'Asia is ground zero for the future of humanity.'

The Marketing Society Asia was honoured to host Dr. Parag Khanna to talk about his new book Connectography – Mapping the Future of Global Civilization and provide our members with new ways to think how they organize their efforts, who exactly they should be targeting and some of the risks to keep in mind.

Dr. Khanna’s message is built around two great megatrends, those of urbanization and connectivity.  For a deep visualization of this see: https://atlas.developmentseed.org/. Cities and how the interact with each other, their ‘functional geography’ is becoming the de facto organizing principle of the 21st Century, a kind of Pax Urbanica. In his words, ‘cities want to connect more to other cities; cities enrich each other.’ There is an aspect of Metcalfe’s network law to this where the more nodes are connected, the more useful and powerful the network becomes, effectively the opposite of traditional zero-sum thinking about international relations or market share. Marketers need to start looking at city maps and thinking about they are allocating their team’s time and marketing spend and less at political maps which don’t add much insight.

If we are focusing on cities, we need to think about who is living in/moving to those cities and how marketers can best engage this target group. Dr. Khanna notes that the 7 or so truly global cities where there is a genuine ethnic/racial/nationalist mix of peoples shows us a truth that homo sapiens has become an urban species, one defined increasingly by professional groups and sharing many global values. This is in contrast to the origin stories we are told of being an ethnic/nationalist tribal species.  Marketers will need to consider how to reach this global/urban psychographic target set, rather than targeting only along demographic lines.  

For marketers looking at APAC, Dr. Khanna highlighted the Pearl River Delta (PRD), China’s reorganization and ASEAN integration as areas of interest. The PRD is in the process of becoming one of the great urban archipelagos of human civilization, with 75 million deeply connected people producing a GDP equivalent to India’s. Perhaps we can look past the divisions of yellow/blue ribbons, localism and disappearing book sellers to the logic of functional geography to take advantage of Hong Kong’s role in helping the PRD become a major area of corporate growth in the coming years.  

Learning from the success of the PRD, China is intentionally reorganizing the country into megaclusters of anchor cities connected with impressive new infrastructure including high-speed rail, 5G networks and superhighways. The Economist Intelligence Unit wrote about this trend here. Dr. Khanna noted that well-networked cities of over 3 million population, with a heavy percentage of service sector contribution to GDP are more resilient to shocks than smaller cities reliant on industry. China is set to have more of the former than anywhere else on the planet.

The countries of ASEAN should also be of great interest to marketers.  Together it’s a market of 700 million people, receiving more foreign investment than China. Like other emerging markets, citizens of ASEAN are more likely to say they are global citizens and highly value connectivity, mobility and sustainability. While ASEAN is unlikely ever to have monetary or political union, the ASEAN Economic Community which came into force at the beginning of 2016 will only heighten these aspirations towards free movement and connectedness. Values to take note of when planning your next campaign.

Asked about the risks of connectivity to multinational companies and their brands, Dr. Khanna highlighted the global militarized underclass, which makes up part of the 25% of the population globally who are falling behind. While global inequality is falling, inequality within countries, and inside cities, is rising. This puts MNCs on the front-line, often literally but also digitally, of unrest inspired by this unequal distribution of wealth. Brands will need to develop not only risk-mitigation measures but also a voice and a viewpoint to help them manage this turbulence.

You can follow Dr. Khanna @paragkhanna and his blog.

Barrett Bingley is Associate Director - Content Solutions at The Economist Group Knowledge partner of The Marketing Society Asia.

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