Systematic and strategic planning makes all the difference between success and failure when entering international markets. However, any plan is only as good as the foundation it is built on. It is crucial that plans are based on actual conditions and that starts by challenging the status quo.

Experience has shown that if the following 4 conditions are fully addressed in the context of the new (not the existing) domestic market, then success rates are much greater:

1. There is no low hanging fruit

Strong competition means you must be prepared to fight hard against competitors who don’t play by your rules to get and then keep market share.

2. The country is not your target

The specific sector and cluster within each country is your target and most countries have dozens of clusters: Learn everything about each cluster before deciding on which to enter. The advantages are clear: in Latin America, the SME growth rate by becoming part of the cluster supply chain is triple compared to those who do not do so.

3. Buyers – not sellers – are in the driver’s seat

Buyers can select from dozens of countries. Know your relative advantage over your competitors, and how you would do better than them before you knock on the buyer’s door.

4. YOU are the immigrant in a new market

Proving you can – and then will – support your product / service long term is more important than the product / service itself: relationships are key to success. How do you plan to establish your relationship?

The important role of planning

My observations and research, conducted since 1992 in over 20 countries, demonstrates that disciplined, systematic planning will consistently meet objectives from 50% up to 80% of the time.

In contrast, we have spoken with literally dozens of firms attending trade missions, trade shows and independent international initiatives who arrived without a solid plan, and returned home empty handed and disillusioned.

So how to transition from zero to hero? Selecting how to effectively plan is crucial, and most successful exporters we work with use the same general approach.

Why the default business plan isn’t enough

What is clear is that the default business plan many exporters prepare is not suitable for early stage market assessment. Put simply, you can’t manage what you have not yet measured.

A comprehensive business plan can be completed only after the exporter has:

• Determined exactly what they want to do
• Made the strategic and tactical decisions on how / when / where they want to do it
• Assigned their in-house management
• Signed local contracts (LOI etc.)
• Obtained financing
• Dedicated the necessary resources to make it happen on a defined schedule.

In addition, they will have already sought expert and detailed legal, accounting and financial advice, lined up their supply chains and customers, and implemented a rock-solid risk management / mitigation plan.

How a business case propels your progress

Instead, we recommend that exporters adopt a business case approach. This approach is an agile, adaptable, high level and broad-based assessment of a given market, optimized for each firm and their specific product or service.

In several cases of working from an optimized business case template we observed, over 20 potential markets were reviewed and cut to 2 finalists in a matter of a few days, with surprisingly low effort.
It is also an effective planning tool for trade missions, trade shows or international sales reps when entering new markets.

The key is to develop a business case template that is optimized for each company / product / service. It can then be easily applied to identify the most prospective markets quickly, cheaply, systematically and with minimal demands on management for immediate up / down decisions to be made.

Assembling your business case

In general, the business case will address two critical areas. The first is to get a rough idea of the potential market. The second, and by far the most important, is evaluating the firm’s readiness and capacity to enter the new market and then provide the long-term level of service.

Part One is the easiest, is the focus of all exporters, and can be completed through research (online, TCS, industry groups, private consultants) to answer these questions:

• Is there a significant market now for what you are offering in a given country / cluster?
• How is the market being serviced now?
• By whom and under what conditions?
• What is the growth potential?
• What is your compelling value proposition that makes your offering better – and by how much?
• What would your 60 second elevator pitch to potential customers focus on?

Part Two is where the vast majority of failures occur, and the discipline imposed by the business case is incredibly useful in finding weaknesses and correcting them early.

Some of the important issues to address are:

•  Is exporting to this market a core part of the strategic direction of the company?
• Does it have 100% backing by senior management / owners / directors?
• Is the product / service fully compliant and 100% ready to export? (Are you really sure?)
• Does the firm have the cash and staff resources to launch, and what is the contingency plan?
• Does the firm have the resources and dedication to support it long term?
• Does the organization have the technical / language / cultural capacity to provide the necessary customer service? If not, what exactly will you need and where will you get it?

Part two is absolutely critical to get right. Even in markets with demonstrated strong demand, an extreme risk of failures exist due to appointing the wrong project champion, a lack of research, and invariably underestimating the level of change and the demand on resources required within their organizations. This is further complicated by a lack of perspective to assess themselves accurately in the context of operating in a foreign market.

