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I was a student in Beijing, barely twenty, when a German-Chinese couple invited me to their company gathering out of pity. It was a karaoke session in one of those KTV places where groups rent their own room to eat, drink and sing.

Besides the German who had invited me to join, I was the only Western person in the room, and I hardly spoke any Chinese at all.

And there I was, in the midst of a crowd that obviously took pleasure in singing their favorite songs. Of course, Chinese songs, sung in Chinese.

When I was asked to sing, I reluctantly sang the only song I always sang, because it wasn’t that difficult and I remembered the lyrics. Hotel California. I got polite “Nice” comments, but the mood in the room did not change.

Then the other German took the mike and chose a Chinese song. The crowd was roaring, and he seemed to be able to read every single character on the screen.

That was the moment when I decided: I also want to be able to do that. Recognize enough Chinese characters to join the party. To be able not only to order food in Chinese, but to read a newspaper.

And I started working towards that goal. Whereas before that evening I had attended my Chinese classes in the morning, done my homework half-heartedly, and then gone off to play badminton or explore Beijing, I actually got interested in learning Chinese for all it could offer.

Not for the well meaning conversations with taxi drivers who always asked where I was from and then told me they liked VW, sausages, and Hitler. I was indulging myself in the world of strange characters, grammar, and stories from the Chinese past.

Karaoke once again

I had long forgotten that story, until I remembered it just recently, because my husband and I had bought a karaoke machine in the Philippines, one of the karaoke capitals of the world, and brought it home with us. There we sang in our living room, and at some point I chose a Chinese song. I was able to read the lyrics in Chinese. That was when I realized: I got there. I reached a goal I had defined and forgotten about.

What interests me now is where the wish came from. Nobody in that room was unkind to me, nobody told me I was missing anything. There was only the distance between a polite “nice” and a room that roared, and I could hear it clearly enough to want to be on the other side of it.

I have set plenty of goals since then in the proper way, with a plan and a date and a way of measuring whether I got there. Most of those I can no longer remember. This one was never written down anywhere, and it survived twenty years of not being thought about.

It’s often like this. We all have our big or small growth motors in us, and somewhere there was a spark that ignited the wish and the will to develop beyond the capabilities we have today. Most of those sparks were never chosen and could not have been planned for, a room we happened to be sitting in, or somebody who was better at something than we were in a way that made us want it rather than resent it.

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What is your growth motor, and which moment started it?

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I can still see my 90-year-old grandmother standing behind her gas stove in her tiny kitchen that was also kind of her living room. On that stove, there are three pots. In one, creamed spinach is bubbling, a nice mix of dark green sparks with occasional white flecks in between. In the other, peeled potatoes are simmering slowly in water, almost as yellow as gold. And the third item on the stove is a frying pan.

My grandmother has already put three eggs into it, and she is slowly turning them into Rührei, scrambled eggs the way only she made them. She knows that I dislike them burnt, so she is extra careful to avoid this, stirring them every now and then.

For me, this is a dear memory. I stand behind her after setting the table, and feel loved. A rare moment, frozen in time, and in my memory.

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When school lunches compete with YouTube

Last week, I had an intriguing conversation with a fellow Substack writer about food. She had written about South Korean school lunches and how unfair it is that these school lunches have to compete with mukbang YouTube videos over children’s palates.

This conversation triggered a lot of thoughts that I have had over the years when it comes to food, culture, and emotions.

Hyper-palatable foods are bad for people’s health, and especially children’s. We know that. But what if they are combined with positive emotions, a feeling of home, a feeling of emotional safety, and the feeling of being loved? Then it’s not only a discussion about excessive sodium, carbs, and fats anymore. And although these hyper-palatable foods are often the same global kinds (pizza, chips, ice cream, soft drinks, you name it), there are also cultural nuances to them.

Call it pav bhaji, mac & cheese, ramyeon, or Spätzle mit Soße. We love it because it releases that dopamine flood that the mix of fat, sodium, and carbs gives us. But we also love it because it holds memories for us.

It even works across species. My husband started giving our cat Dreamies snacks from time to time, always a bit too many. Three months later she was overweight and refused her normal food. Cats don’t watch mukbang, but her palate had been recalibrated all the same, as the writer pointed out to me. She didn’t choose to become a picky eater. Neither do the children.

In search of the perfect meal

Besides his TV show, Anthony Bourdain wrote a quiet book about the food he ate during his travels. For me, the essence of “A Cook’s Tour: In Search of the Perfect Meal” was not the meals and dishes he ate in different countries. It was the chapter in which he returns to the small French town where he spent his childhood summers, together with his brother.

As boys, they had bought firecrackers there and eaten their first oysters, fresh from the boat of an old oyster fisherman. Now, with their father no longer alive, they walk through streets that have changed, looking for traces of him and of the boys they once were. The oysters are still there, but the taste he remembered is not.

And that influenced my thinking about food profoundly.

More than nutrition

In our modern times, food’s role is never just to satisfy your physical hunger. Its role, often subconsciously, is to feed your emotional hunger too, your need for love, for feeling safe, for evoking memories of times long past. How long ago that memory was doesn’t matter. For Korean school children it might just have been yesterday. For others, it might have been decades ago.

Over the years, I started to pay more attention to what people eat, and what they cook when they miss someone, or are far away from home. Food holds our memories more reliably than photos do. A smell rising from a pot can bring back a whole kitchen, and the person standing in it.

Back in my grandmother’s kitchen

Shortly after the scene with my grandmother, she passed away. That is many years ago now, but I still crave the spinach, that Rührei, and those golden potatoes. I have tried to recreate that taste a dozen times, but I can only taste it in my memory, lingering on the tip of my tongue.

Cherish the moments that will later become a loving memory.

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Which dish holds that memory for you?

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It has been some time since I wrote and published anything on Substack. A lot has happened in my life over the last two to three months, and I felt like I needed a reset. Not only in my writing, but in the direction my professional life was steering.

I write about growth, about intercultural challenges, and how they influence our decision making and behavior. I write about private encounters that show me how important it is to embrace change as a way to grow. But when you’re in the middle of such a growth moment, it rarely feels like growth. It feels like being lost.

If you have followed my journey for a while, you know that I started my solopreneurship two years ago. At first, I was convinced that my new business concept to sell intercultural marketing consulting would work well. Why? Because I had encountered a lot of external and internal intercultural challenges when I worked for global companies, trying to expand to new markets.

My plan was nice. Reality wasn’t. I realized that in the midst of an economic downturn, combined with groundbreaking new technologies that completely changed the way we think about business and marketing (namely AI), offering services like mine wouldn’t work. No company was willing to invest in my guidance, because they either didn’t have the budget, or they believed that generative AI could do at least a good enough job.

So I had to research the market again and tweak my offering. I started working with trainers, consultants, and solopreneurs on their positioning. How they could differentiate themselves from their competitors. How they could communicate their uniqueness in a way that led to more customers.

And I loved this work, because it made me feel my immediate contributions to the success of others. But I was new in that field, and business was growing slowly.

Then fate knocked on the door. Last year I had sent out initiative applications for lecturer jobs. And a newly founded institute was interested in hiring me, not as a lecturer, but to build the career consultation and marketing part from scratch.

I was beaming with joy, because suddenly I was seen again. But I also had doubts, because I loved being self-employed (well, the good sides of it). It took me some time to reshape my thinking about this opportunity. During this time, I didn’t feel like writing or posting anything. I was in digital detox to find myself again.

Divers know this state. After a deep dive, you don’t swim straight to the surface. You stop at five meters and hang in the water for three minutes, doing nothing, while your body releases the nitrogen it collected at depth. It feels like wasted time. Your dive is over, the surface is right there, and still you wait. But this safety stop is what makes surfacing safe. Skip it, and the ascent itself can hurt you.

My weeks of silence were my safety stop. Two years of solopreneurship, a pivot, a difficult decision. That was a deep dive, and I needed time to let it work through my system before coming up.

If you’re in a transition yourself right now, a new role, a pivot, a decision that took more out of you than expected, maybe the quiet phase you’re in isn’t a lack of progress. Depth needs to leave your system before you can move on. Give it the three minutes it takes.

Since July 1st, I have surfaced. I’m building the marketing of a young education institute from scratch, and I advise people on their careers and further education. In many ways, this is a return to my roots. Education, marketing, branding, these are the fields where I started and where I feel at home.

And the advisory part gives me something I’ve missed. I believe the strongest impact happens within three feet of influence. Real change begins in direct conversations, in small, human spaces, and I consider that closeness essential for success, in any role and any market. Now I have those conversations every day, with people who are figuring out their own next step.

VKG Consulting and this newsletter continue alongside. So no, this is not the plan I started with two years ago. It’s the plan that fits the conditions I actually found in the water. And for the first time in months, I’m not just okay with that. I’m curious where the next dive will take me.

The newsletter is back to its rhythm now. Thank you for staying subscribed through the quiet!

I’d love to hear: what did your last safety stop look like?

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Someone in Lagos ordered dinner through a delivery app. The food arrived cold, the packaging had shifted, the soup was half-empty. The customer left a two-star review, and the restaurant’s rating dropped.

The cook had nothing to do with any of it. The road between the kitchen and the customer’s door had potholes. The ride took forty minutes longer than expected.

