Going and Growing Global: Meet Stephanie Peterson

Stephanie Peterson has been working at the intersection of marketing and operations with a focus on globalization for over 25 years. With experience at successful startups and big brands including YouTube at Google and Xbox at Microsoft, she’s poised to leverage her expertise and collaborative network of consultants to help companies expand to international markets.

Then I joined YouTube, shortly after Google acquired the business, to help expand internationally. Anybody could access youtube.com globally, but we had to localize the experience for different markets. It was as much of an exercise in user experience as it was marketing.

Since working at Google, I’ve been consulting for over 12 years. I’ve helped U.S. companies launch and grow internationally, but also those established overseas wanting to enter the U.S. market. And I’ve been working with EM Marketing for over 10 years on projects with Adobe, Facebook, GoDaddy, and several medium-sized businesses.

What are the top considerations for companies that want to launch internationally?

Going global is complex and takes time and commitment but the opportunity far outweighs the investment. Most mature businesses see 50%+ of their revenue come from outside the US. Those who expand to international markets early can establish a competitive beachhead and diversify their revenue streams.

“Going global is more than just marketing. It touches all parts of the business from product and engineering to operations to finance to legal.”

For Xbox, we had a very strong incumbent competitor and a number of international markets that were more PC games focused than console focused. There was a lot of complexity in manufacturing, logistics and meeting local regulatory requirements. And we had wide variability in pricing plus the challenge of piracy in some countries. Localization was also complex because some games had audio and voice talent which was more expensive to localize than text. So we had to have a very clear business case for each game in each international market to be sure we weren’t over or under investing.

When I worked at YouTube, we were expanding rapidly into new markets. One of the early issues was that although the website was localized, the video content on the home page was optimized for a US audience. So that left someone in France, for example, able to navigate the site and search in French but the default videos they were seeing when they first hit the site, were very American. We quickly made adjustments but it was a challenge in the beginning. I went back to YouTube as a consultant years later when they were building their subscription-based businesses to look at how they should best support customers in a handful of emerging markets. Expectations around customer support channels, support hours, and service level differ greatly country to country.

I’ve launched kid and teen focused products globally, and every country has different regulations about how you can market to children. Even within the EU, member countries have different rules and regulations about what personal information you can collect from minors and how you can use it. So it’s very important to understand the regulatory and political issues that might impact your international business.

What’s next for you?

“Positioning your brand overseas can be different market to market. It really depends on the competitive landscape and local market dynamics. Even two countries right next door to each other can be very different.”