What a business case does not address in any detail are marketing plans, communications plans, HR and staffing plans, operations plans, financing and cash flows, P&L projections, detailed start up costs, procurement and logistics plans, tax optimization, etc. These and other business plan components can be completed only after detailed research in-country is undertaken.

While some firms develop templates in-house, creating optimized templates can be months faster, less expensive and more accurate if an expert management and trade consultant is engaged. A consultant will dispassionately analyze all aspects of the firm, identify the level of effort exporting will take, and develop a template customized for that organization. The cost is usually about the same as staffing a booth at a trade show, and the savings realized in the first year can be impressive.

The final version of the business case can often be used to present to investors, or if necessary be expanded quickly into a comprehensive business plan.

Over the past 20 years, this systematic and disciplined approach using an optimized template has proven reliable, accurate and inexpensive, and has consistently achieved exporter objectives in 7 out of every 10 export initiatives we have been involved with.

Let us know how this approach works for your business! Questions? Reply in the comments below.

I’ve learned a lot of lessons from over a decade of observing the efforts of senior trade development professionals, combined with research that included trade mission/show follow-ups, interviews with SME exporters, and extensive conversations with foreign government trade development officials.

One of the most important is that all of these sources revealed a critical gap in export market entry.

Canada’s SME exporters still mainly rely on the traditional “push” export approach, which involves selecting a potential market, building and launching a market entry strategy, and attempting to penetrate a new market.

However, the vast majority of potential buyers, as well as Canada’s international competitors, transitioned many years ago to a “pull” procurement approach.

Buyers prefer to purchase from local suppliers who offer fast delivery, local invoicing, and produce service and warranty.

Exporters using the pull approach, rather than trying to force their way into an established and usually highly competitive market from afar, take a longer term view and become part of the local supply chain that allows them to instantly identify opportunities and pull any good or service from head office.

In contrast, the typical SME export approach is to focus on managing risk and guaranteeing ROI over the near term. This is most easily accomplished by a simple push approach that relies on selling goods into markets without a previous invitation or request, and doing so with the minimal risk or expense.

But with service exports or services integral to product exports like software, licensing, R&D, custom design and fabrication, etc. becoming an increasingly important part of international trade, companies lacking the ability to provide these services are falling behind. As more countries require a certain percentage of local or domestic involvement, many companies not already in those markets are immediately excluded. And if a buyer is looking for a supplier, they will often find several local options and limit their search to those options, rather than expanding their search further to international options.

I suggest that the focus on push exporting goods and systematically excluding other potential exporters not using the pull approach is the primary cause of why Canadian SMEs export less than SMEs in many of Canada’s primary trading partners.

By encouraging more businesses to set up local presences in international markets, new doors will open for them and their exports should increase as a result.

How pull procurement tilts the odds towards businesses with a local presence

The pull approach is nothing new and has been in common use by international competitors and large Canadian exporters for decades, but has largely been ignored by most SMEs.

The fundamental success factor in any pull application requires only that SME have an established presence in the target country that allows them to identify, quantify and access opportunities from inside that market.

They can then pull goods, services and value-added intellectual property in as required. This presence can take several forms, and is almost always much lower cost than trade missions or even trade shows.

So why does pull work so much better than push? Put simply, suppliers are easy to find in any given market: they advertise, have websites, are often members of highly effective international trade promotion groups, focus exclusively on getting product into the hands of buyers, and compared to buyers are relatively few in number.

In contrast, buyers are much greater in number, do not advertise, and the vast majority rarely, if ever, attend trade shows. But more importantly, procurement has changed and now often focuses on services or service-intensive goods that demand a local presence. In addition, the vast majority of buyers depend on local supply chains, either by preference or to comply with local regulation or procurement contracts, as mentioned above.

This puts buyers (pull) in control of the procurement relationship. With the entire world and often literally thousands of suppliers to choose from, the chance a buyer will find one specific seller is low.

How does this play out in real-world examples?

Our international market research in 15 countries has shown that most of Canada’s SME competitors have been using a “pull” approach since at least the mid-1990s. In many markets they have dominated and have effectively shut out push type export sales into these countries.

EDC has successfully used the pull approach on larger projects and foreign buyers for years, although despite their best efforts, this approach generally does not benefit the majority of SME firms as much as larger companies.

