To sell a strawberry, build trust locally, then sell internationally

The following editorial was written as a blog contribution to the IPRA, the International Public Relations Association.

I’d visited Thailand at least twenty times, starting from my first visit in 1994, before I undertook a project locally. I thought I knew the country and its culture. Laid back, agriculture, ancient history, beach, delicious. But almost 30 years after my first visit, I felt like a rookie in their business environment. I was immediately confronted with how complex their societal context is. And, how naive it could be.

Trust is earned, rather than implicit

Much like Japan, Thailand operates on a high-context frequency where systems serve as social buffers. Their processes are designed to protect the harmony of the interaction and the safety of the institution.

For example, I tried to open a business bank account in Bangkok. To initiate this process, I had to print a series of documents, make a trip to the Thai Embassy in Singapore, and pay a lawyer over a thousand dollars to have them legally stamped as verifiable and true before I could enter the Bank in Bangkok. Once I did, I was asked, “Do you have a relationship with our Bank?”. Um, no. I live in Singapore. “Do you bank with one of our Bank’s partners?”. I bank with DBS Bank. “They aren’t one of our partners. You can’t open an account with us.” Arguably, this was the biggest bank in Thailand to facilitate foreigners and their transactions. Ultimately, I was only permitted to open a passbook account, meaning to transact I would have to appear at the bank and to justify every transaction I made. I gave up on the notion.

Thailand today is bourgeois, increasingly rich, and they have a phenomenal trade portfolio. My job was to publicise to the region the largest food & beverage trade show that takes place in Southeast Asia. Over 60,000 people attended the trade show at that stage; today it’s over 80,000.

At first conducting business there seemed straightforward. It isn’t. Like the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia, the media landscape is dominated by one main city, and then spreads across regional mastheads. News coverage can feel more like a clarion call than news itself as Thais don’t shy from publicity.

I learned quickly that the conversations that shape opinion happen in channels that look, to Western eyes, almost absurdly informal. Personal and business relationships are conducted through instant messaging apps. Acknowledgement, and sometimes decisions, are signalled through gifs or emoji. It was unsettling for me that professional exchanges felt, by any institutional measure, almost juvenile, yet carried real weight, because everyone in the chat (not always me) understood the code.

How trust is earned in Asia

Ruminating on how trust is earned across culture and context leaves me grappling with a question. What if the information environment I was trained to navigate — mainstream media, editorial credibility, third-party endorsement as the gold standard of trust — was never the primary architect of trust? What if the traditional information chain hasn’t broken, but has changed?

The global PR conversation right now is organised around loss. Practitioners are watching institutions that carried trust (the respected masthead, the independent broadcaster, the expert with credentials) being systematically undermined by algorithmic amplification, disinformation, and the collapse of the economic model which used to sustain quality journalism.

In Asia, institutional credibility layers over cultural nuance. Take the bank example above. From a Western perspective, opening a bank account isn’t based on a relationship, it’s transactional. Once you open the account, you then build the relationship. Yet for Thai banks, an existing relationship demonstrates you are trustworthy.

In Asia, trust moves through people, not across publications. The village elder. The community leader. The family patriarch. The colleague whose judgment you trust because you have eaten with them, argued with them, watched them operate over years. Guanxi is far more than a quirky cultural curiosity, it is a functional description of how decisions get made and reputations get built in high-context societies where relationships precede transactions.

Platforms for communications have not destroyed this architecture. They have democratised it.

Trust moves through nodes

Consider these scenarios. In Indonesia a journalist that rejected mainstream media for disguising the truth now gathers live audiences in football stadiums and millions of viewers online, not because any institution conferred authority on her but because she has shown up consistently and honestly for a specific community which permits her to have difficult conversations with them. In the Philippines, a digital bank facing a reputational crisis managed the story almost entirely on social media as they’d built trust with journalists who could see they were managing the issue with their community and felt no need to add fuel to the fire. The voices that are shaping public perception in these instances are not traditional editors or analysts but people who have accumulated credibility with their target audiences. They succeed because of the direct trust built with their audience over time.

The journalist or bank in this instance are examples of nodes — the points in a network through whom trust is sourced and from which it emanates.

What has changed is who gets to be a node. The credentials required are entirely shifting. You are no longer restricted to inherit the position through institutional affiliation or community hierarchy. You accumulate it through consistency, proximity, and recognisability to a specific community. It is self-appointed, self-distributed, and horizontally credentialed. It is the domestic helper from Indonesia that has 50,000 TikTok followers. This notion has no precise precedent in either the Western institutional model or the Asian high-context relational model. It is a third thing, and it already dominates trust architecture across much of the world right now.

Circles of trust emanate

Trust is earned first in a small circle, then it radiates outward, carried by the people at the centre.

Take the story of Korean strawberries. In Singapore, prized Japanese strawberries can command up to S$80 a box. Until recently, we primarily bought strawberries when they were in season from Australia, the USA, or Japan. Today, thanks to Korean exports, we can buy strawberries any time of the year.

The Korean boon started because a government researcher, looking to build new economic opportunities, ate 200 strawberries a day for years. He was central to a small, committed, expert community of farmers and researchers who worked to develop a strain of strawberry that was perfectly sweet and could grow in greenhouse conditions to ripen during cooler months when fruit prices are higher. Once perfected, Korea built domestic demand for that strain of strawberries, so they didn’t have to import them. They then parlayed that local success into a thriving export industry, creating a new economic pillar. The export market didn't create trust. Local trust created the export success.

The strawberry example illustrates how trust radiates through a network: the inner circle that participates, the wider circle that testifies, the community that receives. Platforms enable those circles to expand larger and faster. They have not changed the architecture. The story also underscores that in Asia you need to build local trust before attempting to scale it outward.

To seed a truth, look for the node

Today, to earn trust, the practitioner's job is not to find the right channel. It is to find the right person. A node exists in every market, every category, every stakeholder universe. Finding them, earning the right to work with them honestly, is at the heart of modern communications.

Illka Gobius is CEO and Managing Director of Pinpoint PR Pte. Ltd., Singapore, and an APAC communications strategist with nearly three decades of experience across the region.