Pick a city, study the demographics, estimate the opportunity, and spend enough to get noticed.
That’s been a pretty standard way to think about market expansion. But companies can now know much more about a market before they spend the money to enter it.
In his latest Forbes Technology Council article, RAD Intel CEO Jeremy Barnett looks at what that changes about the way companies expand.
AI can help companies evaluate where to expand, but Jeremy pushes the idea further. A strong market expansion strategy also requires understanding the communities where growth could actually take hold.
A company can look at Denver and see a promising market. What it actually needs to understand are the communities inside Denver that could give its product somewhere to start. That means knowing who influences buying decisions, where trust already exists, and which groups might help something new catch on.
Until fairly recently, understanding a new market at that depth could mean months of research, regional expertise, and testing. AI is making more of that understanding available earlier, when companies are still deciding where their capital should go.
In the Forbes piece, Jeremy looks at why communities can be a better unit for thinking about growth, how companies such as DoorDash learned through expansion, and why entering a new market should make the next expansion smarter.
It also changes what companies can take from one expansion to the next. Expansion has traditionally been treated as a playbook companies learn to repeat. Jeremy makes the case for something more adaptive, where each market teaches you what to carry forward and what to reconsider.
For any company thinking about its next city, region or eventually country, that changes what “doing your homework” can look like.
Read Jeremy’s latest Forbes Technology Council article, “The New Playbook For Market Expansion,” here.