But the platform’s rating system doesn’t ask who is responsible for the last mile. It asks: did you enjoy your meal? And the answer, shaped entirely by delivery conditions the restaurant never controlled, tanks a local business’s visibility for weeks.

This is what happens when a global platform exports its metrics without exporting its infrastructure assumptions. The star rating was designed in a context where roads are passable, delivery times are predictable, and the journey from kitchen to door is a logistical footnote. In Lagos, the journey is the story.

The question platforms forget to ask

Every food delivery company expanding into a new market asks the same questions: How large is the addressable market? What are the customer acquisition costs? Who are the local competitors?

Almost none of them ask: whose definition of quality applies here?

The answer varies more than most expansion strategies account for. In South Korea, quality means speed and real-time tracking. In the UK, it’s reliability and the comfort of a familiar takeaway. In Germany, it turned out to be something else entirely: whether the whole system treats the person delivering your food as a worker with rights, or as a contractor who can be dropped the moment the numbers shift.

Deliveroo found out the hard way. The British company entered Germany in 2015, scaled to over 2,000 partner restaurants and 1,100 riders, and pulled out entirely in 2019. Officially, the reason was a refocus on more promising markets.

The sharper version is that Germany had a different question. Not “Is this convenient?” but “Is this fair?” German labor law, union culture, and consumer expectations created a context where the gig economy model wasn’t just operationally difficult. It was culturally unacceptable. Deliveroo never quite answered the German question, and eventually stopped trying.

When the system is built from the inside out

Every morning in Mumbai, before the city fully wakes up, women in homes across the suburbs start cooking. By ten o’clock, a dabbawala is at the door to collect the tiffin, a stacked aluminum container holding a full lunch: rice, dal, vegetables, roti, sometimes a small dessert.

That tiffin will travel by bicycle to a train station, move through Mumbai’s local rail network sorted by a hand-painted color code, and arrive on an office worker’s desk by lunchtime. Then the whole system reverses. Empty tins go home.

This has been happening since 1890. Roughly 5,000 dabbawalas move around 200,000 meals a day, with an accuracy rate that business schools have studied as a logistics case study.

What makes the system worth thinking about isn’t the logistics - it’s the cultural premise underneath it. The tiffin service was built around a specific desire, in a specific city: office workers who wanted the food their families made at home, not restaurant food, not a menu, not convenience in the Western sense. The whole architecture of the service reflects that. It works because it was never trying to be universal. It was trying to be exactly right for one place and one kind of hunger.

Modern delivery platforms move in the opposite direction. They build something that works in one context, prove the model, and then ask which other cities will accept it.

The gap, when things go wrong, usually sits in the same place: between what the platform assumes people want and what people in a specific place actually want, and what the roads, the rhythms, and the habits of that city actually allow.

Adjacency is not the same as universality

Grab’s recent acquisition of Foodpanda’s Taiwan operations is worth paying attention to, not just as a deal but as a statement of logic. Grab’s CEO described Taiwan as “a natural next step,” citing Southeast Asian experience as a direct fit for the market.

Most global expansions are sold on market size. This one was sold on cultural adjacency, the idea that operational and consumer knowledge built in one regional context transfers meaningfully into a neighboring one.

That’s a different way of thinking about growth. Not “where is the biggest opportunity?” but “where does what we already know actually apply?” It’s a question that most expansion strategies don’t ask explicitly, even when the answer would change the decision.

The metric is always a cultural choice

The Lagos restaurant with the bad review isn’t an edge case. Global platforms carry their measurement systems with them the way they carry their logos: as things assumed to be neutral, universal, obvious.

A star rating that asks “did you enjoy your meal?” is built on the assumption that the meal’s quality determines the answer. In a market where infrastructure is the variable, that assumption produces data that is both misleading and genuinely unfair to the businesses being measured.

And this reaches further than food delivery. Any company expanding across cultural and infrastructural contexts eventually runs into the same problem. The tools they use to measure success were built somewhere, by someone, with specific assumptions about how the world works.

Those assumptions travel invisibly, embedded in the product, the rating system, the contract structure, the definition of what a good delivery looks like.

Most platforms enter new markets tracking the same metrics they used at home: order volume, delivery time, customer rating. But those metrics only measure what matters if the underlying assumptions hold. A company that enters Nigeria optimizing for star ratings is, without knowing it, optimizing for road quality.

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Sources

Feedr. (2025, October 16). The amazing dabbawalas of Mumbai. https://feedr.co/en-gb/c/blog/the-amazing-dabbawalas-of-mumbai

Food on Demand. (2024, October 22). Cultural adaptation in global food delivery platforms. https://foodondemand.com/10222024/cultural-adaptation-in-global-food-delivery-platforms/

Kuye, A. (2020, November 9). Why Deliveroo withdrew from Germany — my perspective. Medium. https://alaniphantom.medium.com/why-deliveroo-withdrew-from-germany-my-perspective-1f5c479fb2ed

NBC News. (2015, June 11). This Indian food delivery service is the envy of FedEx. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/indian-food-delivery-service-envy-fedex-n156291

Quartz. (2019, August 12). Food-delivery giant Deliveroo is pulling out of Germany. https://qz.com/1685962/food-delivery-startup-deliveroo-exits-germany

Techpoint Africa. (2024, December 1). Inside the pursuit of profitability in Nigeria’s food delivery landscape. https://techpoint.africa/insight/food-delivery-sector-nigeria/

The Berliner. (2025, February 10). Berlin’s food delivery war, is it really over? https://www.the-berliner.com/berlin/food-delivery-scene/

The Local. (2019, August 12). Deliveroo pulls out of Germany. https://www.thelocal.de/20190812/deliveroo-pulls-out-of-germany

Veyet, T., & Ngui, Y. (2026, March 23). Grab to buy Delivery Hero’s Foodpanda Taiwan business for $600 million. Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/business/grab-buy-delivery-heros-foodpanda-taiwan-business-600-million-2026-03-23/

Founder and headhunter Tine Rask has placed hundreds of people into roles. She knows within minutes whether someone will thrive, or quietly struggle until no one can pretend it’s working anymore.

When I sat down with her, I asked what actually happens when the mismatch isn’t caught early. Her answer was not what I expected. Not about qualifications, but about ecosystems, cultural assumptions, and the moment in a salary negotiation when someone finally shows you who they really are.

The CV tells you what someone has done. It doesn’t tell you how they operate when the rules are different from what they’re used to. For companies that want to grow, especially across borders, that’s not an HR problem. It’s a strategy problem.

One thing that stayed with me after this conversation

Tine mentioned that people who are not aware of their own culture find it very difficult to adapt to other cultures. Most companies skip exactly that step. They screen for competence and experience and assume adaptability will follow. It doesn’t always, and by the time anyone admits it, a lot of time and goodwill has already been lost.

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Have you ever walked into a role and only realized halfway through that the rules were completely different from what you expected?

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I should say upfront: I don’t own a Birkin bag. I’ve never been inside a Hermès store, and luxury brands are genuinely not my world. But what happened to the luxury sector in March 2026 is one of the clearest illustrations I’ve seen of something I think about constantly in my work: what happens when growth is built on favorable conditions rather than genuine understanding.

In March 2026, escalating conflict in the Middle East forced luxury brands to close stores across the Gulf region. Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Burberry were all hit by the same disruption, right in the middle of Ramadan. The timing couldn’t have been worse.

Ramadan is the highest-revenue shopping period of the year across the Gulf, and stores in Dubai, Riyadh and Kuwait City were closed through most of it. According to CNBC, the conflict wiped out over $100 billion in market capitalization from major luxury companies within weeks.

Hermès, Rolex and Loro Piana kept growing.

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Who held, and why

The easy explanation is that these brands serve wealthier customers who are more resilient to disruption. That's partially true, but it misses what actually matters.

Hermès, Rolex, Loro Piana are three very different brands with one shared logic - none of them have ever tried to be for everyone. The Birkin waitlist, Rolex’s scarcity model, Loro Piana’s quiet craftsmanship with no logo in sight: these are not marketing tactics.

They are the result of a sustained decision not to dilute who they work for, even when it would have been easy and profitable to do so. Staying focused isn’t a constraint for these brands but the foundation everything else is built on.

Then there’s Ferragamo, and this is perhaps the most instructive case of all - not because of the Middle East crisis specifically, but because of what the brand is doing while others are trying to recover from overextension.

Ferragamo had spent years trying to be too many things to too many people, and it shows in the numbers: revenues fell 5.7% in 2025 and the company posted a net loss. But the second half of 2025 already looked different. Management refocused on what Ferragamo actually is - a shoe and leather goods house - closed around 70 underperforming stores, and pulled back from wholesale channels that compromised the brand.

In the Americas and parts of Asia-Pacific, the DTC (direct-to-consumer) channel is now growing in double digits. The Ferragamo story matters because it shows that this kind of clarity can be rebuilt, even after it’s been lost. It isn’t a privilege reserved for brands that got it right from the beginning.

Louis Vuitton and Gucci made a different decision. For years, the model was premium for everyone: aspirational buyers welcome, logomania as a growth engine, rapid price increases as the primary lever. McKinsey had already flagged this in their State of Luxury report in January 2025, noting that between 2019 and 2023, price increases alone accounted for 80% of luxury growth.

