Asia is not flat. Surely that's the riposte we need to send to Thomas Friedman, author of the incredibly popular tome, "The World is Flat".

A mistake made by many in assessing Asia is that "it's all the same". That essentially is the thesis of Friedman's book writ large and applied to the world, thanks to the trend of globalisation. However, Asia as a region remains - and will continue to be - so diverse in terms of cultures, languages, political systems and business practices that the only thing that really unites the region is its diversity.

With this in mind, it was with relief that I stumbled across a brief review today of a new book by Harvard Business School professor Pankaj Ghemawat, "Redefining Global Strategy". According to the reviewer in The Economist, a better and more accessible title would have been "The World is Not Flat". 

"Differences between countries matter enormously, Mr Ghemawat explains, and unless companies seek to understand those differences - which can be cultural, administrative, geographic or economic - their global strategies are likely to fail," says The Economist article.

"Particularly revealing is Mr Ghemawat's account of how Coca-Cola has gradually developed a global strategy that ‘neither ignores the differences across countries nor caves in to them entirely-that is, it recognises the reality of semiglobalisation.' This book deserves to be a bestseller ..."

It's my view that multinational companies operating in Asia need to develop not only corporate reputation and branding strategies relevant to each market in the region where they operate but also adopt a local "face" and approach. That involves dropping the typical multinational-style template overlay some companies still insist on keeping for all aspects of their business - and they provide little freedom or room to maneuver in accordance with local preferences. Instead a core set of products or services, principles, values and messages aligned with the global business are required, but much more latitude should be given to develop or alter goods, services and communications materials which also resonate locally.

This is the point I was making in my post, "Five trends that will shape the Asian century", when referring to the region's economic rise on the world stage: "Few multinational companies with operations in Asia have yet recognised the impact this massive shift will have on communications and brand strategies - including where the power over related decisions still resides geographically."

Support for a local approach has recently been expressed by McKinsey & Company which found in a large survey most Chinese consumers trust domestic brands more than foreign brands. In its report on the survey, the Financial Times highlighted "the good news for multinationals [which] is that there is considerable confusion about the national identity of some products, with many Chinese consumers believing that brands produced by multinationals are actually home-grown. In the case of two well-known US toothpaste brands, for instance, more than 80 per cent of respondents said they thought they were Chinese. ‘The successful foreign companies have usually made a real effort to listen to Chinese consumers and create local brand management teams, rather than import approaches from other markets,' " said Andrew Grant, the head of McKinsey's China practice.

The days when foreign brands were generally preferred over local ones are fast disappearing in a complex, dynamic  and more confident Asia.