A holistic approach to your international expansion and growth
“A holistic approach looks for fundamental underlying issues, rather than only addressing symptoms” - Fran Sussman
I’m a strong believer in a holistic approach to many aspects of my life including the work I do. In fact, I write a similar article on the same topic which has been one of the most read articles on our website.
To me, a holistic approach to culturalisation and international UX is twofold:
Having a holistic view and understanding of the markets and the customers (and their context)
Having a holistic strategy to your global growth across different teams
A holistic view of who you’re serving
To grow your global reach, you might want to make changes to your products or services for your international audiences, spend a big chunk of your budget on a marketing initiative for one of your markets, or to explore innovative ideas for your customers in a specific region.
Before you make any of those decisions, you need to first have a good understanding of your customers. When it comes to customers from different culture, background and context, it is crucial to make sure the view and picture you have about them and your markets are as accurate and as complete as possible.
Why is it important to have a full, complete, holistic view of the markets and the people you’re serving?
If you are solely looking at the collected data and/or analysing what you gather from user research, there is always an underlying risk where you either:
Only address only obvious and miss out the opportunities to be innovative, or
Address and focus on the wrong things because what you think you know might not accurately represent the full truths (e.g. insights being misinterpreted due to insufficient )
It means looking into what you comprehend, observe and hear from different perspectives, digging deeper into the roots and origins, and to spot relevancies.
Let’s use this metaphor to describe this holistic concept: Let’s say your understanding of a market and your customers that market is the end picture of a puzzle set. The more puzzle pieces put together, the more details you’ll see, the more complete your understanding about them will be. When you start to learn about your customers and markets, you’re just putting the puzzle pieces together one by one, BUT without the end picture for you to refer to (so you won’t know what it will look like eventually). If you rely only on one research approach or using very little sources to help you paint each puzzle piece, then you might paint the incorrect details to the puzzle pieces and you might only see a fraction of what the full picture (which might not represent the true story).
That’s why my approach is always about connecting the dots between pieces of information or insights that initially may be unknown or might seem unrelated. It means finding and recognising patterns of activity (or meaningful intelligence) comprised of data from potentially disparate sources, collected by a variety of means and subjected to a myriad of analytic processes.
“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.” - Steve Jobs
Looking backwards in this context is about having a comprehensive, integrated and complete understanding of your customers and what driving their behaviours, needs, attitudes, motivations and expectations.
A holistic approach to global growth
Internationalisation and culturalisation process touches all aspects of a business - from branding to product design/build, to marketing, to sales, to operations, to finance, to partnerships, to propositions and so on.
Therefore, where possible, insights about your customers and markets should be shared across teams within the organisation. For example, when insights and data were gathered by one team, even if it has a unique focus or looks from a particular angle, there is always insights that are useful for other teams too.
That’s why when I conclude an outcome of our work with my clients to talk about what they can further explore or take action (from the insights we gathered), we always try to involve other teams (either by having them sit in the presentation and ask questions or to join us in our workshop). Sometimes in the final delivery, we will have a section or slide which highlight insights and actions which are relevant to specific teams, as well as how different teams can work together.
To ensure a holistic approach to global growth, apart from sharing insights across different teams, silos between teams in global efforts should be avoided, where possible. For those who work in big organisations, we know this is easier said than done. That’s not to say it can’t be done.
Your marketing strategy needs to be aligned with your product roadmap. Your product roadmap should align with your partnerships strategy. Your partnership strategy should consider your business proposition for a market. You get the idea.
If you would like to chat more about how to apply a holistic approach to your business as well as your understanding about your customers and markets, do get in touch.