That works, until it doesn’t. The rapid expansion led to overexposure, weakened exclusivity, and left brands dependent on conditions staying stable.

When the conditions changed, that strategy was the first thing to break.

Ramadan as a mirror

What makes the Middle East situation particularly revealing is following: for many of the brands that struggled, these markets were never a strategic core. They were an attractive addition, brands were present because the purchasing power was there. They had stores because the locations were good. But had they really understood what these markets mean to the people in them?

Ramadan is not simply a shopping season. It is one of the most significant religious and social periods of the year for hundreds of millions of people. Brands that understood this deeply had already adapted their collections, built communications that reflected the season’s meaning, and developed customer relationships that extended well beyond the transactional. When the disruption came, those relationships held.

Brands that had marked Ramadan as a peak revenue window in the annual calendar found themselves with closed doors and no meaningful foundation in these markets beyond logistics and location. The disruption didn’t create that gap. It just made it visible.

Borrowed growth

There is a kind of growth that functions beautifully in stable conditions and collapses when those conditions shift. I call it “borrowed growth”. You expand because the context allows it: markets are open, purchasing power is strong, competitors haven’t moved yet, and no one is asking difficult questions about whether the foundation is real. The numbers move in the right direction and the strategy looks sound.

But the foundation is missing. A genuine understanding of who your strategy is built for, in which cultural and market context it works, and what holds it together when the environment changes.

The luxury sector is not a special case - it’s just an unusually visible one right now. The same pattern appears in technology companies that enter new markets without translating what they offer, in service businesses that win international clients on price rather than genuine relevance, in any organisation that has expanded its audience so broadly it no longer serves anyone with real depth.

McKinsey noted that the luxury sector lost around 50 million customers between 2023 and 2024, in large part because rapid expansion had eroded the very qualities customers were paying for.

Growth borrowed from favorable conditions eventually has to be repaid. The bill tends to arrive at a difficult moment.

The question worth asking now

After March 2026, the question I keep returning to isn’t how the luxury sector recovers. It’s the same question I ask in every market context I work in: do we actually know who our strategy is built for? Or have we defined our audience so broadly that when things get difficult, we aren’t really serving anyone?

Geopolitics answers that question fast. Better to answer it first.

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Sources

CNBC. (2026, March 27). Iran war wipes out $100 billion from luxury stocks. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/27/iran-war-wipes-out-100-billion-from-luxury-stocks.html

McKinsey & Company. (2025, January 13). The state of luxury. https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/retail/our-insights/state-of-luxury

Lifestyle.INQ. (2026, April 6). This 2026, the luxury market is shifting to brands that bank on emotion. https://lifestyle.inquirer.net/560836/luxury-market-2026/

Zargani, L. (2026, March 11). Ferragamo focuses on DTC growth, core leather goods, footwear and retail optimization. WWD via Yahoo Finance. https://sg.finance.yahoo.com/news/ferragamo-focuses-dtc-growth-core-205953977.html

Every year, around this time, I stand under our Sakura tree and ask myself exactly that.

The blossoms were in full bloom just a few days ago. Now the first petals are starting to fall, drifting down like pink-white snow. Ten more days, maybe less, and it will all be over. There’s something about standing under a tree that gives everything it has, fully, for just a short window, that puts the rest of the year in perspective.

This year, standing there, I felt something I can only describe as grateful.

It has been a year of learning. Steep, deep, real learning, the kind that changes how you see things rather than just what you know. Exciting and exhausting in equal measure. New clients who challenged me and taught me as much as I taught them.

New projects that pushed me past the edges of what felt comfortable. People who showed up with their time, their thinking, their honesty. People who trusted me with their work and their growth. People who gave me a shoulder when I needed one, and a sharp question when I needed that more.

Standing under the Sakura, I feel the humming of the bees and wasps working through the blossoms. The extravagant beauty of those flowers, so delicate and so strong, here for just a few weeks and then gone. Before they fall, they give me a distinct, uncomplicated joy. The privilege of witnessing something this beautiful, simply because I happen to be standing in the right place at the right time.

Are you happy? Yes. I think I am.

And then I read the World Happiness Report 2026, which came out last week, and I found myself thinking harder about what that actually means.

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What the report found

The 2026 edition focuses on social media and wellbeing. The main finding is striking: heavy social media use is linked to significantly lower wellbeing among young people in English-speaking countries and Western Europe, particularly among girls. Life evaluations for under-25s in the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand have fallen by almost a full point on a ten-point scale over the past decade.

But one part that caught my attention. In 85 out of 136 countries, young people are actually happier now than they were twenty years ago. Most of the world’s youth is doing well. The English-speaking world is the outlier.

And the researchers found something they struggled to fully explain: the same platforms, used for similar amounts of time, were producing very different outcomes depending on where in the world people lived.

In Latin America, platforms built for social connection were associated with higher happiness. Passive, algorithm-driven, visual consumption platforms were not. In English-speaking countries, the negative effects showed up regardless.

The same tools, the same usage time - but different cultural contexts, and wildly different results.

Finland, as ever, tops the rankings for nine consecutive years, and nordic countries filling most of the top six. Costa Rica breaking into fourth, the highest any Latin American country has ever ranked.

The report uses six factors to measure happiness: income, life expectancy, social support, freedom of choice, generosity, and perceptions of corruption. It’s a rigorous framework, built by serious researchers. And it is also a framework that was built somewhere, by someone, inside a specific intellectual tradition.

Same question, different answers

Here is where it gets interesting.

A separate Gallup survey, run independently across dozens of countries, asking simply whether people feel happy, produces a strikingly different picture. Countries like China, Indonesia, and Mexico rank among the highest in self-reported happiness. These same countries sit nowhere near the top of the World Happiness Report.

Two surveys, one question, and the results could hardly be more different. Because what counts as a good life, what social support feels like, what progress looks like, none of this is universal. It’s culturally shaped. And when you apply a measurement tool across 147 countries without asking whether it was ever designed for this context in the first place, the data gets complicated in ways that are hard to untangle from inside the framework.

The report can identify that something different is happening in English-speaking countries. It has more difficulty explaining why. Because the explanation lives in culture, not in the data.

What this means for how we work

This pattern is not unique to happiness research.

For anyone working across international markets, as a consultant, coach, trainer, growth advisor, the same dynamic plays out constantly, just at a smaller scale.

We build client satisfaction frameworks in one market and assume they transfer. We design success metrics inside one cultural context and wonder why they land differently somewhere else. We measure progress using tools that were never designed for the environments we are now applying them in.

The mechanism that drives happiness in one context may be entirely absent or mean something different in another. The platform that builds community in one culture creates comparison anxiety in another. The communication style that signals competence in Germany reads as cold in the US and as warm in Japan.

Context isn’t a variable you adjust for. It’s the whole operating environment.

The Sakura doesn’t ask whether it is performing correctly. It blooms in the conditions it is in, fully, and that is already a complete thing.

But we keep applying universal frameworks to contexts they were not designed for, and then puzzling over why the results don’t match the model.

Are you happy? I am. And I am also curious about whose framework I would be using if I tried to measure it properly.

That question, it turns out, is the interesting one.

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Sources

Helliwell, J. F., Layard, R., Sachs, J. D., De Neve, J.-E., Aknin, L. B., & Wang, S. (Eds.). (2026). World Happiness Report 2026. Wellbeing Research Centre, University of Oxford. https://www.worldhappiness.report/ed/2026/

Gallup International Association. (2025). East-West happiness divide: Gallup International report on happiness 2025. Gallup International. https://www.gallup-international.com/survey-results-and-news/survey-result/east-west-happiness-divide-gallup-international-report-on-happiness-2025

For the first episode, I spoke with . Christine has spent 25 years coaching German-speaking executives and entrepreneurs to hold their own in English - not by perfecting their grammar, but by recovering the presence they already have in their own language.

She made a comparison to sport that I keep thinking about: you can read about swimming all you like, but at some point you have to get in the water. The knowledge is usually there. What’s missing is the practice of using it under pressure - and the permission to be imperfect while you do.

She also told me something that made me laugh. Watch the episode to find out what.

Watch below - and if anything resonates, I’d love to hear it in the comments.

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If you'd like to explore Christine's work further, she writes about language confidence and communication on her Substack The English You Alread Have.

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This morning my husband took an electric saw to cut our hydrangeas.

Not pruning shears, and not the careful snip-above-the-bud approach I’ve spent two years learning. But with an electric saw. He worked his way along the row, cutting every dried flowerhead off at one uniform height, until the garden looked neat and the ground was covered in debris. Then he came inside looking pleased with himself.

I stood at the window and thought: he has no idea where the growth points are.

Two years ago, I was him. We had just moved from Cologne to the countryside, and the garden that looked lush and green in summer turned into a mystery the moment winter hit. The hydrangeas, which our neighbors love and my husband calls toilet brush flowers, spent the cold months looking brown and dead and vaguely accusatory.

I called myself the Bridget Jones of gardening. People used to joke that my name meant sudden death in the language of plants, and I even started a blog called Hortensia & Fern, named after the two plants I was most convinced I would kill.