A clear example of the power of the buyer vs the supplier is a Latin American startup importer that easily identified and qualified providers and signed procurement and services agreements with over 30 suppliers in 14 countries (pull) in under 120 days. Over the next two years they grew to dominate their multi-million dollar national market, yet only one international exporter reached out to them (push) to carry their product.

Another recent example of the gap between push and pull exporters is a country actively trying to develop a new oil and gas services and support cluster, that offers excellent (potentially huge) opportunities and facilitated access to market for significant numbers of Canadian SME.

While these opportunities are obvious, easy to identify and quantify, and offer immediate revenue generation, over the past two years dozens of Canadian firms have visited this country on push type trade visits, but to date few, if any, have achieved meaningful success.

One reason is obvious: local content procurement regulations systematically eliminate push exporters, and direct procurement towards registered local pull type providers who must meet minimum local supply and service levels.

How can I take greater advantage of buyers using a pull approach?

Any effective approach must address the gap between SME needs to manage risk and provide a low cost, facilitated market entry, as well as recognize the constraints of the offshore buyers and their requirement to operate within their supply chain as pull importers.

Unfortunately, while simple and inexpensive, this is not as easy as it should be. Any SME can do it on their own, but very few will, so it usually comes down to developing a group (shared risk/cost) approach.

The most successful examples are where industry groups and associations, usually working with various levels of government engage private sector consultants who are subject matter experts in the various industries and have a strong understanding of the local and target country markets. These consultants can then package export investment opportunities and present them in a format that is easy to understand and promote.

The generic approach that has been observed to offer a success rate of well over 50% for each opportunity identified is to:

1. Assess the target sector. Identify strategic operational areas in services and value added supply chain where there is a demonstrated need that is expected to grow strongly for at least 5 years.
2. Identify the ideal profile of the target SME firms they would need to attract.
3. Review the local operating environment with respect to constraints that could restrict trade and develop effective solutions before these constraints become problems.
4. Develop a comprehensive business case on each opportunity with sufficient detail to allow an SME to make an informed decision.
5. Where possible, partner with the provincial and federal government trade promotion agencies and various industry associations to promote it to their members and constituents, as this can sharply reduce the cost of any due diligence.

The New Realities of Trade (EDC: Chasing the Chain) is perhaps the best recent publication to demonstrates the link between Foreign Affiliates (FAs) and export success, and how FAs can increase sales, reduce risk, lower costs, improve market penetration, and enable agile, real time response to change.

It is important to note that this assessment was made for businesses that meet the following criteria:

Assumptions:

• Annual sales to a specific market/region exceed $500,000.
• The exporter has sufficient capacity to meet demand, especially when sales increase sharply.
• The focus is on exporting tangible goods. Services exporters have generally been required to establish FAs since 2000.

And taking into account that:

• World trade is increasingly dominated by regional trade blocks with preferential access to members, and Canada lacks FTA access with most of them.
• Local content rules for many sectors restrict access to export markets.
• Canada (directly) exports fewer manufactured goods now than in 1990: foreign affiliates sell over 50% of value added exports; and over 50% of value added exports are services.
• Corruption of Foreign Public Officials Act (CFPOA) legislation requires exporters take pro-active measures to ensure agents and distributors are not involved in corrupt practices.

Benefits of Foreign Affiliates:

1. Managing complex markets:

You don’t “sell to China/India”: at best you sell to one region/sector. With dozens of languages and cultures, and diverse regional sectors, no distributor can reach the entire country. USA, Mexico and Brazil also consist of diverse regions with distinct economies. Yet exporters still assign exclusive rights to one distributor, shutting out huge potential markets.

Outsourcing marketing, sales, and often support functions to a distributor or agent demands significant investment on their part. Few will invest unless they have exclusivity, which is usually awarded countrywide. In contrast, having a foreign affiliate allows surgical precision in assigning exclusivity to multiple agents and distributors for specific sectors, regions and products. We have observed examples where sales immediately increased by over 400% simply by assigning one sector to a new distributor.

2. Cost/Benefit of FAs:

Most exporters are price takers, not price makers. In Canada prices are (usually) calculated as Cost + Profit = Price, but exporting to increasingly competitive markets with well established, aggressive incumbents means a change to Price – Cost = Profit.

Controlling costs and optimizing operations are crucial for export success, and foreign affiliates help meet exporters’ needs by sharply reducing management/admin costs, optimizing logistics and operations costs, providing access to low cost inputs, and ensuring distributors are matched to demand.

