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> Teams that start with translation almost always share the same failure pattern: They change the language, without changing the choice. Obligatory reminder to

> Teams that start with translation almost always share the same failure pattern: They change the language, without changing the choice. Obligatory reminder to the utter failure of Walmart to enter the German market a few decades ago [1]: no respect for local labor laws was one thing (most of the competition openly sharted on it just as well), but what really did them in was the greeters, the forced smiles and the chants. Germans don't want to be coddled like Americans, Germans don't want to be treated like a religious cult at work, and the failure of Walmart to see this lost them over a billion dollars. [1] https://medium.com/the-global-millennial/why-walmart-failed-in-germany-f1c3ca7eea65 https://medium.com/the-global-millennial/why-walmart-failed-...

port3000 10mo ago
True. Interesting as well that Aldi Sud did the complete opposite when they entered the US with Trader Joe's - completely adapting the brand to the local market.
- KellyCriterion 10mo ago
  ...Id say that Aldi watched the market failure of Walmart in Gemany very closely and learnt massivly from that? :-)
magicalhippo 10mo ago
I really don't get why large corporations seemingly don't do more homework when trying to get into a new market. Especially if they buy a successful company to do so, without doing any work figuring out why they're successful, nor rocking the boat. I worked at one of the largest IT companies here in Norway when it got sold to some international corporation. They drove it into the ground in less than 6 months, selling the tattered remains for scraps to our largest competitor. In my current job I've seen it multiple times with our competitors, where they're just a shadow of themselves after getting acquired by a large multinational. Good for us of course, we're now dominating our niche.
- mschuster91 10mo ago
  > I worked at one of the largest IT companies here in Norway when it got sold to some international corporation. They drove it into the ground in less than 6 months, selling the tattered remains for scraps to our largest competitor. That's intentional, corporate raiding (or by its legal name, leveraged buyouts and similar strategies). Load the purchased company up with debt to finance its own acquisition, take everything that's valuable (e.g. a specific contract, IP, "rockstar" employees - aka acquihire), sell off the husk to the highest bidder or send it off to bankruptcy. All you need is someone braindead (or desperate) enough to lend you money. When all you're looking at is one single thing of (relatively) stellar value, you don't need to invest in the rest.
  - magicalhippo 10mo ago
    > That's intentional, corporate raiding (or by its legal name, leveraged buyouts and similar strategies). But that's not what they did as far as I know. They just implemented some braindead policies that caused income to grind to a halt overnight, because those policies worked so well in the other countries ther were in. The good employees jumped ship early. I had a limited contract which didn't get renewed due to hiring freeze.
oswarld 10mo ago
Author here. This is a really good thread, and the Walmart Germany example is exactly the failure pattern I had in mind. What went wrong there wasn’t a lack of effort or even a lack of localization budget. It was that the core choices never changed. Language, signage, and surface behavior were adapted, but the underlying assumptions about how work, trust, and retail interaction should function were treated as universal. That’s why “translation-first” expansion fails so consistently. It preserves the original offer and operating model and only swaps the interface. But markets don’t reject foreignness in general; they reject mismatched constraints. In Germany, Walmart didn’t fail because it was American. It failed because it tried to export a specific social and organizational contract that simply didn’t survive contact with local norms. The Aldi / Trader Joe’s contrast is also telling. That wasn’t just better localization. It was a deliberate decision to let the local market define what should remain and what should be abandoned, even if that meant the brand looked very different from its origin. This is the distinction I was trying to surface: changing language is cheap. Changing choices is expensive. Most expansion failures happen because teams do the former and avoid the latter.

port3000 10mo ago

True. Interesting as well that Aldi Sud did the complete opposite when they entered the US with Trader Joe's - completely adapting the brand to the local market.

KellyCriterion 10mo ago
...Id say that Aldi watched the market failure of Walmart in Gemany very closely and learnt massivly from that? :-)

magicalhippo 10mo ago

I really don't get why large corporations seemingly don't do more homework when trying to get into a new market. Especially if they buy a successful company to do so, without doing any work figuring out why they're successful, nor rocking the boat. I worked at one of the largest IT companies here in Norway when it got sold to some international corporation. They drove it into the ground in less than 6 months, selling the tattered remains for scraps to our largest competitor. In my current job I've seen it multiple times with our competitors, where they're just a shadow of themselves after getting acquired by a large multinational. Good for us of course, we're now dominating our niche.

mschuster91 10mo ago
> I worked at one of the largest IT companies here in Norway when it got sold to some international corporation. They drove it into the ground in less than 6 months, selling the tattered remains for scraps to our largest competitor. That's intentional, corporate raiding (or by its legal name, leveraged buyouts and similar strategies). Load the purchased company up with debt to finance its own acquisition, take everything that's valuable (e.g. a specific contract, IP, "rockstar" employees - aka acquihire), sell off the husk to the highest bidder or send it off to bankruptcy. All you need is someone braindead (or desperate) enough to lend you money. When all you're looking at is one single thing of (relatively) stellar value, you don't need to invest in the rest.
- magicalhippo 10mo ago
  > That's intentional, corporate raiding (or by its legal name, leveraged buyouts and similar strategies). But that's not what they did as far as I know. They just implemented some braindead policies that caused income to grind to a halt overnight, because those policies worked so well in the other countries ther were in. The good employees jumped ship early. I had a limited contract which didn't get renewed due to hiring freeze.

oswarld 10mo ago

Author here. This is a really good thread, and the Walmart Germany example is exactly the failure pattern I had in mind. What went wrong there wasn’t a lack of effort or even a lack of localization budget. It was that the core choices never changed. Language, signage, and surface behavior were adapted, but the underlying assumptions about how work, trust, and retail interaction should function were treated as universal. That’s why “translation-first” expansion fails so consistently. It preserves the original offer and operating model and only swaps the interface. But markets don’t reject foreignness in general; they reject mismatched constraints. In Germany, Walmart didn’t fail because it was American. It failed because it tried to export a specific social and organizational contract that simply didn’t survive contact with local norms. The Aldi / Trader Joe’s contrast is also telling. That wasn’t just better localization. It was a deliberate decision to let the local market define what should remain and what should be abandoned, even if that meant the brand looked very different from its origin. This is the distinction I was trying to surface: changing language is cheap. Changing choices is expensive. Most expansion failures happen because teams do the former and avoid the latter.