Stop exporting your assumptions

Sitting in Seattle two weeks ago in a room full of Americans and Canadians, I was asked the inevitable question: "So what are the real differences between Australians and North Americans?"

I smiled, knowing that there were two paths to go down.

The first, extremely sarcastic and humorous. The poor North Americans know this path too well. 

The second is a genuine perspective of how history, culture, national narratives and environment have deeply shaped the behaviour of people.

I chose the second path.

I explained Tall Poppy Syndrome and the need to keep our fellow countrymen and women from getting 'too big for their boots'. I explained the inherent distrust in authority that I suspect comes from our penal history. We discussed the differences in communication styles, how trust and credibility is built differently between Australia and the US.

When they asked for my opinions on US culture, I could speak from over 10 years' experience working there on a cultural exchange and numerous visits. Some of my ideas were agreed with quickly, and others were constructively challenged as they had become less relevant since I observed and formed them years ago.

The whole conversation affirmed to us that to truly connect and communicate with someone (and sell to them), you have to have an understanding of who they are. In other words you need to be relevant to them.

Here's the truth: most businesses that start exporting are solving the wrong problem first. They're focused on logistics, pricing, legal structure. All important. But the businesses that actually win in a foreign market have done something harder.

They've understood that their customer is shaped by a completely different set of forces — and they've built their offer around that.

Export Market Foundations 

Every market in the world is built by a number of dynamic forces that are constantly evolving. History. Geography. Religion. Colonial legacy. Climate. Conflict. Economic shocks. The stories a culture tells itself about work, success, family, and status.

These forces don't just shape who people are. They shape what they want to buy, how they want to be spoken to, what feels trustworthy, and what feels tone-deaf or even offensive.

When you walk into the US market, you're walking into a culture built on individual achievement, optimism, and the idea that effort equals outcome. When you walk into the Japanese market, you're walking into a culture that values precision, collective harmony and trust that is built over time, consistency and relationship. These aren't preferences. They're foundations.

And if your marketing, your product or your service don't reflect that — you're not really competing in that market. You're just present in it.

It's not a translation problem, it's a relevance problem

Translation is a minimum entry requirement, not a strategy for relevance.

Language is the surface level of market relevance.

Beyond getting the words correct, the deeper meaning of images, tones, narratives and purchasing behaviour are stronger markers of relevance that build trust with your global customers.

Being relevant to an export market means understanding what that market is organising itself around — and positioning your product or service within that frame.

Case Study: How Canva gets this exactly right 

One of the best examples of market relevance done well is Canva.

Canva now serves over 220 million monthly users across 190 countries in more than 100 languages. That reach didn't happen because they translated their interface. It happened because they built what they call a "Truly Local" strategy: the principle that every community should feel that Canva was made specifically for them.

When Canva launched a new US brand campaign called Love Your Work, they quickly discovered through user testing that the same campaign didn't resonate with UK audiences. Rather than push it anyway, they went back to the drawing board — not just for the UK, but for each major market they were looking to sell to.

The result was four completely different campaigns, built from distinct cultural insight:

- US: "Love Your Work" — optimism, individual achievement, creative ambition
- UK: "Design Against Dull" — dry wit, anti-mediocrity, British humour
- India: "Dil se, design tak" — emotional depth, cultural pride, Hindi phrasing
- Japan: "Make it Unbelievable" — relationship, hierarchy and trust

Watch how differently these two campaigns feel. Same product. Same core function. Entirely different relevance.

Japan — "Make it Unbelievable"

UK — "Design Against Dull"

Neither of these could be swapped into the other market without falling completely flat. If you promoted the Japanese campaign in Australia, it would struggle to be understood, even when it has English subtitles.

Canva went even further at the content level. In Japan, they partnered with Irasutoya to add over 20,000 iconic local illustrations — images that feel immediately familiar and culturally grounded to a Japanese user. In Indonesia, they built batik-inspired templates that reflect national cultural heritage. In India, they built for Diwali. They added over 700,000 templates for non-English languages — more than half created by local team members and communities, not translated from English originals.

This is what it looks like when a company invests in relevance rather than just accessing a market.

Case Study: Snow in Singapore and Prada's lack of relevance

Now for the other end of the spectrum.

Prada's winter collections are the same around the world for the season. They frequently feature heavy snow imagery — icy landscapes, fur coats, frost-covered scenes. The aesthetic logic makes sense from a European runway perspective. Winter as a design concept: dramatic, cold, elegant.

The problem is that a significant portion of Prada's Asian consumer base lives in climates that never see snow. Singapore. Hong Kong. Large parts of Southeast Asia. Guangzhou. These are subtropical or tropical cities where snow is not a lived experience — it's a novelty, a tourist attraction, or simply irrelevant to daily life.

Image taken in a shopping mall in Hong Kong during a humid 'winter':

Snow imagery doesn't communicate luxury and season to these buyers the way it does to a customer in Paris or Milan. It communicates disconnection. A brand that sells to you, but doesn't see you.

For a luxury brand where identity, belonging, and aspiration are everything, that's not a small misstep. It's a relevance failure at the most expensive level of marketing spend.

The collection is exported globally without local recalibration. Now this may be intentional from a branding perspective. But walking past a store with products that don't suit the climate feels like a waste of rent.

The EOFY reality: Your financial calendar is not universal 

Right now, Australian businesses are deep in End of Financial Year mode — and it's a perfect example of how domestically-built logic fails internationally.

Sales, campaigns, planning conversations, urgency messaging — all of it is built around June 30. It's a genuine psychological and commercial deadline, and it drives enormous buying activity.

Here's the problem: EOFY is only relevant to a very small handful of countries.

Australia's fiscal year ends June 30. The US ends September 30. Japan closes theirs on March 31. Fiscal frameworks differ dramatically. Not just the dates, but the logic behind them — trade partnerships, colonial history, agricultural seasons, government structure.

If you're running EOFY promotions and urgency campaigns into markets where June 30 means nothing, you're not just wasting budget. You're sending a signal that you haven't done your homework. For businesses selling into or working with foreign government agencies in particular, this distinction is critical — budget cycles, procurement windows, and planning processes are all structured around that country's fiscal calendar, not yours.

What this means for your export strategy 

You don't need Canva's budget to apply their thinking. You need a market-relevant mindset.

Before you enter a market, ask:

What is this market organised around? What are the cultural narratives, the calendar pressures, the identity signals that drive buying decisions here?

What does relevance look like here? Not what do we offer — but what does this community actually need our offer to feel like?

What are we assuming that isn't true? What EOFY-equivalent logic are we building our strategy on that has no meaning in this market?

Who in this market can tell us what we're missing? Not a translator. Someone who actually lives inside the cultural context and has deep experience.

The businesses that grow internationally aren't the ones with the best product. They're the ones who did the work to make their product mean something to the people they're selling to.

That's market relevance. And it starts long before the first invoice.