The flip side of cost reduction is to improve productivity and increase revenue. FAs can help drive strong revenue growth by providing thousands of hours of low cost business development in partnership with distributors.

FAs can profitably provide value added services in many markets starting with just $250,000 in sales. In contrast, an international sales rep needs over $1M in sales to justify their existence.

3. Intelligence + Trends + Product Development:

Exporting is (or should be) first about obtaining market intelligence about trends, customer needs, competitors, new technologies, and identifying new opportunities. After completing this research, it’s then about developing and adapting products to meet the needs of the clearly defined market.

A small FA office can provide over 4,000 hours/year of expert real time customer service, identifying new product ideas, and tracking market trends ensuring your products are matched to local demand. No distributor or sales rep can match the value added by an FA.

4. Scaling:

Thousands of Canadian companies have learned that scaling via “Smart Networks” is the most effective export growth strategy. Smart networks are developed by establishing autonomous foreign affiliates, staffed by strategically selected professionals who leverage their networks, local industry knowledge and cross-cultural expertise to extend your firm’s integration to all parts of the local supply chains. Many of the over 2500 manufacturing FAs operating in Mexico, one of which generates over $5 billion in revenue, are excellent examples of scaling via smart networks.

Trade statistics provide additional support for smart networks and FAs: manufacturing exports from Canada decreased by 7% over approximately the same period as manufacturing export sales from FAs – many of whom were integrated into local supply chains – increased by about 20%.

5. Brand Reputation & IP:

Selling expired or damaged goods, and dealing with IP registration and protection related to pirates are common problems that are difficult to manage even with the best distributor. Since 1991, we have observed that local competitors are very quick to duplicate any fast selling goods or technologies, and defending against these small but numerous pirates is almost impossible to do from Canada. We have examples where sales were reduced by over $1M in under 8 months by copied goods after new products were introduced, and the exporters had no affordable recourse.

In contrast, an FA confers full commercial and intellectual rights, and enforcing local copyright and IP laws are always faster and cheaper than filing a complaint via your distributor (who will charge you extra) or the WTO.

6. Protectionist Procurement Restrictions & Domestic Content Requirements:

Procurement in sectors such as oil & gas, defense, energy, communications, education, infrastructure and air transport is often restricted to domestic firms, may require specific warranty and support contracts direct with the manufacturer (not their representative), and/or may require a minimum percentage of local content.

In many countries, regulations are geared specifically towards excluding imported goods, and FAs can provide innovative workarounds to open extensive new markets not available from Canada. Combining FAs with experienced and qualified strategic partners enables the exporter to quickly scale their operations while keeping tight control on costs.

7. Profit Centers & Related Services:

Car dealerships reportedly make 6-8 times more profit on service than sales, yet many exporters consign this potentially lucrative profit center to distributors.

An FA captures revenues from services such as maintenance, training, software updates etc. By locking in exclusive support contracts with guaranteed cash flow, a firm can offer competitive pricing on their goods, helping clinch the deal and keep competitors out.

8. EDC & Canadian Banks:

When your FA holds the distributor contracts, EDC can usually insure your sales, and having confidence you will be paid promptly is often the difference between success and failure. If EDC is involved, your Canadian bank may also participate, and many have services designed for SME exporters.

An often overlooked benefit of having EDC on your side is that when (not if) the customer tries to renegotiate prices after delivery, EDC can help ensure you are paid in full and on time.

9. Legal Considerations & Contract Risk Management:

It’s easier to manage contracts between domestic companies, and resolving cross-border commercial disputes can take years. A foreign affiliate enjoys full domestic commercial and legal rights, provides additional levels of liability protection for the exporter, and helps ensure compliance to CFPOA requirements.

In practice, exporters with FAs rarely need formal legal process to resolve disputes, as empowered local staff will either avoid conflicts in the first place, or resolve them quietly via trusted relationships.

Here’s the bottom line when it comes to FAs

Deciding to establish a foreign affiliate is carefully considered strategic decision. Depending on the need, an FA may be limited to contract administration, or can offer customer support services, handle sales and business development, or host a major distribution and logistics center. Regardless of the function, it is critical to establish the right metrics, and then proactively manage the KPI’s to ensure the FA is meeting objectives.