Then a neighbor rang the doorbell and told me I really should have pruned the hydrangeas weeks ago. So I went outside with new gloves and rose scissors and started cutting, feeling more confident with each flowerhead. It took a second neighbor, and a full growing season, to understand that confidence and knowledge are not the same thing.

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What my husband did wasn’t wrong. It just wasn’t pruning.

He removed the dead weight, and the garden looks tidier for it. But hydrangeas don’t just need the old flowers removed. They need to be cut just above the point where new growth is already forming, a centimeter above the bud, not at whatever height looks clean from a distance.

Cut below the growth point and you’ve lost this year’s flowers. Cut just above it and the plant does exactly what it’s supposed to do. The saw was efficient - but the saw had no idea what it was looking at.

Growth hacking tells you to cut. But it doesn’t tell you where.

Most growth frameworks are good at identifying what looks unproductive. What they rarely address is whether the thing that looks unproductive is actually dead, or simply dormant in a context you haven’t fully learned to read.

Last year, I met a founder at a tradeshow who built an AB testing tool in Singapore. When she expanded into Southeast Asia, she noticed that customers didn’t just want the tool. They wanted her team to run the analyses, interpret the results, and tell them what to do next. So he built a service layer alongside the software.

Then she decided to expand to the German market.

German customers had no interest in the service. They wanted the tool, the documentation, and to be left to work things out themselves. The service created friction where it had previously created value, and by standard growth logic the right move was obvious: cut it, streamline, one clean product for a global market.

Except that in Southeast Asia, the service wasn’t overhead, it was the product. The relationship, the interpretation, the human layer wrapped around the software was exactly what made the tool worth buying in that context. Cutting it wouldn’t have simplified the offer. It would have removed the growth point for an entire market.

She didn’t cut it but learned to present two versions of the same product, each shaped by what the market actually needed. It is the same tool, but with completely different growth points, depending on where you were standing.

Before you make the cut

Dead weight and dormant potential look almost identical from the outside. Both are brown and dry and not doing anything visible right now. The difference shows up in summer.

Before you cut something from your strategy, your offer, or your team:

• Do you understand why it exists? Not why it was created, but what function it’s actually serving right now, even if that function isn’t the one you designed it for.

• Have you looked for the growth point? In hydrangeas it’s a small green bud just below the dead flower. In business it’s whatever is generating real signal, real relationships, or real trust in a specific context.

• Is this underperforming everywhere, or only here? The founder’s service wasn’t failing. It was failing in one market. That’s a different problem with a different solution.

• Who knows this plant better than you do? That person exists in your business too. Find them before you pick up the saw.

• What happens in summer if you get this wrong? Most strategic cuts aren’t reversible. The cost usually shows up months later, when it’s too late to do anything about it.

The challenge

My husband will probably never love the hydrangeas. He’ll always see toilet brush flowers where I’ve learned to see something worth understanding. But as it turns out, he forgot to touch the ones in the backyard. So I’ll prune those myself, the way I’ve learned to do it over two years, finding each growth point and cutting just above it.

By summer we’ll have a natural experiment running. Front garden: electric saw, one uniform height, done in ten minutes. Back garden: slow, deliberate, a centimeter above each bud.

I’m genuinely curious which ones will bloom better. Because he might have got it right too.

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Have you ever cut something from your strategy or offer and realized later it was a growth point? I’d love to hear what you learned from it.

When the product is right and the market still says no

In the early 2000s, I took over responsibility for the German market of a Taiwanese software company. The product was video editing software, genuinely capable, competitive with anything else available at the time.

The marketing materials were a different story: bright colours, layered visuals, busy layouts, designed entirely for the market that had made them.

The German sales team was very direct in their verdict. “It looks cheap,” one of them told me. “Not trustworthy. It doesn’t look serious.” And not looking serious is a problem in Germany.

The company in Taiwan already knew something wasn’t working. Their PR team had been filtering upward, showing management only the negative reviews, which meant that when I proposed a pilot, they were open to it.

My idea wasn’t to redesign the product. It was to build one of the first German online communities for video editing, a space where users could engage with what the software actually did well. Not the decorative cute effects, but the professional cuts, the clean transitions, the compositional control that serious editors cared about.

The reviews started to change. Reviewers who had dismissed the product began writing seriously about what it could do. The product hadn’t changed, but the way it was experienced had.

That was the first time I really understood the difference between translation and adaptation. It took another twenty years of working across global markets to turn that observation into a framework.

PMF tells you if they want it. CMF tells you if they’ll trust it.

Most people working in growth know Product-Market Fit: does the market want this, will they use it, will they pay for it? PMF is a functional question, and it’s a good one.

But there’s a second question PMF doesn’t answer, and that most growth frameworks quietly skip over: will the market accept it, trust it, and interpret it the way you intend, within their cultural frame?

That’s what Culture-Market Fit addresses.

A product can have strong PMF and still fail in a new market, not because the offer is wrong, but because the signals around it are. The tone reads as arrogant where it should read as confident.

The visuals communicate noise where they should communicate quality. The messaging that converts brilliantly in one country feels pushy or vague in another. The value is real, but the perception isn’t working well.

PMF answers whether they’ll use it, whereas CMF answers whether they’ll accept it and trust it.

Growth hacking is how you accelerate both, but only once you’ve got both right.

What the CMF Framework actually evaluates

The Culture-Market Fit Framework is a diagnostic methodology built around three pillars: Brand, Marketing, and Thought Leadership.

Across those pillars, it evaluates fifteen dimensions – things like cultural resonance, tone and style fit, trustworthiness signals, differentiation, and how audiences in different markets perceive AI-generated content.

The framework draws on intercultural research – Hofstede, Hall, Trompenaars – and on marketing science: Keller’s brand equity model, Cialdini’s persuasion principles, Häusel’s work on emotional decision-making.

It doesn’t produce theory but delivers a clear picture of where the friction is between how a brand presents itself and how a specific market is actually receiving it.

Four principles run through all of it.

1. Cultural environments are never identical. Every market operates within its own codes and expectations. Successful communication requires genuine adaptation, not just translation.

2. Meaning is not universal. Signals of trust, credibility, and resonance that work in one context can produce doubt or misunderstanding in another. What reads as confidence in one room reads as arrogance in the next.

3. Authenticity must survive adaptation. Strong positioning holds a stable core while adjusting how that core is expressed. The goal is never to become something else. It’s to make sure what you already are actually comes through.

4. AI amplifies, but does not replace human judgment. Content can be generated and scaled. Cultural fit, contextual credibility, and trust cannot be automated. What resonates requires interpretation, and that interpretation is human.

This isn’t only a company problem

Most people think about international expansion in terms of companies entering new markets. But the same dynamic applies to anyone who moves beyond the market they know.

This might be a consultant who has built a strong reputation in Germany and starts working with British or American clients. Or a trainer who positions herself in the DACH market after years in Asia. Or a coach who moves from corporate clients to independent professionals and finds that the same offer needs to be communicated completely differently, because the cultural codes of the new audience are not the same as the old one.

In every case, the question is identical: does the way you’re expressing your value actually work in this context? Not just the content, but the signals, the tone, the trust markers, the aesthetic choices, the way you talk about what you do.

CMF provides the lens to answer that question before it becomes an expensive problem.

Three questions worth asking before you scale

Are you translating or adapting? Translation changes the language. Adaptation changes how value is expressed so that it’s recognisable to the people you’re trying to reach. These are not the same thing.

What signals are you sending about credibility, and are those the signals that actually build trust in this specific context? In Germany, proof points and references carry weight. In the UK, directness without warmth reads as cold. In the US, what sounds like appropriate confidence lands as overstatement in a German boardroom. The answer differs more than most people expect.

Is your core still intact? Adaptation should never require you to become unrecognizable. If you feel like you’re losing yourself in the process, something has gone wrong in the diagnosis, not in your positioning.

These aren’t abstract questions. They’re the starting point for almost every conversation I have with clients, whether they’re expanding a business into a new region or repositioning themselves as consultants for an audience that doesn’t yet know how to read them.

The glasses you grew up with fit perfectly. They just weren’t made for every market.

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Where have you noticed this? I’d love to hear what you’ve observed in the comments.

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Sources

Hofstede, G. (2001). Culture’s consequences: Comparing values, behaviors, institutions, and organizations across nations. Sage.

Hall, E. T. (1976). Beyond culture. Anchor Books.

Trompenaars, F., & Hampden-Turner, C. (1998). Riding the waves of culture: Understanding diversity in global business. McGraw-Hill.

Keller, K. L. (1993). Conceptualizing, measuring, and managing customer-based brand equity. Journal of Marketing, 57(1), 1–22.

Kietzmann, J., Paschen, J., & Treen, E. (2018). Artificial intelligence in advertising. Journal of Advertising Research, 58(3), 263–267.

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A few days ago, I turned down the offer to become a co-founder of a very promising SaaS startup.

I’d love to create something new, together with a passionate co-founder. Build something from scratch, see it grow, and feel the energy that whole process creates in the team, the market, and myself.

But. Time.

We often talk about growth as a positive thing, something worth aspiring to. And it is. But growth also means that time passes. For us humans, it means we get older. It means things change, and nothing stays as it is in this very moment.

