What May Be Shown?
Note on Expression
Expression runs from Restrained to Open, and measures how freely warmth, emotion and social energy are displayed. The world spreads evenly across this axis, with scores from 21 to 81 and an average sitting almost exactly in the middle at 48.
China at 21, the Czech Republic at 22, Bangladesh at 25, Indonesia at 27 and Japan at 28 hold the Restrained end. Argentina at 81, Venezuela at 80, Puerto Rico at 78, Colombia at 77, Mexico and Brazil at 72 and Italy and the USA at 71 hold the Open end. The same feelings exist everywhere. What differs is the rule about where they may be spent.
Why countries land where they do
Where people live close together and depend on each other daily, an unguarded outburst becomes expensive. The rice-farming villages and crowded cities of East and Southeast Asia hardened harmony-protecting habits into face culture, with composure, indirect speech and feeling held back until the sanctioned moment. China at 21, Japan at 28 and Indonesia at 27 all sit here, each with its own vocabulary for the same discipline.
Anthropologists have long documented a band of high-contact cultures running through Latin America, the Mediterranean, and parts of the Middle East and Africa, where conversation happens at closer range with more touch, more volume and more gesture. Argentina at 81, Brazil at 72 and Italy at 71 inherited public squares, café life and crowded festival calendars, and in those places warmth became the ordinary register of trust.
Restraint has also served as protection. Where speech has been dangerous under surveillance and hard regimes, composure became a survival skill. North Korea at 23 and Turkmenistan at 27 are the extreme cases, and the reserved public face with a warm kitchen table behind it is a widely noted pattern across the former Soviet world, including Latvia at 28 and Russia at 38.
Religious and moral codes push in both directions. Protestant sobriety across Northern Europe and Islamic norms of public modesty in parts of the Gulf and North Africa both hold display down, while Catholic festival cultures license it.
Mid-scale countries usually run two registers at once, one reserved in public and one expressive in private, which describes much of the Slavic and Arab world. Britain at 49 does something subtler, using understatement and irony to carry the feeling that plain words are not permitted to state.
How it shows up
The most famous case on this axis belongs to De Beers, which entered Japan in the late 1960s. It found a reserved market with no tradition of the diamond engagement ring and spent decades building one, through advertising that gave couples a scripted and approved way to display romantic feeling. Adoption went from a few per cent to a large majority of brides within two decades. Japan did not become expressive; it acquired a channel through which expression was allowed.
Reserved cultures often adopt tools that let feeling travel without a face attached. Emoji were invented in Japan, and LINE built a substantial business on paid sticker packs, where a cartoon character says what the sender will not. China pairs the lowest Expression score on the list with the loudest shopping spectacles in the world, in the Singles' Day galas and livestream commerce, because a spectacle is a sanctioned occasion and feeling is licensed at the appointed time in the appointed form.
Advertising tone follows the axis closely. The USA at 71 turned the Super Bowl ad into a cultural event, emotional and spectacular. British advertising's best-loved campaigns run deadpan and understated, matching a market where hard-sell sincerity grates. Muji, the Japanese no-brand brand, turned restraint itself into a global aesthetic of plain packaging and quiet quality, and the same product story would read as underselling in São Paulo and as good manners in Tokyo.
Service style splits the same way. Open markets reward enthusiastic staff, greetings and small talk, while reserved markets read the same behaviour as intrusive; Japanese service is famously warm, scripted and unobtrusive at once. Complaint behaviour splits too. Customers at the Open end tell you what is wrong, and customers at the Restrained end say nothing and quietly never return, which is why satisfaction surveys under-report problems there.
In reserved markets the licensed occasions carry outsized commercial weight, which is why Lunar New Year, Diwali, Eid and Singles' Day matter so much. They are the moments when display is permitted, and brands win by owning the occasion rather than by asking for everyday exuberance.
What it does to consumption
This axis sets the volume for everything a customer sees, including creative tone, packaging, brand voice, staff behaviour and the way feedback has to be gathered. It also determines when emotion can be attached to a product at all, which runs from every day in Buenos Aires to occasion-bound in Tokyo, and therefore when the marketing budget should be spent.
"Match the volume. Sell with feeling where feeling is public, and sell with proof where it is private, then own the occasion when the rules relax."
* The cases are well-documented. The causal accounts — density and face, contact cultures, restraint under surveillance, religious codes — come from established literatures and describe tendencies rather than laws.