Why performance marketing alone fails global B2B brands entering Japan and APAC

Global B2B brands entering Japan, South Korea and the wider APAC region need to build local brand and trust before performance marketing can work. But PR and marketing have to do it together.

Your brand is famous in Chicago, London or Munich. In Tokyo, Seoul or Singapore, it’s a stranger offering a translated website.

Global B2B brands rarely believe that when they first enter the market. At AIM B2B, we regularly meet newcomers to Japan, South Korea and the wider APAC region who expect paid search, LinkedIn campaigns and a lead-generation funnel to do all of the work bringing them in. When results disappoint, the head office decides the market is slow or the targeting is off. Usually it’s neither – it’s just that the market has no reason to trust them yet.

My argument is simple. Performance marketing is not going to create demand for a brand nobody knows. Established global brands entering APAC need to invest in brand building first, and PR and marketing need to do that work together instead of in separate silos.

Home-market fame stays home

Reid Holmes, author of Appreciated Branding and an award-winning creative director whose clients included Burger King and H&R Block, has put the point bluntly: “Performance marketing doesn’t create demand. It captures it.” In the book, he describes what he calls the “plateau of indifference.” It’s where brands are known but not meaningfully different, so buyers default to price.

A new market entrant has it worse. A global brand landing in Japan sits at the ignored end of Holmes’s spectrum, however big it is at home, because there is no local reputation to capture. That extension is my reading, not his.

The data suggests the same thing. Les Binet and Peter Field’s B2B study put the optimal split at roughly 46% brand building to 54% activation, and Professor John Dawes of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute explains why: only around 5% of B2B buyers are in the market at any time. Keep in mind also, these are averages, not a description of a company starting from zero. In our experience, such a brand should tilt further toward building in its first years, and no study I know of has tested that.

A stranger needs credibility before a click can convert

This October, AIM B2B published From Content to Influence, a survey of 152 business leaders in Japan and across Asia-Pacific. It’s exploratory and self-reported, so it shows what leaders believe, not strict causation.

Some 83% of participants said influencing business partners is essential or very important to their organization’s success, and 78% of those asked said that influence works by building trust and reputation. Among respondents who think good content has an effect, 71% said it changes how credible an organization seems.

Amol Oberoi, regional marketing director for APAC at Enerpac Tool Group, was direct: “Content is useful so long as it is contextually relevant to the customer and demonstrates expertise.”

That credibility is what a newcomer lacks, and a click cannot supply it. A retargeting ad can remind a buyer of a company they know, but it cannot vouch for one they have never heard of. Relationships do the vouching, and 80% of respondents said business relationships are more influential than business connections. Performance campaigns produce connections: a name, an email address. Turning those into relationships takes time, people and proof.

Storytelling works when it is relevant and real

Among the survey respondents, 74% saw a connection between storytelling and influence. Asked what that depends on, 63% said relevance to the audience and 60% said quality and authenticity. Of the 10 who doubted its value, eight said it can feel artificial or promotional.

Ross Rowbury, senior managing director at Nomura Holdings, describes the mechanism: “If storytelling creates memorable, relevant content, it leads to richer psychological closeness and connections between parties. That richness develops into relationships and as those continue to be enriched, the trust and rapport that results leads to influence.”

That is the sequence a newcomer needs to follow, and it only works if the story matters to the person hearing it. The founding story that wins awards at home does little for a procurement committee in Osaka. Respondents also ranked useful insight (48%) ahead of telling a story (31%). The story carries the insight, but it doesn’t replace it.

PR and marketing belong in the same room

Some 39% said storytelling’s effect depends on the credibility of the storyteller. A foreign brand telling its own story in a market where nobody knows it is the least credible narrator available. Local trade media, customers, partners and executives are better placed and earning their voices is PR work. Marketing then amplifies that credibility and converts the demand it creates.

Split the two and PR earns coverage nobody amplifies, while marketing sends paid traffic to a page with no third-party proof behind it. I wrote recently about how headquarters, regional and Japan teams judge content against different scorecards. The fix starts earlier, with one plan that treats credibility as the first deliverable and leads as the second.

A simple test, adapted from Holmes: ask ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude to recommend vendors in your category, in Japanese or Korean as well as English. If you don’t appear, or appear vaguely, your performance budget has nothing to stand on.

None of this means switching performance off. Paid search will find the 5% who are ready to buy. It just needs to find them something worth trusting.

So try this at your next APAC planning meeting. Imagine the ad budget stops tomorrow. Who in Tokyo, Seoul or Singapore still knows your name, and what do they say when a colleague asks about you?

This piece was first published on The Drum.