Even though you think you know a lot about aging and the changes it brings, it is different to witness it firsthand and firstbody, both the fact and the process.

It’s difficult to accept that suddenly you might be too old for something. Not because you can’t do it anymore physically or mentally, but because your time horizon is not long enough anymore.

And yes, there also are the things that get more cumbersome. Things you never expected to become exhausting.

So when this offer came, I pondered over it for days. I have every reason to believe I have many happy years ahead. But this is the thing: how we define and live these happy years.

Because everything comes with a price tag. My time (just like everyone else’s) is limited, and if I choose to dedicate it to building a startup from scratch, I won’t have enough time for other things that are dear to me. Travelling, writing, and most of all spending quality time with my beloved ones.

Over the years, I have learned that time spent, both in good and bad ways, cannot come back. If we say we do things later, often there isn’t a second chance. Time has changed and so have we.

Maybe I’m not too old for something like the co-founder role. It’s just not the right timing anymore for this stage in my life.

And yes, I am feeling sad that this co-founder chapter is over. But it also means I have the chance to do what is right for where I am now.

So let’s embrace this feeling of being here in the moment. Embrace that we have the chance to get older, every day at a time. And cherish today as the day we are the youngest we will ever be again.

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What about you? Have you ever turned something down not because you couldn’t do it, but because the timing no longer fit the life you’re building?

A song from 1998 and a question on growth that stayed

Last week, a client conversation brought back a song I hadn’t thought about in years.

Herbert Grönemeyer is a German singer I’m not too much a fan of. But over the years, one line from his 1998 song “Bleibt alles anders” stuck with me over the years: “Stillstand ist der Tod”. Stagnation is death.

What made me remember this line weren’t the words themselves but the contradictions surrounding them in the whole song. “Du steigst nach unten und fällst nach oben”. Climbing downward, falling upward. Things that make no logical sense but feel completely true, part social commentary, part philosophy, wrapped in a pop song playing between the weather report and the traffic update.

The song came out in 1998 when I was finishing high school and didn’t have the vocabulary for what I was hearing. But again, I still remember these lines today.

When we were working on my client’s positioning, his philosophy, how he wants to show up in his market, that line surfaced during our discussion. And after the meeting, I kept thinking about it, because “keep moving” is easy to say.

What comes after that is harder to answer.

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Why stagnation really is dangerous

Stop moving and your body starts to deteriorate, not overnight, not dramatically, but steadily in ways that compound over time. Movement isn’t optional for a healthy body, it’s the baseline condition everything else depends on.

Business works the same way. Markets shift, competitors move, and what worked three years ago needs adapting today. The companies that treated their 2019 playbook as permanent found out what stagnation costs, and some of them very publicly.

Most people nod along to this. But there’s a question underneath it that’s less comfortable.

If everything changes, why build anything?

If everything is constantly changing, why should we develop a positioning, a methodology, a content strategy, if you’re going to have to revise it anyway? Why invest in a brand when the market shifts underneath you before you’ve finished building it?

I hear this sometimes from people who are genuinely stuck, and I understand the exhaustion behind it. When you’ve been told to pivot often enough, you start to wonder whether committing to anything makes sense at all. But this framing confuses two things that aren’t the same.

The difference between adapting and drifting

Tactics change, channels change, and the format that worked on LinkedIn last year isn’t the one that works now. What resonates in one market fails in another, and these things require constant attention.

But underneath all of that, something else needs to stay fixed: what you stand for, the problem you care about solving and why, the way you think and what makes your perspective distinct. That’s precisely what makes constant adaptation possible without losing yourself in the process.

The people I work with who struggle most with visibility aren’t struggling because they don’t know enough. They’re struggling because they’ve been adapting everything, including the core. A new positioning every six months, different messages depending on who’s in the room, following every trend because standing still feels dangerous. That’s not growth, that’s drift.

Two ways to find your core

A useful starting point is paying attention to where the discomfort comes from. Adapting tactics usually feels energizing, trying a new format, shifting your messaging for a different audience, testing a new channel.

When adapting starts to feel like losing something, you’re probably touching the core. That feeling isn’t weakness or resistance to change, it’s a signal worth taking seriously.

The other test is cross-cultural. If what you stand for only holds up in one market or one cultural context, it’s probably not core, it’s a tactical adaptation you’ve mistaken for identity. Real positioning survives translation - not word for word, but in substance.

The problem you solve, the way you think, the perspective you bring, these should be recognizable whether you’re talking to a client in Germany, in Asia, or in the US, even if the language and style adapt around them.

Context changes how movement is read

What counts as healthy movement and what reads as instability isn’t universal. In some markets, visible evolution signals ambition and relevance, and in others it signals that you don’t really know who you are. In German-speaking markets especially, consistency is a trust signal, and changing your message too often doesn’t communicate agility, it communicates doubt.

So even the pace and visibility of your evolution needs to be calibrated to context, not just whether you’re moving, but how that movement lands with the specific people you’re trying to reach.

Stillstand ist der Tod, yes. But movement without an anchor isn’t growth either, it’s just movement without direction.

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What’s your experience with this?

Where in your work do you feel the tension between adapting and staying grounded? And how do you know when you’ve crossed from healthy evolution into drift? I’d love to hear how you navigate this in the comments.

When I was around 12, my handwriting changed. For years it had been neat and rule-following , exactly what German schools expect. But then, something shifted. My thoughts started moving faster than my hand, and I stopped caring how the letters looked. What mattered was getting the ideas down before they disappeared.

My teachers had opinions about this, and one told me I wrote like a boy.

I remember feeling two things at once: mildly embarrassed and quietly proud. Because that messy, fast, sprawling handwriting felt like mine in a way the neat version never had. It was the first time I realized that how we write is not just a technical skill. It carries something personal – something that doesn’t fit neatly into a grading rubric.

Years later, I learned Chinese. And my handwriting in Chinese was completely different. Controlled, careful, legible. Not because I had become a more disciplined person. But because I learned it as an adult, with full attention, using a system that demands a different kind of precision. It was the same person, but a completely different result. I learned that context changed everything.

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The hiring discussion that triggered this article

Recently I came across a discussion about hiring methods in the AI era. Someone suggested handwriting as an evaluation tool, a way to assess character, attention to detail, perhaps cultural fit.

It’s not a new idea. Graphology has been used in hiring for decades, particularly in France and Germany. Studies have repeatedly failed to confirm it works. And yet the intuition persists: surely how someone writes tells you something real about them.

It does. Just not what people assume.Recently I came across a discussion about hiring methods in the AI era. Someone suggested handwriting as an evaluation tool, a way to assess character, attention to detail, perhaps cultural fit.

Why handwriting is never neutral

Handwriting is taught. The style you learned in school was determined by where you went to school, when you went, and what your teachers believed good handwriting looked like. German Schreibschrift looks nothing like French cursive. American print looks nothing like either. Same Latin alphabet, completely different norms.

Add to that when you learned. Children absorb handwriting deeply and unconsciously. Adults learning a new script approach it differently – more deliberately, often more carefully. My Chinese handwriting was never going to look like someone who grew up writing characters from age six.

And then there is the gendered layer. My teacher’s comment wasn’t random. There are documented cultural expectations around what good handwriting looks like for girls versus boys. When an evaluator looks at handwriting and makes a judgment, they are not just reading the letters. They are reading against an invisible norm that was never declared and never applied equally.

What this means for your own growth

Being evaluated through a norm that wasn’t built for you puts you in an uncomfortable position. You can adapt – and lose something that was genuinely yours. Or you can resist – and get penalized for it.

I adapted my handwriting for years before I stopped caring. And the version I stopped caring about turned out to be more authentically mine than the careful, rule-following one.

Growing in a cross-cultural context means learning to recognize which norms are worth adapting to and which ones to question. And that’s not rebellion but cultural intelligence. And it’s a skill that takes time and experience to develop, because most of the norms being applied to you were never made visible in the first place.

What this means for organizational growth

For companies, the stakes are higher than they might appear.

When you evaluate talent through culturally coded signals like handwriting, presentation style, communication directness, how someone structures an argument and call it objective, you are quietly filtering out people who don’t match an invisible baseline. Often those are exactly the people who would help you grow into new markets, serve diverse customer bases, and think in ways your current team doesn’t.

This is a growth strategy problem dressed up as an HR problem. The companies that recognize it earlier gain a real advantage, not just in diversity, but in market reach and strategic agility.

Three questions worth asking

Before adopting any evaluation framework, let’s say for hiring, for performance, for potential, ask yourself:

• Where was this norm built, and whose behavior was the baseline?

• Who benefits from this signal, and who gets quietly penalized for coming from a different context?

• And what would you miss if you removed it?

You don’t have to abandon structure. But you do have to know where your structure came from.

The most revealing thing about handwriting is not what it says about the person who wrote it. It’s what it says about the person who decided it meant something.

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Have you ever been evaluated through a framework that wasn’t built for you? Or do you think signals like handwriting can still tell you something meaningful, regardless of where someone is from?

What would you think if an ad for your most beloved festival looked more like a horror movie than a family reunion?

