The debt scaling brands don’t measure, until it’s too expensive to ignore

For the last few years I've watched the same pattern turn up in almost every scaling brand we've worked with, no matter the industry. This year, I've been able to name it - International Marketing Debt.

I discussed the idea in my conversation with Deborah Malone on The Internationalist's Trendsetters podcast last week, but I wanted to set it out here in my own words as well. Links to the podcast below, thanks also to Deborah for the great graphic.

What is International Marketing Debt?

It works the same way technical debt does, where in software development, a team ships a shortcut to hit a deadline. The fix works in the moment and nobody pays for it straight away. But the shortcut persists, and everything built on top of it inherits the problem, until the entire system is fragile and slow to change.

Marketing teams can make the same mistake when brands scale into new markets. A content or campaign brief, or a user experience, gets adapted from the home market instead of built for the local one, because there's no time to start from scratch. A translation goes out without a cultural review, because the schedule's tight and it reads fine on paper. An agency scope of work excludes the upfont localisation strategy piece because it's faster and cheaper. None of these decisions are careless and each of them are defensible on their own.

But none of these decisions 'clear the balance' as it were. They just add to it and unlike a missed deadline, this debt doesn't announce itself. It sits quietly in the background until the cost of ignoring it is higher than the cost of doing it properly in the first place would have been.

For brands scaling into new markets...

If you're scaling into new markets right now, I'm willing to bet you're already carrying some of this. Most founders don't find out how much until performance in a local market drops and nobody can say why.

Over the next few weeks, I'll be sharing more about where international marketing debt actually comes from, why almost nobody measures it, and what paying it down looks like. I'm also joining a panel discussion at Sifted Summit at the end of the month, and this is what I want to talk about while I'm there. So stay tuned, lots to come.

Listen to the full conversation on The Trendsetters Podcast.

Read Deborah Malone's write-up in the Internationalist Magazine.