Scaling a business beyond a home market is a huge milestone. Turning local success into sustainable growth across regions comes with real complexity. Teams have to navigate new markets, new expectations, and new risks. But there’s one part of the strategy that’s often underestimated, or left until it’s too late. Your research strategy.
Not just what research you’re doing today, but whether it can realistically scale as your business expands into new regions, cultures, and customer segments.
The hidden problem with “one-off” research
Many organizations rely on one-off, project-based research to inform decisions. That approach can feel manageable in a single market, especially when timelines are short and budgets are contained, but as soon as companies start operating across regions, the limitations become clear.
To keep up, teams often run separate studies in each market or turn to general population samples to move faster. Both paths introduce risk. One-off studies are expensive and slow to repeat, while exclusively leveraging general samples can make it difficult to know whether the feedback truly reflects the needs and behaviors of real customers. As the number of markets grows, so does the cost, complexity, and uncertainty behind every decision.
Scaling starts with building research around real customers
Scalable research doesn’t mean more research. It means better infrastructure for listening. The most resilient global teams anchor their insights strategy in real, verified customers who’ve opted in to share their feedback over time. With a customer community in place, research becomes easier to repeat, faster to execute, and more consistent across markets. Teams can ask better questions, track changes over time, and respond to regional differences without rebuilding the process each time. What often feels complex about global research becomes far more manageable when the right infrastructure is already there.
What scalable customer research looks like in practice
Global gaming company, Pokerstars, built a flexible research program using customer communities across nine key markets. Now, they can quickly gather authentic player insights and share them with more than 200 colleagues across the business from UX designers to senior leadership. Insights move faster through the organization on a global scale and directly shape player experience across regions.
Adeo took a slightly different approach, creating six distinct customer communities globally to support product co-creation. With this approach, members can test products at home and provide feedback on pricing, retail experience, marketing, and loyalty programs. Because the right participants are already engaged, time to insights have dropped significantly as did their research operating costs. Strong governance has allowed the Adeo team to collaborate across regions while still maintaining local relevance.
Then there’s Condé Nast, which chose a single, collective model. Its insight community includes more than 70,000 opted-in members across 12 countries and 17 properties. This has given their teams on-demand access to their audience to develop new offerings, improve engagement, and unlock revenue beyond advertising, all while building long-term loyalty.
The ability to grow depends on the foundation beneath it
Global scale introduces uncertainty, and assumptions that once felt safe can quickly become liabilities. A scalable research strategy gives teams a way to validate decisions before investing heavily, stay aligned across regions, and adapt as markets evolve. Most importantly, it ensures that customer voices remain present at every stage of growth.
If growth is the goal, the foundation matters. Understanding how to reach the right audiences quickly and consistently is what turns expansion into something sustainable. Before entering new markets, it’s worth asking whether your research strategy will support that growth or hold it back.
