Cultural strategy for brands entering new cultures
Shanghai · Saigon · Accra · Sydney · London
01Briefing
Meridian is cultural counsel for brands entering a new market. It reads the culture they are walking into, from the inside, built on two decades of living and working there.
I.
What drives your target audience: their needs and tensions, the codes they read, whom they trust and why, and how they decide. Often they are not a translated version of the customer you have at home.
II.
The culture of the environment you are entering: the city’s art, food, music, institutions, media and commerce. The setting your brand has to belong to, not just sell into.
We are more the same than we are different.
The need is constant.
Belonging, status, safety, growth. Every market is driven by the same human needs, and that shared foundation is where cultural strategy begins.
The expression is cultural.
What signals status, what reads as success, what is aspirational and what is insulting: all of it changes at the border. What lands at home can read as tone-deaf, or simply foreign, somewhere else.
Get the cultural expression right, and a foreign brand stops being foreign.
02Reading the cues
In the West, running is sold as freedom: clear your head, run free. For China's urban runners it is the opposite, a discipline of self-improvement measured in progress and personal bests. Sell freedom and you miss them. Sell mastery and the brand belongs.
Many people in Vietnam assume OMO is Vietnamese. It has led its category for so long, and woven itself so deeply into family life, that its origin has disappeared. That is the real prize: not to be welcomed as a visitor, but to be taken for a local.
In Côte d'Ivoire, Maggi is woven so deeply into everyday cooking that it reads as part of the culture, not a brand that arrived from abroad. It has stopped being a product people choose and become part of how a family meal is made.
Reading the cue correctly is the service.
03Dispatches
Society is only part of it. Culture is the art people queue for, the museums that hold a city’s memory, the food that defines a weekend, the music, the street, the game on Saturday. These are the touchpoints Meridian works with, for strategy, for campaigns and for PR.
Shanghai · Retail as content
For Gen Z in Shanghai, shopping is a social, content-making act. A makeup store that turns every visit into a shoot and every customer into a creator stops being a shop and becomes a stage.
Saigon · Art & exhibition
Children's drawings, collected by a bus that toured the country and hung as public exhibitions. A detergent brand earned a place in the culture by giving it something to look at, and to talk about.
Accra · Music
For young West Africans, music isn't entertainment, it's fuel for ambition. A coffee brand built a grassroots song contest with local artists across three countries, and became part of how a generation starts the day.
The cultural index
Galleries, studios and the visual language a city recognises as its own.
The stories a place tells about itself, and the institutions that keep them.
What people eat, when, with whom, and what the table means.
The sound of a generation, and where it gathers.
How identity is worn, mixed and shown off in public.
Where pride, discipline and community meet.
Understand
Read the culture accurately: its codes, its tensions, and what it values and rejects.
Embody
Express the brand in the culture's own terms, so it speaks with people rather than at them.
Imagine
Picture the brand wrapped around the life of the city: its art, its food, its streets. Then build the campaigns and partnerships that make it real.
The brand stops visiting the city. It wraps itself around it, and becomes part of it.
04The agenda
Decode the category and the city through a local lens: meaning, tension, opportunity.
A brand idea and message built for the market, not translated into it.
Partnerships with the city's art, food, music and institutions that earn attention rather than buy it.
Segmentation, platforms and activation that local teams can run.
Every engagement ends in the same decision, made with the people who will carry it out: what of the brand travels as it is, what bends to the culture, and what has to be rethought from the ground up.
The Meridian Sprint
A focused sprint around one brand and one market-entry challenge, with an optional stakeholder workshop facilitated by David.
What does the business believe about the new market? Every home-market assumption, written down.
Fresh research on the ecosystem, the city and its culture, plus real conversations with local people.
Twelve stages of the consumer experience, each with its cultural barriers and openings.
A vivid portrait of the real target: who they are, what they know, whom they trust.
Decided together, across positioning, communications, channels and audience.
Priorities, quick wins, risks, and what to test first.
05Case files
The Experience Centre, Shanghai
The store's real output isn't a sale. It's content, and every visit seeds the next.
Lazr V2 & Zante Pursuit launch
Re-segment the audience until the proposition writes itself.
FY19 market-entry strategy
In a market that skipped the console era, immersion was the unmet need. Culture told us how to sell it.
More cultural work from Vietnam and West Africa: Light Vision case studies
06Atlas
The process doesn’t change from market to market. Only the content does.
07Correspondent
David Chait has lived inside the markets he advises on: planning lead at Wunderman in Shanghai, regional strategy across twenty-two African markets for Nestlé at Publicis, and years in Vietnam and Australia.
Each move forced a fresh cultural read from zero. The instinct for what a brand means in an unfamiliar place wasn’t studied. It was lived, one relocation at a time, and that is the muscle Meridian brings to every brief.
08How to begin
For a team that needs a shared, accurate read of a new market, fast.
For one brand and one market-entry challenge.
For brands building a market over time, from launch onwards.
Meridian works with a small number of brands at a time. Each engagement is scoped to one market and one decision.