Finding growth in new markets
Finding business growth in new markets is a common business growth strategy. Whether you’re launching a global brand in local markets or creating new products and services for those markets, this insight and marketing friendly ‘how-to guide’ to help unlock opportunities, is based on our own personal experiences of spending months on the ground with clients and consumers in-market, particularly among the emerging middle classes and those with increased disposable income.
Galvanise the team
Successful market development requires everyone to be on board. This sounds simple, but the concept of ‘not invented here’ can be damaging and derail the whole process. This is particularly important when a global or regional team needs to work with a local team, and needs the local team to help, when traditionally they do not collaborate day-to-day. Politics need to be navigated sensitively. Get local business leaders’ sponsorship and agree at the start how best to work together. Ensure that your agency and business partners have scheduled contact with the local team and that roles, responsibilities and expectations are clear.
Create a sense of urgency
A great call-to-action which states the case for market development and the jeopardy of not acting, or being too late to the party can galvanise the team, particularly as being a late entrant can be extremely costly and difficult. Create this sense of jeopardy through films, or other media which paint a picture of the future.
Understand business ambitions and capabilities
Ask clarifying questions up front about growth ambitions, key resources and expectations. If the work involves innovation, be clear on what will be done in house and what (if anything) will be outsourced. Ensure that all senior stakeholders are involved and aligned at this up-front scoping stage. Capture the parameters that have been agreed in a project charter.
Spend time with teams responsible for sourcing, production, product development, channel relationships and marketing to understand what is and isn’t feasible.
Get granular if needed, understanding what can be made, and what cannot. This collates relevant information early and avoids any loss of time later.
Sweat your existing insights before gathering fresh insights
Understand all you can about the category, the channels, the consumer and anything else you think might be relevant. Size the potential opportunity, and develop hypotheses about where growth will come from and how.
Ensure you work with the local team to do this, failing to do risks spending valuable time and effort on things the business already knows
Capture key questions and knowledge gaps that need further exploration.
Agree on any fresh insight that’s required to fill knowledge gaps or hypotheses that need further exploration.
Immerse, immerse, immerse
Understanding the cultural context is critical and will be difference between just OK launches and market-leading. Being in-market, on the ground is the ideal as some of the most valuable insights come from being in the moment and seeing with your own eyes. Unfortunately, for some, the pandemic and travel bans make this more difficult, but thanks to technology, workarounds are possible.
What do we mean by understanding the cultural context?
Get to know your consumer, and go back to good old-fashioned observational insight.
Visit them in their homes, see how they use, store and shop for your product. Dig deep into the benefits that they’re looking for, their beliefs about the category and what it can do for them. Build a picture of the cultural context in which your brand and category operates. For example, if working on hair removal wax, understand what is the meaning of beauty and how does waxing contribute? For household cleaning, what does the home, the floor, your clothes say about you? For health and hygiene, what are the consequences of getting sick? For alcohol, how do people socialise and express themselves as a group and individually?
Go beyond the obvious and be prepared to both ladder up to big picture, and down to granular insights. These insights are critical to getting the in-market execution right. For example: women in India wax to remove hair (yes), but also to even and brighten their skin-tone that can become darkened by the sun; or, health and hygiene is important to avoid getting ill (of course!), but the impact of a missed day at school or at work means lost learning or lost income, a risk that many are trying to avoid (cue Lifebuoy’s campaign about staying germ-free and not missing school).
Visit the places that they shop and consume your products
Visit modern trade, traditional trade in all its forms (from the wet and dry markets to the Kirana store), go-online, go to where they hang out. Spend time at the shelf looking at packaging, claims, assortments and promotions. See what else is on offer, how it’s sold, the claims the products are making. Talk to sales staff. Consume the product in the places it is normally consumed.
Understand sources of influence in culture
From social influencers to popular cultural references in the media, understand how consumers build their awareness and understanding: who they rely on and what research they do. Look at these sources and immerse in the narrative.
Gain inspiration from experts
Work with experts to understand the broader consumer cultural context. Run Q&A inspiration sessions and co-create with people that walk in your consumers’ worlds. These could be:
People who advise your consumers
Influencers that they follow
Academics who specialise in your subject matter
Journalists
People from parallel industries that are somehow related
Have clear strategic platforms for growth
Assimilate all insights, opportunities, trends and cultural nuances into a small number of growth platforms that give the team direction for action. This avoids ambiguity and provides the brief for what they need to create and some hints at how.
Co-create ideas internally and with consumers
Work across functions and business units work together to generate solutions. Ensure that there is a healthy blend of technical capability and marketing capability collaborating to reflect a whole business approach. Allow people time and space to think, combined with faster-paced sprints.
Stress test early ideas with consumers and local team members to ensure that they are culturally relevant, meaningful and useful. Don’t underestimate the disconnect between different cultural heritages and the importance of getting the proposition right. Getting the language, communication and benefits right is critical.
If the ambition is to land a global proposition locally, demo your product to consumers in a live session and get their reactions. Capture their language and their questions. Find out what (if anything) is interesting to them about it.
Use qualitative and quantitative testing to understand and optimise
Use iterative research to build, test and learn. This enables you to evolve ideas and test the parameters of what is acceptable to consumers.
Build into business ideas and test small-scale prototypes where possible
Once you’re sure that the business idea has potential, get it to market as quickly as possible, as the consequences and cost of entry of being late to market can influence in-market success rates.
If you’ve enjoyed reading this and it is something that you’d like to explore further, send us an email by clicking here.