3-Step Market Selection

How do you select your international markets? Cristina Talacko, Marketing and Product Development Director at SalDoce says there are three major steps you can take.

    1. Whether the market has a sophisticated supermarket structure: the back end, so they can communicate properly with our target consumer, a high-end consumer. We look at areas with a lot of expatriates that like gluten-free products, and whether the local buyers are willing to buy these products, whether there’s a gluten-free trend over there and whether they have the financial means to buy them.
    2. We also look at the ease of market entry. That’s really important to look at because we tried to get into the Philippines and it took us 18 months just to get our products approved even though they’re not medical, just food products, but bureaucracy in certain countries can be a huge impediment, just to get approved. If you want to get started quickly, I would recommend finding markets that don’t have a huge requirement for registration. I would recommend places like Dubai, Singapore and Hong Kong which are high-end markets, with a lot of expatriates, and it’s easy to do business there.
    3. The third thing is who will be your distributor? Because you need to have a really strong relationship before you get anywhere and make sure that person understands your products well. We didn’t produce diabetic products initially and with the help of our in-market partners, we noticed a huge demand for those products in certain countries so we developed and adapted our products to the consumer and certain markets that have a huge trend or need for those products, which is something that small companies like ours can do. We can actually adapt and develop new products very quickly. Markets like India, China, and the Middle East are countries that are seeing greater demand for diabetic products.

Exporting internationally to more than 16 international markets, this advice was won through dedication and years of export experience. It is the real deal, even though, as she says, ‘I’d love to say we select markets based on where you can have a great holiday.’

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