Chinese New Year is almost here. This means that we will enter the Year of the Fire Horse - a symbol of powerful, passionate energy that can either propel you forward spectacularly or burn everything you’ve built to the ground. The difference? Wisdom paired with ambition.

Festival marketing shows us where brands miss this balance. Chinese New Year campaigns from global brands offer some of the clearest examples.

The opportunity (and the risk)

The numbers are staggering: roughly 2 billion people worldwide celebrate Lunar New Year across more than 15 countries where it’s a public holiday or major observance. Global consumer spending during this period hit approximately $1.5 trillion USD in 2023, combining China, the rest of Asia, and overseas diaspora markets.

For brands, festivals like CNY represent massive growth opportunities. But they’re also cultural litmus tests. How you show up during a culture’s most meaningful moments reveals whether you actually understand that market - or whether you just want to extract from it.

The failures are memorable, and the patterns repeat across cultures.

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When Festival Marketing Fails: Three Patterns

Pattern 1: Tone substitution (right elements, wrong emotional register)

This is where brands get the symbols right but miss everything else. They understand what a festival looks like on paper but completely miss the feeling that makes it meaningful.

Burberry’s horror movie Chinese New Year (2019)

Burberry had everything lined up: serious budget, celebrity ambassadors including actresses Vicky Zhao and Zhou Dongyu, a theme about family togetherness - which is central to CNY.

The campaign showed eight models across generations posing for a family photo in Burberry outfits. But they were unsmiling, dressed mostly in black, photographed against a cold, dull backdrop. It had the editorial sophistication of London Fashion Week, not the warmth of Chinese New Year.

Chinese netizens didn’t hold back: “funeral portrait”, “ghost-like”, “this looks like a horror movie”. Some asked if this was actually meant for Qingming Festival - the Tomb Sweeping Festival where families honor deceased ancestors. Burberry quietly pulled the most criticized images from WeChat.

Here’s what they got wrong: Chinese New Year is warm, noisy, festive, deliberately abundant with red and gold everywhere. Burberry tried to make it sophisticated and cool instead. They took CNY’s emotional context and replaced it with their brand aesthetic. The market said no.

Dolce & Gabbana’s Market Collapse (2019)

If Burberry made an expensive mistake, D&G’s was catastrophic.

They released a video showing a Chinese model being “instructed” by a condescending male voiceover on how to eat Italian food with chopsticks. Probably meant to be playful, it came across as racist.

What followed: canceled Shanghai fashion show, products removed from Alibaba and JD.com, basically lost the entire Chinese market. How fast? Hours.

You see this same pattern elsewhere. Luxury Ramadan campaigns that feel like Paris runways instead of iftar gatherings. Minimalist Diwali campaigns that strip out the colorful abundance that makes it Diwali. Every time, the brand aesthetic matters more than the cultural moment.

Pattern 2: Red Capsule Syndrome (symbols without meaning)

If tone substitution is getting the feeling wrong, red capsule syndrome is barely trying at all.

Multiple luxury brands offer “CNY collections” that are just existing products recolored red with a zodiac icon slapped on. Chinese consumers call these “lazy cash-grabs” and “copy-paste CNY SKUs”. There’s no reflection of regional food culture, family rituals, or how different communities actually celebrate. Just: make it red, add zodiac, call it a collection.

FMCG brands do this with advertising - stereotyped family dinner scenes with generic lanterns, dragons, dumplings. The images look less like CNY and more like Western ideas of “Chinese restaurants.”

This pattern repeats: Ramadan campaigns that just add a crescent moon. Diwali campaigns that are “regular ad plus some lights”. What it signals: we want your money during this spending moment, but we’re not interested in what the moment means to you.

Pattern 3: Cultural flattening

Some brands try to be inclusive and end up erasing the very distinctions that matter.

The clearest example: campaigns that rebrand Chinese New Year as “Lunar New Year” and layer in Korean hanbok, Vietnamese áo dài, and generic red envelopes into one pan-Asian creative. The intent is usually good. The execution flattens distinct festivals (CNY, Seollal, Tết) into one vague “Asian celebration”. You see this elsewhere: “Hispanic Heritage Month” campaigns that blend Mexican, Puerto Rican, and Colombian cultures into one generic message.

What it reveals: you see these markets as interchangeable. But they notice, and they care.

The substitution vs addition framework

The unifying pattern comes down to one question: are you adding to what already exists, or trying to replace it?

Additive approaches work. Christmas decorations in Bangkok don’t ask Thais to stop celebrating Songkran. Black Friday discounts don’t require adopting Thanksgiving. Markets take what fits and ignore what doesn’t.

Substitutive approaches fail. When brands use CNY symbols but impose their own aesthetic, they’re asking markets to replace local meaning with brand values. Markets can tell the difference immediately.

The brands that succeed long-term aren’t asking “How do we sell during CNY?” They’re asking “What does CNY mean to the people celebrating it, and how might we participate respectfully?”

Festival marketing isn’t just about seasonal campaigns. It’s a microcosm of international expansion. Fire Horse energy - ambition, resources, bold moves - is necessary for growth. But without cultural understanding, you get spectacular failures instead of sustainable expansion.

Fire horse wishes

This Fire Horse year, I’m wishing for all of us the kind of growth that doesn’t require us to dim someone else’s light. The kind that asks good questions before making bold moves. The kind that understands respect and ambition aren’t opposites - they’re partners.

What's a festival marketing campaign you've seen that actually got it right? What did they understand that others miss? I’m looking forward to your comments!

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Sources

Awisee. (2023, December 29). Chinese New Year shopping and sales statistics 2024. Awisee Blog. https://awisee.com/blog/chinese-new-year-shopping-sales/

Jing Daily. (2019, January 16). Burberry's Chinese New Year campaign raises eyebrows. Jing Daily. https://jingdaily.com/posts/burberrys-chinese-new-year

BBC News. (2019, January 23). Dolce & Gabbana: Chinese turn on fashion brand over 'racist' posts. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-46968750

Revolut is building a superapp in Europe. WeChat already built one in China. So why does only one of them market itself that way?

Revolut offers banking, investments, insurance, crypto, travel bookings, and phone plans. WeChat handles messaging, payments, shopping, government services, transportation, and healthcare appointments. Functionally, they’re both superapps. But WeChat celebrates being your everything-app. Revolut talks about giving you control and financial freedom.

It’s the same product logic – but they use opposite marketing strategies.

Have a look at your smartphone. How many apps do you have? And how would you feel about consolidating most of them into a single platform?

Your answer to that question isn’t random personal preference. It reflects deep cultural patterns about trust, control, and how we organize our digital lives. And those patterns determine whether your expansion strategy works or crashes into invisible resistance.

Last week, we explored how trust signals differ across cultures. Today, we’re looking at how that trust shapes product architecture - specifically, how much of your life you’re willing to hand over to a single system.

The answer varies dramatically by region. And if you’re looking to grow beyond your home market, misreading this can damage your strategy before you even launch.

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East & Southeast Asia: Superapps as Infrastructure

In markets like China, Taiwan, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Korea, superapps aren’t seen as platform dominance. They’re practical infrastructure. The emotional response to WeChat or Grab isn’t “what is this company doing with my data?” - it’s “this makes my life easier.”

You book a taxi through Grab, pay the driver, order lunch delivery, pay utility bills, transfer money to a friend. Same app. This doesn’t feel like dependency, it feels efficient.

Convenience and friction reduction matter more than strict separation between services. Trust builds through reliable performance. It’s an ecosystem that works smoothly from one provider feels safer than managing multiple disconnected tools.

WeChat, Alipay, Grab, Gojek become default interfaces for daily life. If it’s reliable and officially accepted, it’s trusted.

United States: The Ambivalence Problem

Americans understand superapps intellectually but resist them emotionally. Even when they rely heavily on a few dominant platforms, the idea of explicit dependency triggers discomfort.

You probably use Apple Pay for payments, iMessage for communication, Apple Music for streaming, and iCloud for storage. That’s superapp functionality. But if someone called your iPhone a “superapp”, you’d push back. It doesn’t feel like one platform controlling everything but rather like your choice of integrated tools.

Many Americans already live inside quasi-superapp ecosystems through Apple, Google, or Meta. But those companies don’t frame themselves as superapps, because that framing would feel restrictive. Freedom in the US is tied to optionality, not efficiency.

The anti-monopoly tradition runs deep, even when it contradicts actual usage patterns. Innovation culture celebrates best-in-class individual tools rather than all-in-one solutions.

So superapps work in the US, but only if you don’t frame them as such. Integration happens, but quietly.

Europe: Control Over Convenience

Europeans approach superapps with skepticism. The core question is: “Why does one company need to know all of this about me?”

You use N26 for banking, your local transit app for transportation, WhatsApp for messaging, and a separate app for investing. Four different companies, four different purposes. That separation feels right, not inefficient. The idea of consolidating all of that into one platform triggers unease, not relief.

Privacy and clear boundaries rank higher than convenience. Trust is outsourced to institutions and regulation, not to platforms. There’s strong cultural preference for keeping roles separate - your bank shouldn’t be your messenger, your mobility app shouldn’t handle your payments.

GDPR and competition law shape these expectations. Regulation tells Europeans that fragmentation is safer, and people internalize that message. Historical sensitivity to surveillance reinforces the unease with centralized data collection.

