Reading the terrain
Before I was a strategist I trained as a cultural geographer. The discipline taught me to look at places not as locations on a map but as lived environments. Terrains with their own rhythms, hierarchies, maps of meaning and codes of belonging, where some people move through easily and others don't. I've never stopped seeing markets that way. A market is a place. And like all places, it can be entered, but it can also reject you.
The standard vocabulary of market entry doesn't quite acknowledge this. We talk about entering a market the way we talk about entering a building. Crossing a threshold, taking up a position, doing business inside a defined space. The metaphor implies that the work is mostly logistical. You get the channels right, the pricing right, the partners right, the regulatory approvals right; the door opens; you're in. The cultural translation, if it's discussed at all, gets handled as a checklist item, adjusting the language, swapping a colour, avoiding a few obvious taboos.
This isn't wrong. It's just not the whole story. And that can start to matter twelve months into a launch, when the sales aren’t buzzing and the economics aren't quite working and nobody is quite sure why. The real work of market entry isn't entering. It's inhabiting. And inhabiting a market means understanding a place well enough to be absorbed by it rather than bouncing off it.
Most of what I'd want to say about how to do this well comes back to the work of the anthropologist Daniel Miller, whose research on consumption and everyday life (collected most accessibly in his book Stuff) is one of the deepest influences on how I think about brands.
Miller's argument, across decades of fieldwork in London, Trinidad, the Philippines and elsewhere, is that consumption isn't an isolated commercial act. It's woven into the dense, taken for granted texture of how people actually live, the relationships that matter to them, the moral and aesthetic codes they use to make decisions, the rhythms of their days. Brands enter into these life worlds, or they don't. When they do, they tend to do so by being adopted into existing practices rather than imposed on them.
Reading the terrain, in practice, means understanding the life world a brand is trying to enter well enough to be invited in rather than tolerated, ignored, or actively repelled.
Four things, I've come to think, are worth paying close attention to.
The first is codes. Every category in every market has a working vocabulary of visual, verbal, and behavioural conventions that signal category membership and positioning within the category. The brand colours that say premium in one country signal cheap in another. The packaging conventions that read as artisanal in the UK can read as unprofessional in Germany. The brand language that signals warmth in the US can land as oversharing in Japan. These codes aren't decoration; they're how meaning gets transmitted at speed. Misreading them is the most common form of market entry failure and it almost always happens to brands that thought they could carry their home country brand language across the border merely with light adjustments.
The second is rhythms. Markets have temporal patterns. When people shop, how often they buy, what time of year a category goes through its volume cycles, how purchase decisions are spaced relative to use. These patterns are often invisible from outside the market and feel obvious from inside it. A wellness brand entering Germany has to know about Apotheken culture and the rhythms of seasonal supplementation. A food brand entering Japan has to understand konbini and how people actually buy food when they buy it. The brand that ignores rhythm risks launching with the wrong distribution shape and burn cash trying to correct.
The third is hierarchies. Every market has incumbent brands, prestigious players, category leaders and category laggards. The hierarchy isn't always what an outsider would expect. The premium tier brand in your home market may be a mid tier brand by the standards of a new country. The slightly downmarket brand at home may, in a new market, be perceived as exotic and aspirational. The hierarchies also include adjacent categories. What the consumer is comparing your brand against may not be your direct competitors at all, but the cultural alternatives they're choosing between. Misreading hierarchy is how a brand ends up priced wrong relative to its actual positioning.
The fourth is alternatives. Most market-entry analysis focuses on direct competition. The cultural read is broader. What else could this consumer be doing instead of buying you? In a yoga practice community, a supplement brand isn't competing with other supplements. It's competing with meditation, with adjusted diet, with a teacher's recommendation, with the choice not to supplement at all. In a category where consumers are educating themselves about their own bodies and figuring out chronic illness, biohacking, personalised health, the brand is competing with patient communities, with self experimentation, with the long process of finding what works. Understanding the real alternative landscape is often the difference between a brand that finds its place and one that pushes in the wrong direction.
I think about this in the work we do almost every day. A few years ago I worked with a nutritional brand, building its presence in the yoga community. The interesting thing about that work wasn't the obvious commercial structure like channels, retailers and pricing. It was the cultural one. Yoga practice in the markets we were working in had its own life world: the studio, the teacher, the atttached rituals, the particular relationship to health that wasn't quite the same as mainstream wellness culture. A protein brand entering that world couldn't behave like a sports nutrition brand or a clinical supplement brand. It had to find a way of belonging to the rhythms and codes of a community that was already there, with its own internal logic. The work was much closer to ethnography than to brand strategy as usually practised and the strategy emerged from understanding the life world, rather than being applied to it.
More recently, working with a functional and genetic health business, whose audiences include biohackers, integrative practitioners, doctors raised in entirely different health cultures, nutritionists, and patients who became self-taught after their own chronic conditions weren't being addressed. Each of those audiences is a partial life world, with its own codes and authorities. Reading the terrain there isn't about a single market. It's about navigating five or six overlapping cultural worlds without flattening any of them.
When the cultural read is done well, you can see it in the way a brand lands. IKEA's entry into India, often used as a case study now, was preceded by years of immersive fieldwork in local homes, understanding the rhythms of family life, the size and shape of urban apartments, the place of the meal in everyday domestic culture. The eventual entry strategy looked nothing like a copy and paste of the European model. The stores had different layouts. The product range was different. The cafés were positioned differently. None of that emerged from a desk research exercise. It emerged from spending time in the life world the brand was trying to enter.
The shift this requires, in how a business approaches market entry, is more posture than process. It means treating the new market as a place to be inhabited rather than a target to be acquired. It means going in with the curiosity of someone who knows they're a guest, rather than the confidence of someone who assumes the rules transfer. It means slowing down enough at the front end to read what's actually there, before the operational machinery of launching takes over and there's no time to look up.
The brands that do this well often look slower at the start and faster after launch, because they've avoided the eighteen months of quiet drift that follow most market entries.
It also means accepting that entering is the wrong word for what's actually happening. A brand crossing into a new market is doing something closer to moving house in a city it doesn't know yet. The neighbourhood has rhythms. The neighbours have expectations. The shops you visit, the people you talk to, the way you greet someone in the lift, all of these are part of becoming part of the place rather than just renting space in it. Learning the neighbourhood and gradually becoming an active part of it.
This is the work I find most rewarding, and the work most prone to being underestimated by people who haven't tried to do it. The terrain is always there. The question is whether anyone reads it before the moving van arrives.