Nobody learns to swim in the deep end

Following my previous post, where I showed how every market has its own dominant friction (compliance in Spain, localization in Georgia, financing in Argentina), today I'm sharing a personal story where my read of a market was wrong.

As part of a plan to diversify web sales and find growing markets, we launched campaigns in Benelux with what looked like flawless logic: "high salaries mean high purchasing power, so high-end rackets." We pushed hard in that direction and the results never showed up.

Time to get to work. I stopped looking only at the ad platform dashboards and sat down with the commercial team, who knew the market better than any dashboard. I cross-checked what they saw against Padel Days' annual report, which reviews the state of the company and the market overall.

The conclusion was different. The first half of the premise still held, but Benelux was an emerging padel market. These were consumers just trying out a sport in the middle of a boom, which means they start with entry-level gear and only move up once they're hooked. They dip their toes in first.

The campaign became mostly low-end products and outlet. The result showed from one week to the next, without changing the share of budget allocated.

Clayton Christensen explains this with "jobs to be done": nobody buys a product, they hire it for a specific job. Here the job wasn't "own the best racket", it was "try this sport without going all in." It's the same lesson as Spain, Georgia and Argentina, with one more dimension: there is no universal playbook.

Purchasing power tells you how much a market can spend. Experience tells you what it's ready to buy.