Wise Startup Blog

Researchers Find U.S. Doesn’t Top the List of Countries, and Suggest Marketers Take a ‘Waterfall’ Approach to Rollouts. The actual top-country doesn’t even speak English at all, at least not natively.

The best place to introduce a new product: Japan. The worst place: China.

Broad scope
For the study, Gerard J. Tellis, director of the Center for Global Innovation and professor of marketing at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business, and his co-author, Deepa Chandrasekaran, assistant professor of marketing at Lehigh University, looked at data for consumer household products over 50 years and across 31 developed and developing countries. To rank the countries, they created an “innovativeness metric” based on the time it takes for new products to take off in a particular country.

Why Is Japan The Best?

Regional differences could be a factor and he [Gerard Tellis] explained that this could be because the evaluation was done on a national level, not on a regional level, and that his next study with Ms. Chandrasekaran will look at just this. “Within the U.S., I would expect the coastal areas to be more innovative than the interior. I don’t know if that would match the blue states vs. the red states that they have in political science, but that is a testable hypothesis that we are going to attack next.”

For now, the study can save marketers “a lot of time [and] get quick results,” contends Mr. Tellis. “This ranking of countries tells you which to launch in first.” The authors also recommend a “waterfall” approach to launches, staggering them from one country to the next, and they created a hazard model for the study to determine how many years it will be before products “take off” in a national market.

Mr. Tellis noted that globalization has not made the world flat — products take off in different ways, and this is especially important to keep in mind in an economic recession when resources are limited and competition is tough. “Having this knowledge is more important than ever before because you can’t be extravagant,” he said.

Startups Launching In Japan First?

So are we going to see a lot of startups doing a soft launch in Japan? For the most part, this would be an interesting strategy. Assuming you could launch in English, this would give you an initial market test, and hopefully allow you to build traction and start earning some revenue.

Then, when you take your start-up to the States, you would be ready to go.

What do you think?