Europe prefers interoperability over integration, and modularity over ecosystems. Here, emotional safety outweighs efficiency.

What This Actually Means

If you’re looking to grow beyond your home market, don’t only think about localization but about architecture.

The question isn’t whether you can build integrated features. It should be do users in that market want integration or control. A unified payment system might be table-stakes in Asia but a red flag in Europe. Same feature, opposite reception.

Before you finalize your product roadmap for a new market, ask: Does our architecture assume users want everything in one place, or the ability to keep things separate?

The Real Question

Superapps don’t fail because of technology, UX, or feature sets. They fail because they ask one fundamental question: How much of your life are you willing to hand over to a single system?

Different cultures answer that differently. And your product strategy needs to answer it too.

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What’s your smartphone setup? Are you an everything-in-one-app person or a separate-tools-for-separate-purposes person? And does it match the cultural pattern I described? I’m curious - leave a comment and let me know.

Two weeks ago, I read a LinkedIn post that sparked a heated debate. Its thesis: “The entire country of Germany needs charisma training.”

The author had spent a month moving through Germany attending presentations and events. His observation? Germans are doing impressive work - thoughtful, motivated, genuinely trying to change things for the better. But the moment they stepped on stage to present, it was “so dull it was almost absurd.”

The comments section exploded into an interesting debate:

“Americans need to learn humility, not the other way around.”
“German substance beats American style any day.”
”But if nobody wants to listen, does the substance even matter?”

I’ve come across this discussion a lot in companies, classrooms, and client conversations - and learned that both sides are missing the point.

The real question isn’t “Who is right”

The debate positions this as a binary choice: Be like Americans (enthusiastic, charismatic, storytelling-driven) or be like Germans (substantive, precise, fact-focused).

But that’s not how communication actually works across cultures and contexts. The real question is: What signals build trust with THIS specific audience, in THIS specific context?

Because trust is what determines whether people listen, believe you, and act on what you’re saying. And trust signals vary dramatically depending on where you are and who you’re talking to.

When you present to a German board of directors using American startup energy, you don’t look inspiring - you look unreliable. When you pitch to Silicon Valley investors using German thoroughness and risk mitigation, you don’t look credible - you look old-fashioned.

Neither approach is “better”. They’re contextually appropriate or inappropriate.

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Trust looks different everywhere

In German business culture, trust comes from thoroughness, precision, and understatement. “Underpromise and overdeliver” isn’t just a saying - it’s how credibility is built. Overpromising, even if you deliver, damages trust because it signals unreliability.

In American business culture, trust comes from enthusiasm, confidence, and vision. The energy isn’t fake - it’s a cultural signal that says “I believe in this deeply enough to show it.” What feels “over the top” to German audiences is actually how commitment gets communicated.

In startup culture (regardless of country), trust comes from authenticity over polish, speed over perfection, and vision over details. A scrappy, real presentation beats a rehearsed corporate one every time.

In established corporate culture, trust comes from track record, process adherence, and risk awareness. People need to know you’ve identified what could go wrong and have a plan.

And this causes friction, because none of these styles are universal. A presentation style that builds trust in one context actively destroys it in another.

When “Just be authentic” backfires

Shortly after I joined a startup as CMO, we had our annual strategy meeting - two days together with the whole team, working in groups on different topics.

I came from a mid-sized, very German, down-to-earth company, and I was excited to work with this young, fresh, energetic team. The atmosphere was pure startup energy, and being new, I felt like I had to prove myself.

I was presenting something about branding to the marketing group. At the end of my presentation, I said: “I’m really passionate about this - we can do it!”

People giggled.

When I asked what was wrong, one of my colleagues said: “That was the most unpassionate motivation I’ve heard in a long time. I can feel that you mean it and that you’re excited - but the wording and the way you said it just didn’t fit together.”

She was right.

I’m not a loud, hyped-up, fist-pumping motivator. People who’ve worked with me know that I’m more of a quiet, one-on-one motivational person. I was trying to match the startup energy in the room, but I was forcing a style that didn’t fit me.

What I learned from that moment is: “Just be authentic” is incomplete advice.

Refusing to adapt isn’t authenticity - it’s inflexibility. But forcing yourself into a style that doesn’t fit you isn’t adaptation - that’s performance theater that everyone sees through.

The real skill is: Stay authentic to WHO you are, but adapt HOW you deliver based on what your audience needs.

It's as easy as this. And as difficult.

.

Have you ever completely misread what your audience needed? I'd love to hear your stories in the comments.

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When I got my first paid Substack subscriber within 24 hours of launching, I stared at the dashboard. Then I smiled and was incredibly happy and thankful. I gleefully showed it to my husband. And then … that was it. I didn’t post about it, and I didn’t tell anyone else. Because a small voice in my head said “It’s a huge success for you. But come on, one subscriber? People would think you’re ridiculous for celebrating that.”

Last week I wrote about failure as datapoint – something to simply learn from, not something to be ashamed of. But I realized: we’re also bad at acknowledging success, and maybe even worse. Why? Because while failure feels personal and immediate, success often feels negotiated and needs permission.

When my American friends launch something, they post about it before the ink is dry. My German colleagues often look uncomfortable when I suggest celebrating a win. “We did our job, and we did it well. That’s what we were supposed to.” And during my years working across Asia, I watched success flow up through careful email chains of thank-yous, each manager highlighting the team, each team deflecting credit.

None of these approaches are wrong – but they aren’t neutral either. The way we acknowledge – or don’t acknowledge success – is deeply cultural. And if you’re working across different markets, cultures or boundaries, this matters more than you think.

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Failure is personal, success is negotiated.

What I mean by that is: When you fail, you know it immediately. The pitch that didn’t work, the campaign that doesn’t bring in leads.

But success? Success waits for confirmation.

In some cultures, you’re not allowed to declare your own success, it has to be granted by others. A manager acknowledges your contribution, a client renews, or your peers recognize your impact. Often, self-declared success can look like arrogance, as if you’re claiming something that isn’t yours.

In other cultures, if you don’t announce your success yourself, it simply doesn’t exist. No one will do it for you. You yourself have to make it visible, put it on LinkedIn, add it to your CV. If you’re silent, you’re communicating failure. And if you did something valuable and nobody knows about it, did it really happen?

This creates an immense tension for anyone working across cultures: celebrate too loudly, and you alienate one audience. Stay too quiet, and you disappear to another.

What I’ve learned from leading both global teams, as well as from watching my paid subscriber count slowly grow: The question isn’t whether to acknowledge success. It’s how to create a rhythm of acknowledgment that serves you and your team - not just your culture’s comfort zone.

Quiet vs loud success

There are two valid approaches to acknowledging success, and neither is inherently better:

Quiet success builds through:

• Consistent competence over time

• Shared effort and collective wins

• Recognition that comes through trust and relationships

• Letting the work speak for itself

Loud success creates momentum through:

• Visible milestones and announcements

• Explicit celebration and rituals

• Public recognition that attracts opportunities

• Making progress tangible to others

The trap isn’t choosing the wrong one. The trap is thinking you have to choose at all - or worse, choosing neither.

Rhythm over size

What really matters is not how big the success is, but how often you acknowledge it.

I once worked with a team that had “work hard, play hard” as their motto. Every quarter, we’d go out for dinner - no matter how the quarter went. We didn’t only celebrate the huge wins. We acknowledged progress: the small victories, the lessons learned, the growth each person made, the problems we solved together.

The regular rhythm normalized this acknowledgement, nobody had to negotiate whether something was “big enough” to celebrate. We didn’t have to wait for permission or for the perfect milestone – we celebrated seeing what was working.

This is where the growth connection becomes obvious: If you only track failures, you only know what to stop doing. If you acknowledge successes - even small ones - you learn what to do more of.

My one paid Substack subscriber told me something was working. And that is actionable data I can build upon.

Finding your acknowledgement practice

So, what does this mean practically?

If it doesn’t feel right or like ‘you’, then don’t adopt someone else’s cultural script. Don’t force yourself to post every win on LinkedIn or throw quarterly celebrations if that feels performative. But you do need some practice - a way of making success visible to yourself and the people who matter.

This might look like:

• A monthly team ritual where you name what moved forward

• A simple “wins” document you update weekly (even tiny ones)

• Sharing client results in your newsletter, not as bragging but as evidence

• Thanking your team publicly, even when the culture defaults to silence

• Telling one person when something works - your partner, a colleague, a friend

The goal of these practices shouldn’t be celebration for its own sake. It should be creating visibility around what’s working so you can build on it.

When you acknowledge success - yours or your team’s - you’re not being arrogant. You’re collecting data, reinforcing what matters, and making progress tangible in a world that mostly notices what breaks.

Last week I wrote about treating failure as a datapoint. Success deserves the same respect. Both tell you something true about what’s working and what isn’t. The only mistake is pretending neither matters - or worse, only counting one.

How do you balance staying humble with making your wins visible? I'd love to hear how you navigate this.

[Me at the day of the competition - probably before the contest.]

I once became a TV meme in Taiwan. It wasn’t one of my proudest moments.

