April 07, 2026
McKinsey Uncovers Lessons on Customer Engagement from Asia
Asia is quietly rewriting the rules of customer engagement, and the lessons it offers have never been more important for Western brands. A new McKinsey report has identified six business model archetypes piloted across Asian markets generating growth rates well above underlying market averages. The consulting firm argues these models are not products of geography, they are strategic choices, which global customer experience leaders can make too.
Emotion as a revenue engine
The first archetype is what McKinsey calls emotion-first products. Rather than treating emotional connection as a brand-building by-product, leading Asian companies have made it a core economic driver. Pop Mart’s blind-box collectibles, including the now-iconic Labubu toys, generated $1.9 billion in revenue in the first half of 2025 alone, with a trailing 12-month revenue CAGR of 180 per cent. K-pop agency HYBE surpassed $1.6 billion in annual revenue by building fan communities that span concerts, streaming, and digital interaction platforms. For CX leaders, the lesson here is that emotional engagement can be designed, measured, and monetised at scale.
Trust as infrastructure
The second archetype treats trust, particularly the trust consumers place in creators and communities, as a distribution channel in its own right. Douyin’s e-commerce gross merchandise value exemplifies this, having grown approximately sevenfold between 2020 and 2024, reaching an estimated $490 billion. TikTok Shop’s South-East Asian GMV also expanded nearly fourfold in a single year, from $4.4 billion in 2022 to around $16.3 billion in 2023. Livestream hosts function less like advertisers and more like trusted advisers, answering questions live, demonstrating products, and grounding sales in local cultural context.
McKinsey’s advice is not to copy Asia’s creators but to replicate their trust architecture of transparency, cultural fluency, and fulfilled promises. For CX leaders already finding the right balance between AI and human interaction, it demonstrates that AI can enhance trust, but only when anchored by credible human signals.
Personalisation, education, and ecosystems
The third archetype, microproducers and microsegments, shows how demand sensing and supply chain integration can make personalisation at scale viable well beyond the luxury market. Shein moves designs from concept to product in as few as five days, listing thousands of new SKUs daily. India’s Open Network for Digital Commerce tripled monthly transactions within a year of launch, connecting more than 700,000 sellers to national demand.
Perhaps the most counterintuitive archetype is the knowledge economy model, which uses free, high-quality education as a customer acquisition channel. India’s Zerodha built a base of more than 16 million customers through its ad-free investing platform, Varsity, without conventional advertising spend. Rival Groww kept its customer acquisition costs at 12 to 13 per cent of revenue, roughly half the industry average, by following a similar strategy. McKinsey argues this model is transferable to any trust-sensitive sector, from finance and healthcare to insurance and utilities.
Ecosystems and AI-native services
The final two archetypes, which McKinsey terms “Conglomerates 3.0” and “AI-native consumer platforms”, are increasingly inseparable. Ping An has integrated insurance, healthcare, and smart-city services through a unified data and identity platform, achieving around 95 per cent year-on-year customer retention across 242 million retail customers. A quarter of those customers hold four or more contracts. Its model succeeds not by accumulating businesses but by integrating data across them, so that each customer interaction enriches the next.
Underpinning all six archetypes is AI. Platforms such as Yuanfudao and Zuoyebang deliver personalised tutoring to hundreds of millions of users at near-zero marginal cost. AI-generated hosts and digital concierges are already reshaping how brands maintain visibility as automated agents mediate more of the customer relationship. This is not simply a channel shift. It is a new economic model in which the marginal cost of serving an additional customer approaches zero, and the ability to personalise scales without limit.
For Western CX leaders, the challenge is not a lack of insight. Research consistently shows that most organisations are still struggling to convert AI investment into measurable outcomes. Asia’s leading companies offer a working template, not built on structural advantages unique to the region but on deliberate decisions about how to build trust, design products, and deploy technology.
