INTRO

Introducing products in a new country is challenging

Every market in the world is not the same. Introducing a new product in a different market poses a myriad number of challenges.  Pitney Bowes, one of the leading international e-commerce service companies who specialize in global e-commerce, shipping and mailing, collaborated with students of Cornell Tech to solve the challenge of introducing cross-border brands to consumers in different countries.

SOLUTION

We intended to create an influencer marketing digital platform for connecting local influencers to the cross-border brands in order to introduce their products in different countries.

KEY RESEARCH INSIGHTS

We front-loaded our generative research by interviewing both sellers and buyers to understand their pain points in selling and buying products internationally. I interviewed a representative at Pitney Bowes, Rick Watson, to understand the challenges some of their existing brands face in introducing and sending a product internationally. My teammates interviewed buyers who buy international products to understand from their standpoint. Here are the insights we synthesized:

SELLER

BUYER

STRATEGY

Evaluating the effectiveness of the idea

The success of the idea relies on influencer sign-ups. To test this aspect before developing the platform, we created a mock website to lure influencers into signing up for the service. We also designed a social media campaign to direct people to the site for signups.

Campaign efforts went in vain but lessons learnt

We marketed on social media and sent the links out to friends and family in 8 different countries over a span of 10 days. The results and insights are as follows:

After discussing with our advisor, we went ahead with creating the platform as they believe that the brands would benefit out of this and getting influencers on the system is a matter of marketing efforts.

DESIGN SOLUTION

The idea is to create a 2-way app ecosystem for both cross-border brands and influencers to connect, network and market products. Let's take examples of some of our potential users and the scenarios in which our app is utilized.

Scenario #1

James, a sales manager at Coach wants to increase sales by expanding COACH internationally and is looking for right marketing channels to do so. He onboards the Glocal app and does the following steps to meet his requirements.

Scenario #2

Kylie, a fashion blogger from London is interested in using her social media following to get some influencer gigs and earn money. She onboards Glocal connecting all her active social media accounts and does the following steps to meet her requirements.

Visual language inspired from Pitney Bowes brand identity

A visual language was adapted from the existing identity of Pitney Bowes and is consistently maintained across all elements in the product.

TEAM

NEXT STEPS