Entering New Markets - Gathering Ground Level Information

One of the areas that we've been focused on in our International Business course has been the challenges that many companies have when they attempt to move into foreign markets, often assuming that knowledge from their home country will translate into the new market.

As companies send people forward into a country to start doing market research, this is a simple way to get very raw reactions to your concept. The beauty of this is that it's incredibly simple, incredibly inexpensive, and doesn't hide the human element behind a bunch of summarized numbers (or biases). This could be collected and frequently sent back to the product or strategy teams to give them data points to make adjustments to their original plans.