While I was studying at National Taiwan University in Taipei, a lecturer was looking for foreign students who wanted to represent the university’s language department at an annual language competition. All you had to do was engage in a dialogue with a partner in Mandarin on stage.

I spoke the language fairly well, so another student from my class and I volunteered. I thought it would be fun, that I could learn something from it and test my language skills with others. I didn’t give it too much consideration.

But during the training, I learned that it was more rigid than I expected. The dialogue the lecturer had written was full of proverbs I never heard of and that were supposed to be funny. I did my best and simply memorized them without understanding their meaning.

You can probably guess what happened at the competition. I forgot half of the proverbs, and our performance turned out to be funny – in a dramatic way. While the other student could perfectly recite everything, my replies were short and didn’t really fit. We didn’t win the contest.

I went home a little bit embarrassed (well, or a bit more than a little bit), but I thought that by the next day, everyone would have forgotten this incident. It turned out that they hadn’t. Two TV stations had filmed the event, and I had turned into a meme that ran constantly on TV. (Thank God that this was in the pre-social media era!).

When class began the next day, the lecturer turned to me and scolded me for 1.5 incredibly long hours. I had brought shame on the university, and my negligent attitude towards this matter was unbelievable from her perspective.

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What this taught me

What do I want to demonstrate with this little anecdote? Even if we’re often not aware of it, different cultures deal differently with ‘failure’. And not only that, the very definition of ‘failure’ might be even different.

For me, it was an embarrassing moment - something I could laugh about later. I had tried something new, and it didn’t work out. I’d move on.

For my lecturer and many in the audience, it was something much more serious. Public shame. A loss of face for the university. A failure that required consequences.

Neither perspective was wrong. They were just different.

Growth and failure

This experience stayed with me because it connects directly to the work I do now.

This newsletter, and the book I’m currently writing, are focused on ‘growth’. I often look at growth from the perspective of a framework called ‘Growth Hacking’. And the very essence of Growth Hacking is directly connected to how we deal with failure.

Here’s what I mean.

Growth Hacking is based on the ability to embrace failure as just another data point. Not more, not less. It requires a mindset that is open, and willing to disregard personal preferences, internal politics, and ego.

The very foundation and essence of Growth Hacking is: Embrace the uncomfortable truth of a dataset, analyze its root cause, come up with a hypothesis how it can be improved, and implement small changes in sprints. Then start your analysis again.

It’s as easy as that – and as difficult.

In Growth Hacking, growth is a continuous improvement process which is based on analytics. And the best way to improve is when something doesn’t go well or as expected. It doesn’t have to be a complete failure, but it rarely is a perfect outcome either. (And be honest, is there ever a perfect outcome in something?)

The cultural context

Growth Hacking was developed in the 2010s in the Silicon Valley in the US. Since then, it has proved to be successful for many startups, scale-ups, and even big corporations around the world. Therefore, it is often assumed that Growth Hacking is universal.

But the uncomfortable truth is: Yes, the essence is universal. But when it comes to both the required mindset shift, as well as the specific tactics, you won’t be as successful as you could, if you disregard cultural preferences, norms, and specialties.

The attitude towards failure is a good example - and that’s exactly what my experience in Taiwan demonstrated.

Think about it: In Western startup culture, trying something and failing is celebrated as initiative and learning. In more hierarchical cultures, it might be seen as recklessness or poor judgment. In some Northern European cultures, acknowledging what didn’t work openly is valued. In face-conscious cultures across Asia and the Middle East, it could mean losing credibility.

When you try to implement Growth Hacking principles without understanding these differences, you’ll run into resistance. Not because the methodology is wrong, but because you’re asking people to work against their cultural instincts.

The takeaway

Keep that in mind when you think about implementing growth hacking principles or tactics. Before you start, ask yourself:

• How does this team or market define failure?

• What does “learning from mistakes” mean in this context?

• What would make experimentation feel safe rather than threatening?

The core principles of continuous improvement work everywhere. But the way you apply them - the cultural operating instructions - those need to be adapted.

And be curious to learn and improve. That part is truly universal.

What’s been your experience with attitudes toward failure? Have you noticed differences across teams or markets you’ve worked with?

Early in my career in Taiwan, I sat across from a group of talented designers trying to explain why their beautiful, colorful ads wouldn’t work in Germany.

“Germans don’t trust products with mascots,” I said. “They prefer technical, understated designs. Too much color, animation, or friendliness actually makes them suspicious.”

The designers stared at me, confused. In Taiwan, those elements built trust and warmth. How could the same design choices that worked at home trigger the opposite response abroad?

That’s when I realized: business decisions aren’t made logically. They’re made emotionally. And culture determines which signals trigger which emotions.

My journey into culture and business

Since then, I’ve led marketing teams at global B2B tech companies, from early-stage startups to enterprise SaaS scale-ups. No matter where the company was headquartered or which market it wanted to expand to, I kept seeing the same pattern: strategies that succeeded in one context failed badly in another, not because of poor execution, but because the cultural context was different.

A referral program that goes viral in Europe might feel transactional and awkward in Asia. Community-building that works in one market can feel forced in another. The same product messaging that builds trust in one culture triggers skepticism in another.

After years of hands-on execution, I’ve shifted to teaching and writing, helping business leaders, marketers, and founders understand not just WHAT to do, but WHY strategies work in one context and fail in another.

Why context matters more than tactics

Most business frameworks are taught as if they’re universal. Learn the playbook, execute well, and you’ll succeed everywhere. But it doesn’t work that way.

Strategies succeed or fail based on whether they trigger the right responses in your audience. What most people miss: culture determines how those responses are triggered. Trust signals that work in one market can feel strange or manipulative in another. Growth tactics that feel natural in one context might feel forced in another.

Understanding that the same strategy triggers different responses depending on cultural context goes beyond translation or surface-level localization.

I call this Culture-Market-Fit: understanding how cultural context shapes which strategies will succeed or fail. You don’t need to learn every cultural nuance. You need to develop the lens to see WHY something works, so you can make smarter decisions about what to try, what to adapt, and what to skip when expanding to new contexts.

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What this newsletter is all about

Each week, I’ll share insights on how culture shapes business decisions, from expansion strategy to team dynamics to why “best practices” often aren’t. You’ll get real examples, honest reflections from my own journey, and insights drawn from 20+ years working across markets and cultures.

You’ll learn to develop a different way of seeing, recognizing patterns, questioning assumptions, and making better decisions when context matters.

Who should read this

This newsletter is for anyone who works across cultures or markets, whether you're expanding a business, leading global teams, consulting with international clients, or simply curious about why what works “here” doesn't work “there”.

Let's grow together!

If this resonates with you, subscribe to get weekly insights in your inbox. And I'd love to hear from you: what's the challenge you're wrestling with when it comes to working across different contexts? Click reply or leave a comment below.

A year shaped by moments

Today, I’d like to pause and share my reflections on 2025 with you.

2025 was my first year as a self-employed founder and consultant, and it felt like a year made of very different rhythms. Some phases moved slowly, others rushed past me, and a few offered just enough space to breathe and learn.

Looking back, if I had to describe this year’s learnings in one word, it’d be: Time.

Time was my biggest opponent and my biggest ally this year.

When time moved slowly

There were times when I imagined hearing the second hand on my clock ticking, and everything went painfully slow.

In those moments, even the smallest task or decision seemed to stretch out endlessly. At the beginning of the year, recovering from major surgery, waiting for government approvals, or simply waiting for a potential client to reply to a proposal taught me patience in a way I hadn’t experienced before.

Those weeks felt like standing still while the world moved on without me. Yet, they also reminded me that not everything can be pushed or accelerated.

I learned that I had to endure time and to let things go their way.

When time accelerated

Then, there were times when time flew by and I wished I had more of it.

Lecturing at IU University of Applied Sciences while being a student again at UC Berkeley and working at the same time sometimes felt as if my life had sped up to warp speed, pressing me into my chair with the force of several g. On some days, it felt as if the week had barely begun before it was already over.

I didn’t have weekends anymore, and I often planned my whole week to the minute just to keep everything moving in the right direction. It was demanding, intense, and at times overwhelming - yet also strangely energizing.

Despite the pace, I wouldn’t want to have missed these experiences. They reminded me what I’m capable of carrying when I truly care about what I’m doing, and how easily we can stretch when life asks us to.

When time was simply enough

And, last but not least - at other times, I was gifted with just enough time, resources, and heartfelt support to move at a pace that felt right for me. These were the quieter stretches of the year, where nothing rushed me forward and nothing held me back.

I had the space to create, to struggle with ideas, to adjust my plans, and to learn without constantly looking at the clock. Those moments weren’t spectacular or loud, but they shaped me in their own way.

They gave me a sense of steadiness and reminded me that growth doesn’t always need pressure; sometimes, it just needs enough room to unfold.

Looking back

These lessons have been precious to me. They turned me into the person I am now at the end of the year. I feel more grounded, more experienced, and more realistic about what I can expect from life, work - and of course, time.

Perhaps most importantly, they reminded me that every year has its own rhythm, and we grow by learning to move with it rather than against it.

Let the next year come, and with it its challenges, lessons, and rewards.

To the next year - and to all of you, I wish a year filled with precious time, in whatever form you need it most.

What was your key learning in 2025? I’m curious to hear!

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