What’s the article about: 
If you are reading this, you might think that it is time for your business to cross borders and expand to Germany. Over the past couple of years we have collected quite some insights on market entry strategies for impact brands. In this article we give you a digest of the accumulated knowledge, with further reading opportunities.

Have a coffee or glass of water during 5 minutes read.

At Expansion.eco, we have made it our mission to help impact driven businesses to avoid pitfalls and make the right decisions, when entering into the German market. The attitude-behaviour gap is known as the emotional tendency to say “Yes” even before you started to gather the appropriate data. We want you to avoid falling into this trap. Before you take the big step, make sure your expansion plan has a solid foundation. 

Expanding your business geographically into other markets can be a promising way to grow impact. There are enormous opportunities such as gaining new customers and broadening your product or service range. But such expansion can also be risky and bring many unexpected pitfalls. Do not get frustrated by trial and errors, it is a great learning opportunity. We often advise sustainable and social businesses to deploy the ‘compound impact method’ when it comes to making important business decisions. A while back we wrote an article about the compound interest method and how to develop a market entry strategy based on that.

At the beginning of a project, make sure your strategy and action plan is effective. To better assess whether or not you are taking the best steps possible, you could for example create a sheet where you list the proposed actions with the effects they are supposed to entail long term – have them checked by local experts.

Oftentimes, when we focus on profitability too much, we tend to think about the short term outcome in the first place and that is not in favor of growing our long term compound impact. So writing down the compound impact effect, helps to recall the more important end goal in mind. As for us, we are sure that the positive triple bottom line is something very high on your agenda.

If you like to know our views on this topic, read our blog post about increasing the odds for a positive triple bottom line.

Regarding your market entry, keep in mind that going one step back and answering the questions relevant to the German market is important to see the bigger picture and assess whether the steps you want to take are headed in the right direction. All the questions you need to get an answer to when conducting a thorough market research and address the right needs and requirements of your target group – How’s that done? Check out this article about Analysing your Target Group.

So when you decide to enter the German market, take time to conduct thorough market research and when devising your strategy, allow it for relationship building in terms of time and marketing activities. Follow on your steps steadily and once you have built the trust amongst your target audiences, customers will reward you with (life-)long loyalty and free referrals. Easy, huh? To finish off, did you know that the Germans are the most complicated customers in the world? Make sure to keep that in mind 🙂 

Happy Reading.

And if you’re just curious how the story continues, stay tuned for our next post or simply subscribe to our newsletter to read it first.