Exporting is not just stuffing containers; it is driven by agile response to timely market intelligence and developing innovative products and methods to ensure you stay ahead of your competitors. Foreign affiliates help reduce risk, reduce costs, and obtain the real time knowledge needed to successfully manage your business. Distributors – even the very best – cannot do that job for you.

When a firm exports without a foreign affiliate, it no longer enjoys home field advantage. It is a start-up severely handicapped by the lack of expert local knowledge, networks, brand awareness, market intelligence and particularly of the culture(s) and language(s).

Proven, affordable methods exist to overcome this handicap, but experience has shown that (too) many potential exporters still just want to sell surplus capacity, or temporarily offset declining domestic sales.

Further, we find that few will undertake the systematic and quantitative market analysis needed to develop appropriate strategies.

4 new global realities

1. Foreign affiliates replicate the home field advantage of being close to the customer, participating in integrated +/- JIT supply chain, gaining critical intelligence by being part of a cluster, and leveraging lower costs available in the offshore market.

2. Research indicates that only a small percentage of SME exporters would be competitive exporting goods from Canada, and even fewer will achieve significant growth. However, a much larger percentage could be competitive if they created foreign affiliates and GVCs.

3. Exports of goods to the USA are in long-term decline, and are projected to comprise less than 50% of Canada’s manufactured goods exports relatively soon. Many of the estimated 40,000 Canadian SMEs currently focused on exporting to the USA will need to pivot, and sell to emerging markets.

4. Customers expect that a supplier will become part of the supply chain, provide a range of value added services, and will usually exclude those without bespoke foreign affiliates from bidding on procurement contracts, or becoming part of integrated supply chains.

Growth: Get under the tree to catch the fruit

“Customers are hard to find” and “we don’t know where to start” are common complaints from prospective exporters.

In our experience, if done right, business opportunities and customers are plentiful and relatively easy to find. And getting started is also straightforward.

Customers are plentiful:

Manage your offshore markets the same way you do at home and it will quickly become obvious that finding customers is the same everywhere.

Your personal and corporate networks and relationships are critical, and all are impossible to establish and maintain from a distance.

A good example comes from a recent market study.

By leveraging personal networks in the study, over 50 opportunities in high demand sectors were generated and confirmed in less than 8 hours of research.

This result was not exceptional.

Open a local office, staff it with the right people, and invest the time into replicating the ecosystem that you enjoy at home. If you have done your homework and your products are competitive, you should do well.

Opportunities: Unlimited if you are a local

Let’s just look at some “big picture” stats for Mexico.

• The opening of its petroleum production and distribution, and electrical generating and distribution sectors, will require that two national support and service industries be created almost from scratch, and will need to be built in years, not decades.
• Petroleum investment will be rapid, and planned production will ramp up to exceed Alberta (4.5Mb/d), along with the related services, specialized manufacturing and fabrication, infrastructure installation, upgrading, engineering, controls, and miscellaneous service (assuming, of course, that Mexico’s development proceeds as planned).
• Over US$25 billion in automotive investment was announced, and is under construction, in an industry that already employs >700,000 workers.
• Their ICT sector is growing at about 14% per year (about the same rate as Canada’s is shrinking), and is now a world leader in video game and software development, employing >650,000 workers.

You can’t get there from here:

Empirical evidence perhaps, but with billions of dollars in investment in the near term, explosive growth, and huge quantities of qualified and affordable technical talent in Mexico alone, the problem is not that there are a lack of opportunities. The problem is that exporters are not positioning themselves properly to access them. This market cannot be accessed from Canada.

Start with a comprehensive, cost effective market analysis to give management the information needed to make strategic decisions. Follow it up with a business plan, and then decide where to launch.

Keep in mind that the Trade Commissioner Service (TCS) has up to $99,999 in matching grants for business development, and Business Development Canada (BDC) can offer expansion loans up to $150,000.

The leadership challenges in becoming local

Launching a new enterprise in a foreign country used to be difficult, slow, and expensive. Now, it is often possible to start a new sales and/or professional services office, staff it, and be operational in as little as 10 weeks.

We have seen many examples where costs were up to 80% less than maintaining a full time international sales rep. Manufacturing and larger firms do take longer to set up.

The greatest difficulty we encounter is that international expansion requires transformational change that will impact every aspect of an SME, and perhaps the most difficult is accepting the home office will invariably shed functions and staff.

