Indonesia reads more about German cars than any of its neighbours, and less about luxury houses than all of them

Two weeks ago we put the most-read brand in Southeast Asia next to the most-read Korean act and found the brand was read about 5.7 times less. That answered one question and buried another. Brands are not one thing.

Take the same 22 fashion, luxury, jewellery and car brands and split them by kind. Reading is divided by the size of each Wikipedia edition, so Malaysia is not pushed to the bottom for having fewer readers than Indonesia.

Indonesia is first in one column and last in another. It reads more about BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Porsche than Vietnam, Thailand or Malaysia do, and less about Gucci, Chanel and Louis Vuitton than any of them. Malaysia does the reverse: top of the luxury row on 86.30, bottom of the car row on 17.32. Vietnam sits second in every kind that is thick enough to read, which is its own kind of answer.

Rank all 22 brands together and each country gets one position. That one position is an average of two opposite behaviours.

The comparison we did not publish

We wanted to put Hyundai, Kia and Genesis against BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Porsche. The German total is 165.34; the Korean total is 23.13. We are not printing the multiple.

Only Kia has an article in all four editions. Hyundai has none in the Thai Wikipedia. Genesis has one only in Indonesian. Divide 165.34 by 23.13 and you are not comparing German marques with Korean ones — you are comparing three articles with one, and calling the difference interest.

The gap that stopped the comparison is the finding. The Thai Wikipedia has an article on BMW, on Mercedes-Benz and on Porsche, and none on Hyundai.

That is a statement about an encyclopaedia, not about a market. We hold no sales figures. A missing article is not a missing customer, and a marque carrying a century of motorsport brings model-by-model articles that a reader falls into — enough to move reading without moving a single sale.

What this cannot see

Wikidata records no ambassador or endorsement relation between people and brands. We checked; the property is not in use. So none of this says who fronts which house, and the announcement that sends a fandom to a brand page for one week does not appear here at all — this window is twelve months long.

Three luxury houses (Fendi, Burberry, Bottega Veneta) are in the panel but out of the luxury total for the same reason as Hyundai: they are missing an edition, and counting a missing article as zero would dress an encyclopaedia gap as disinterest.

Two kinds here hold fewer than three fully-covered brands. They are printed so the panel is complete and marked so they are not read as a pattern.