the smart starter

I’m coming back to my favorite subject - the one about market education & start-up offices abroad.

Bringing a new service into an emerging market, while being very well established into its home market, means that the company has to spend a lot of marketing effort communicating the benefits of using that generic category of service, before actually mentioning its own brand name, proving its competencies in delivering that service and promoting itself as reliable vendor of that service.

It's the market education work, it's that laborious, quite long and expensive process where you invest all your initial effort in demonstrating to your new marketplace how your service works in their advantage. And convince them to give up the way they are currently deals with the problem your product helps solving and consider the alternative you're offering.

This is hard work and you have to start somewhere.

Have I mentioned that I'm talking about the case of a company that is very well established, with an excellent reputation in its home market? Market leader even, maybe?

I'm going to use the example of a German company establishing new operations in Romania, where its type of service is in the early adopting stage (knowing that Germany is a major foreign investor in Romania)

Well: this company will have to start to educate the new marketplace through videos, demos, product presentation during events, media communication, advertising and so on. But some early references wouldn't hurt.

What this Germany company should be looking for when approaching a new territory is look for its domestic business community - the pool of companies established in Romania and owned or managed by German natural or business persons. Leverage the home market clients and references to get the first meetings abroad; these are likely to be supportive, friendly contacts, which the company should address in priority, in order to start building really fast success stories on the new market.

In my experience with (bashfully) cold-calling expats to let them know that a business service they're probably very familiar with from home has landed in this market, not only was the meeting accepted and the proposed collaboration explored, but I was provided, to my surprise, with feedback, support, ideas and recommendations.

You might also want to read:  New to a new market?PS My Technorati blog code is VXDZKVYYCKKV