customers to deepen their engagement with the group rather than defect to single-purpose competitors.
Ping An is the clearest global example of this model working at scale. The group operates across financial services, healthcare, automotive services, and smart-city solutions, all integrated through a unified identity and data platform. That integration is not cosmetic. A quarter of Ping An’s retail customers hold four or more contracts across the ecosystem. As of the end of 2024, the group served 242 million retail customers, up 11 percent since 2020, with a year-over-year retention rate of approximately 95 percent. Some 72 percent of customers have been with Ping An for five or more years. The company has also invested heavily in the technological layer that enables this integration: cumulative patent applications reached approximately 55,000 by 2024, growing at roughly 10 percent per year, with much of that portfolio concentrated in AI and digital capabilities. Every customer interaction enriches the dataset that powers personalized recommendations, risk assessments, and service automation across the group.
Reliance Industries in India represents the same architecture applied to a different vertical mix: telecommunications, content, commerce, payments, and physical retail. Its digital assets enable cross-vertical bundling and personalized loyalty programs that reinforce retention across the entire group. Reliance has nearly doubled its annual revenues over the past eight years, reaching $100 billion and becoming one of the largest companies in the world. Thailand’s CP Group uses shared logistics infrastructure, data assets, and loyalty networks to scale services across agri-food, retail, and adjacent categories in much the same way.
The organizing insight is that next-generation conglomerates succeed not by accumulating businesses but by integrating capabilities across them. The shared assets that drive value are increasingly digital, data, attention, and access, rather than the physical shared services that defined the previous generation of conglomerate logic. When those digital assets are deployed well, each new service amplifies the others, and the cost of adding a new vertical falls while its cross-sell potential rises.
The sixth archetype may be the most consequential over the long term. Across education, entertainment, commerce, and customer service, Asia is leading the shift to platforms that deliver their core value primarily or entirely through artificial intelligence, services that can scale without adding headcount and personalize without adding cost.
AI tutoring is already mainstream in China, India, and South Korea. Platforms including Tencent Education, Yuanfudao, and Zuoyebang collectively offer millions of personalized practice sessions daily. Zuoyebang alone reports more than 170 million monthly active users. Yuanfudao, valued at more than $15 billion in 2020, has continued to expand its reach into smaller cities, growing device sales by 120 percent year over year in third-tier markets. These systems adjust difficulty levels, explanation styles, and content sequencing in real time based on individual student behavior, approximating the results of one-to-one tutoring at near-zero marginal cost per additional student.
Virtual humans represent another rapidly maturing form of AI-native service. China’s A-SOUL and South Korea’s MAVE are AI-generated digital entertainers that attract millions of followers and generate content monetized through merchandise, concerts, and brand collaborations. On platforms like Douyin and Xiaohongshu, AI influencers drive meaningful commerce through short videos. AI-generated livestream hosts, such as Alibaba Cloud’s Digital Human, can maintain consistent personas, adapt scripts to real-time audience sentiment, and sustain broadcasts indefinitely. AI concierges embedded in live commerce streams answer product questions instantly, recommend bundles, provide sizing guidance, and sequence product showcases based on live engagement signals. Personalized follow-up messages can replicate the tone of each viewer’s preferred human host.
For brands, this approach offers powerful advantages: nuanced message control, unlimited output volume, and zero reputational risk from human behavior. But the risks of over-automation are equally real. AI-only interactions can feel distant. They can erode the authenticity that makes creator commerce work. Companies building AI-native platforms need to find the right equilibrium, leveraging AI for scale and consistency while preserving human signals that sustain trust.
The underlying economics of this archetype are compelling precisely because of their asymmetry. Near-zero marginal cost meets infinite scalability, with personalization available at every point of the curve. Asian firms are already ensuring they have the computing infrastructure to support this wave of AI deployment, leading the world in data center planning, construction, and funding. For global companies, AI-native frontline services, whether tutors, advisers, stylists, or brand representatives, are not a distant possibility. They are a near-term competitive necessity.
Leaders outside Asia can draw five concrete lessons from the region’s track record.
Build trust through creators, community, and education. Customers respond to authentic voices. Cultural fluency and transparency in the sales channel can drive growth far more effectively than reach-based marketing approaches built on demographic targeting. In categories where customers have significantly less information than providers, such as finance, healthcare, and energy, free, high-quality educational content can drive acquisition and loyalty more effectively than any advertising campaign. AI can amplify trust, but only when balanced with credible human signals from the brand.
Create products that balance scale with emotional resonance. Asian innovators have demonstrated that emotional connection can be engineered without sacrificing efficiency. Character-driven narratives and culturally attuned design, combined with microproduction economics enabled by supply chain digitalization and demand sensing, allow companies to deliver personal, identity-laden products at scale. This level of personalization was previously available only to small-batch producers and luxury brands. It is now available to anyone willing to build the operating model for it.
Shift to network-driven distribution. Marketing across Asia has moved decisively away from top-down messaging toward network-driven distribution. Creators and community figures now serve as trusted advisers. AI-generated hosts, personalized concierges, and adaptive recommendation engines engage consumers in real time. These channels convert because they feel intimate and relevant, even when delivered to millions simultaneously. The most effective companies design participatory environments where the boundaries between shopping, community, and entertainment dissolve.
Share capabilities and assets across the entire business. Ecosystem leaders like Ping An and Reliance succeed not by accumulating businesses but by integrating capabilities across them. The value comes from building systems that use shared digital assets so that each new service amplifies the others. This operating model requires organizational discipline; it demands that leaders prioritize systemic integration over short-term divisional autonomy, but the rewards in customer lifetime value, retention, and cross-sell economics are substantial.
Use AI and digital infrastructure across every dimension. Asian firms that have leveraged AI to build new modes of customer engagement and redefine their core offerings have already created significant value across all six business model archetypes. AI can be used to accelerate existing processes or to completely reimagine them, and both applications support global leaders working to adapt these models to their own contexts. The critical caveat: AI tools cannot substitute for the trust that exists between creators and communities. Companies building AI-native systems must find the right balance between algorithmic scale and credible human anchors, and they must treat the preservation of trust as the highest priority.
Business models emerging from Asia illustrate new dimensions of global growth, emotionally resonant, trust-driven, personalized, educational, real-time, and AI-enabled. They demonstrate that breakthrough growth depends on more than structural advantages. It requires new ways of designing experiences, orchestrating supply chains, and aligning incentives across networks.
AI accelerates every dimension of these models. It compresses creative cycles. It strengthens trust when deployed thoughtfully. It enables microproduction at scale, personalizes educational content for individual learners, orchestrates ecosystem interactions across millions of data points, optimizes logistics in real time, and powers entirely new categories of AI-native service that would have been impossible a decade ago.
Asia offers a preview of what global commerce will look like by the end of this decade. The strategic question for leaders everywhere is no longer whether these models will spread. They are already spreading faster than most Western incumbents have recognized. The only question that remains is how quickly each company can adapt them to unlock the next wave of disproportionate, sustainable growth. The window for first-mover advantage is open. It will not remain open indefinitely.
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