Working across Brazil and Australia has given me a grounded view of what product marketing actually requires in different market contexts. The same product, the same strategy, and the same messaging does not always travel.
Here are five lessons that have shaped how I approach product marketing, drawn from direct experience in both markets.
1. Positioning needs to be locally grounded
What resonates as a value proposition in one market can be completely flat in another.
In Brazil, urgency and price sensitivity tend to drive messaging. Customers respond to deals, social proof from their network, and accessibility. In Australia, trust, quality, and reliability tend to do more work. The same product needs different emphasis in each market.
The mistake I see most often is translating positioning literally instead of adapting it culturally. What works is finding the underlying customer motivation and addressing it in a locally relevant way.
Before writing a single word of positioning, the most useful question is: what does this customer type trust, and what makes them hesitate? The answer to that question is usually different in each market.
2. Channel mix differs more than you expect
In Brazil, WhatsApp is a primary communication channel. Push notifications perform at much higher rates. In-app engagement patterns are different. Social commerce is more established.
In Australia, email performs strongly. Search intent is high for considered purchases. LinkedIn works well for B2B. TikTok and Instagram have different audience compositions than in other markets.
If you build your go-to-market plan around channel assumptions from your home market and apply them directly to a new market, you will almost certainly underinvest in the channels that actually work there.
The fix is to do your channel research before you build the plan, not after the plan fails.
3. Speed of trust building varies significantly
In some markets, customers will try a new product quickly if the offer is compelling. In others, social proof, brand recognition, and time in market are prerequisites before most people will convert.
Australia tends toward the latter for higher-consideration purchases. Customers often need to see a brand in multiple contexts before they trust it enough to buy. This changes how you sequence your marketing investment.
Brand-building activity needs to come earlier in the go-to-market timeline than you might expect. If you jump straight to conversion activity before the brand has any recognition, your economics will be poor and you will misread the market as not responding when the real issue is that you have not built enough trust yet.
4. Customer education requirements change the content strategy
In category-creating or category-educating contexts, your content strategy needs to address awareness and education, not just consideration and conversion.
I have launched products in markets where the category was new. The marketing challenge was not "why choose us" but "why does this category even matter." That requires a fundamentally different content strategy. Thought leadership content, comparison content, and educational content do more work than direct conversion content.
The lesson is to diagnose the customer's awareness stage in a given market before you decide what type of content to produce. The wrong content type at the wrong awareness stage produces poor results regardless of how well it is written.
5. GTM sequencing matters as much as messaging
Getting the message right but the sequence wrong produces disappointing results.
The sequence that works for most launches is:
- First, build distribution. The channels, the partnerships, the platform presence.
- Second, establish authority. The content, the social proof, the case studies.
- Third, convert. The offer, the paid campaigns, the direct outreach.
Jumping to conversion activity before you have distribution and authority usually means poor economics. You are paying to convert people who do not trust you yet.
The opposite — building distribution and authority without moving to conversion activity — means you are building awareness that does not monetise.
The timing of the transition between stages is one of the most important product marketing decisions you can make in a new market or launch.
The thread that connects these lessons
Every one of these lessons comes back to the same principle: understand the context before you build the strategy.
Product marketing that works is not applied universally. It is built for the specific market, customer, and moment you are in. The frameworks travel. The specific execution always needs to be local.
You can read more about my background across Brazil and Australia on the About page.