This makes people uncomfortable and challenges strongly held personal and professional beliefs. A simple benchmark is that if the management team are comfortable with opening offshore divisions, they are hiding from reality.

The world of trade has matured, and countries that were decades behind have become sophisticated competitors.

In this new global reality, the proven road to growth is to develop global value chains, establish autonomous foreign affiliates, and become an integrated part of the local markets.

In other words, manage the export market the same way as you do at home, not differently.

With this in mind, I suggest that establishing a foreign affiliate should become the default strategic starting point when considering new export markets.

What if everything you tried didn’t get you past go?

A chance meeting with a group of potential exporters led to a spirited discussion on how to best enter export markets.

It quickly became apparent that management teams were flying blind, planning for markets that no longer existed, and seemed to forget that if you want to catch the fruit, you must first get under the tree.

Further discussion determined the fundamental problem: managers were not willing or able to apply the same strategies and operating methods that had made them successful at home to export markets.

This problem begs the questions:

• What has changed and why are so few of Canada’s SMEs exporting?
• Why do they try to manage offshore markets differently than home markets?
• Where are the best opportunities for growth – i.e. where is the aforementioned tree?

Canada’s export evolution

Canada’s exporters underwent two powerful shocks, plus a pronounced transition from goods to services, that combined to radically change how Canadian SMEs need to think and operate in global markets.

The “Haves” and “Have Nots”:

Enabled by globalization, Canadian exporters had separated into two distinct camps by 1995: those with global value chains (GVCs) that saw massive offshoring to foreign affiliates and focused on services and knowledge-intensive manufacturing, and those without GVCs that were limited to exporting goods from Canada.

Export sales by foreign affiliates now account for over 50% of Canada’s exports.

They are also growing more than twice as fast as export sales directly from Canada.

Money talks – Trade walks:

The second shock occurred from 2000-2009, when the high Canadian dollar forced an estimated 20,000 manufacturing firms to shut down, with a loss of about 500,000 jobs.

Local actors stepped in, in what had been Canadian export markets, quickly dominating their sectors, and becoming sophisticated competitors.

Manufacturing clusters employing millions of workers in automotive and aerospace manufacturing, ICT, agriculture and chemical industries sprung up, forming tightly integrated supply chains, insisting on local supply and service, and effectively excluding foreign-based exporters from Canada and elsewhere.

Leaving on a jet plane? Not without a work visa:

In 1995, Canada’s (and the world’s) trade was dominated by goods, but by 2008, services accounted for about 50% of Canada’s exports.

Unfortunately, exporting services means either moving people or establishing autonomous foreign affiliates and transferring IP.

Since 2004, companies wanting to export technical and professional services from Canada have faced increasing difficulty in obtaining the necessary visas (often impossible).

They also face competition from rapidly advancing local competitors who are invariably cheaper, and are frequently offshore divisions of other Canadian firms.

The transition from widgets to services:

Manufacturing has moved away from transactional finished goods towards value added (knowledge-intensive) products.

In addition, they are offering related services and maintaining a relationship with the customer for maintenance, upgrades, etc.

Those firms that established GVCs have prospered as they developed solid customer relationships, whereas Canada-based exporters have seen a general decline.\

Exactly where is the new frontier?

Current status:

Canada holds no compelling advantage in any value-added sector. However, many Canadian products and specialized technical and professional services are competitive and in demand.

Exporters have been successful, but most had to leave Canada and set up foreign affiliates to do so.

Canada is a world leader in integrative trade, with well over $800 billion in Canadian direct investment abroad (CDIA), and we would argue that Canada’s most successful exports are corporate divisions or even entire companies, not the products they produce.

This offshoring strategy has paid off, and since 2004 foreign affiliate sales in services have grown by approximately 86%, adding over 200,000 new jobs offshore.

Future expectations:

Over 2,500 examples of Canadian foreign affiliates in Mexico alone, clearly demonstrate that exporting goods from Canada is not a path to growth.

In fact, exporting goods from Canada declined by 7% over the same period as manufacturing growth from Canadian foreign affiliates grew by 20%, and these trends are projected to accelerate.

Market intelligence is critical, but also dangerous on its own without the cross cultural context that drives each market.

Realistically, the only way to obtain unfiltered market intelligence in context is to have a credible local presence in each export market, capable of establishing and maintaining relationships, and responding to change in real time.