Behaviors : An in depth look at our market
October 6, 2016
When you go worldwide, the first thing you have to be prepared for is that not every country has the same culture, the same behaviors toward a product/service. This can influence your success in a country or another, or explain why you failed completely in one country or another.
For the sake of this article, the countries/market we're going to use as examples will be personified (Mr.Germany, Mr.France, etc.). Ready, steady, go!
First of all, we have to warn you. This article is about the behaviors we're experiencing toward our counters, it won't be the same for a baker or a software producer. The reality of the behaviors changes a lot depending on the product/service you're specialized in, of course. To explain that, let's use the example of Mr France, Ms UK, Ms Germany et Mr USA and their behavior concerning technologies in stores. LSA published a great article on this matter, but it's in french so I'll sum it up for you guys. This study showed us that Mr France is way more receptive to technologies in stores than the rest of the crew. Why so? Because Mr France is very technology friendly, and the french touch is now famous all over the world. This fact means that if you want to create a technological product, you'll probably be more successful launching it in France than in UK for example.
Let's go back to the main subject : our clients and their behavior. As you know, we're a french company so we can experience and analyze Mr France easier than the others but we still have enough clients in the whole world to talk a bit about them.
Mr France, for example, is... kinda skeptical. He needs more informations than his pals to buy. Let me explain this to you. On our Facebook Ads Manager, we're keeping an eye on how our Facebook ads are doing. And the first thing you can notice when comparing Mr France and, for instance, Ms Germany on these campaigns, is that Ms Germany will more likely buy the product thanks to the first ad they see. But Mr France doesn't behave the same way. Mr France will definitely be more likely to buy the counter when he obtained more informations about us.
So can we assume that Mr France is skeptical? Maybe. But what we can say is that Ms Germany is more trustful in the product she sees for the first time. Same statement for Mr Belgium or Ms Netherlands, they're really optimistic people who are more likely to buy the counter with the ads used in the first acquisition campaigns. See, we talked about 5 of our top 6 selling countries, and they have different behaviors. Lately, we've been selling a lot of counters to Scandinavian countries, and their behavior resembles Mr Belgium & friends more than Mr France. Is France the most skeptical country we're selling counters to? NOPE. There's way more skeptical. In fact, qualifying Mr France as skeptical is precipitated. Simply because we only analyzed the behavior on Facebook Ads. Mr France is actually our biggest client, and by effing far.
No there's one client, one above all else, that's skeptical as hell. Three letters, 50 states. You guessed it. USA. For god's sake we sold more counters in Poitiers, France (89 253 inhabitants) than in New York, USA (8 550 405 inhabitants)... Granted, Mr US is our 3 biggest clients but still, compared to the population and the technologies over there.. That's down right frustrating. But that analysis is not limited to our counters. Mr US tends to buy.. well, american. That's a quote from "The Dark Knight" by Cristopher Nolan, when Harvey Dent says "If you want to kill a public servant, Mr. Maroni, I recommend you buy American.". Right there : Buy American. Mr US is not skeptical of the counter or any kind of technology for that matter, but he's skeptical of non-american products. That's the main problem when you come from the first economic country in the world, you tend to only trust what's made and created by yourself.
And what about you? Are you noticing some different behaviors when you're selling your products in a new country? Tell us!
Hope you enjoyed this article,
I'm out 😉