The Global Marketing Show

Expanding into a new country has traditionally meant months of market research, expensive consultants, and difficult decisions about where to invest. AI is starting to dramatically shorten that process, but that doesn’t mean companies can simply ask ChatGPT which country to enter next.

In this episode of The Global Marketing Show, Wendy Pease talks with Klaus Wehage, serial entrepreneur, global expansion expert, and co-author of Global Class. The book was built on conversations with approximately 400 executives across 50 countries, including leaders involved in the international growth of companies such as Apple, Zoom, Airbnb, and other global brands.

Klaus has spent years helping companies determine where and how to expand internationally. Some of that strategy work once took his team an average of nine months. Today, his company Global Copilot is using AI to aggregate baseline market research in minutes and help businesses build global growth strategies much faster.

But speed doesn’t eliminate the need for expertise.

Klaus explains why companies still need to validate AI-generated research with people who understand the market, industry, language, and culture. A spreadsheet can tell you that a market looks promising. It may not tell you that pricing negotiations work differently in Japan, that employees in the Philippines expect a 13th-month salary around Christmas, or that the language customers actually use can carry cultural meaning that even a native speaker living abroad may miss.

The conversation also explores some fascinating examples of companies that built globalization into their businesses early. Japanese technology company Rakuten made English its official internal language as part of its push to become a global company. French ridesharing company BlaBlaCar changed its original French name and intentionally hired international talent before entering some of those employees’ home markets.

Klaus and Wendy also dig into one of the biggest mistakes companies make: treating international expansion as simply replicating what worked at home. Hiring a salesperson in another country and telling them to sell the same way, using the same messaging, pricing, positioning, and assumptions can be an expensive experiment.

AI can make global research dramatically faster. But successful expansion still requires asking the right questions, validating the answers, and understanding the people on the other side of the market.

Learn more on our blog: https://www.rapporttranslations.com/the-global-marketing-show/global-expansion-research-used-to-take-9-months-ai-is-changing-that

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