Jokes aside, I get the fatigue. The post wasn’t trying to win on voice, just to surface a pattern I’ve seen repeatedly in expansion decisions. Totally fine if the style alone is a dealbreaker.

I worked at one of the largest IT companies here in Norway when it got sold to some international corporation. They drove it into the ground in less than 6 months, selling the tattered remains for scraps to our largest competitor.

In my current job I've seen it multiple times with our competitors, where they're just a shadow of themselves after getting acquired by a large multinational.

Good for us of course, we're now dominating our niche.

What went wrong there wasn’t a lack of effort or even a lack of localization budget. It was that the core choices never changed. Language, signage, and surface behavior were adapted, but the underlying assumptions about how work, trust, and retail interaction should function were treated as universal.

That’s why “translation-first” expansion fails so consistently. It preserves the original offer and operating model and only swaps the interface. But markets don’t reject foreignness in general; they reject mismatched constraints. In Germany, Walmart didn’t fail because it was American. It failed because it tried to export a specific social and organizational contract that simply didn’t survive contact with local norms.

The Aldi / Trader Joe’s contrast is also telling. That wasn’t just better localization. It was a deliberate decision to let the local market define what should remain and what should be abandoned, even if that meant the brand looked very different from its origin.

This is the distinction I was trying to surface: changing language is cheap. Changing choices is expensive. Most expansion failures happen because teams do the former and avoid the latter.

You’re right that concrete case studies would be more interesting if the goal were to teach tactics or prove a specific playbook. This piece wasn’t written to do that. It’s intentionally a framing piece, not a case study collection.

The reason I avoided named cases is that the failure pattern itself is remarkably consistent across industries and regions. Once you anchor on a specific company or outcome, the discussion tends to drift toward “what they did wrong” rather than the earlier decision failure the post is trying to surface: using country names as a substitute for market definition.

As for the consulting angle — I get the skepticism. The intent here wasn’t “hire us because we’re smart,” but “here’s the exact reasoning error we see before expensive expansion failures.” If that error is already obvious or already handled well in your work, then the post won’t add much value.

Case studies are useful once the frame is agreed on. This was written for the moment before that, when teams still believe they’re aligned because they’ve named a geography.

This wasn’t written as an SEO play or a lead-gen piece, and it’s not meant to be a comprehensive framework. It’s closer to a framing memo I’ve used internally with teams that were about to say “we’re going global” without having made the decisions that phrase quietly skips over.

If you already operate at a level where “global” is never confused with a market, then the post won’t offer much. Where it tends to resonate is with teams who say they know this, but still let country names substitute for concrete choices in planning and execution.

Totally fine if it didn’t land for you — appreciate you reading it seriously enough to react.

You’re right that almost no one literally believes “every person in America” is their market. My point isn’t about what people consciously believe, but about how decisions actually get made once a country label enters the discussion.

In practice, phrases like “the U.S. market” or “the Asian market” often function as decision placeholders. They signal progress, but they also delay the harder choices that determine whether an entry works at all: who specifically buys, under what constraints, through which channel, and what is explicitly excluded.

That’s why the argument can sound obvious in hindsight. Before launch, the country label compresses complexity. After failure, teams acknowledge the fragmentation retroactively.

This critique also applies unevenly. For low-involvement, highly standardized goods (mass retail, commodity hardware), broad assumptions can hold longer. The article is aimed much more at B2B and constraint-heavy products where purchasing situations narrow quickly and vary dramatically even within the same country.

So yes, your one-sentence summary isn’t wrong. The issue is that many teams act at that level while believing they’re being more precise. That gap between intent and execution is what the post is calling out.

What’s interesting in cases like yours is that population density looks like the obvious explanatory variable before launch, but after the fact it turns out to be a proxy for something else entirely: institutional density, learning culture, distribution norms, or even how people discover and legitimize educational products.

San Francisco and certain European capitals often share very specific conditions: higher tolerance for self-directed learning, stronger peer signaling around education, and shorter distance between “interest” and “action.” None of that shows up if you frame the market as “the U.S.” or “Europe,” even though it decisively shapes outcomes.

This is why I argue that markets are defined by purchasing situations, not demographics or geography. You didn’t find a cultural preference so much as a repeatable context where the same offer could travel through similar constraints and still work.

Your experience is a good illustration of how misleading country-level reasoning can be, even for products that seem universal on the surface.