Today, expanding into new markets leaves far less room for error. With tighter budgets, limited resources and rising expectations, every decision needs to deliver.
What works in one market rarely works the same way in another. When it comes to building brand awareness—a big part of market expansion—the most impactful channels, creators and media differ by country. Because of this, choosing the market is only part of the decision; what matters is how to ensure your brand performs once you enter it.
In this blog, we break down how to take a more data-driven approach when entering new markets, using brand performance in your market opportunity analysis to guide your decisions.
Why Most Expansion Strategies Still Fall Short
Most expansion strategies fall short because they start with incomplete insights. There’s a lot to consider across demand, brand awareness and performance, but when these are assessed in silos, everything that follows remains fragmented. This makes it difficult to compare markets or understand what can actually drive success.
It’s why market opportunity analysis is a critical step of your market expansion strategy.
What is market opportunity analysis?
Market opportunity analysis helps brands identify where they can grow based on real demand, competitive context and their ability to convert attention into traction. It’s used to evaluate new markets, assess expansion risk and prioritize where to invest.
With market opportunity analysis, brands can:
- Understand what is driving awareness and traction in each market
- Reduce risk across high-cost expansion decisions
- Prioritize where to invest time, budget and internal focus
This is where brand performance becomes critical. Think of it as the starting point of your market opportunity analysis. This stage brings your brand, competitors and the wider category into one view, helping you understand how performance is built and where you stand in each market.
Media Impact Value® (MIV®): Your Consistent Metric for Market Opportunity Analysis
Understanding brand performance requires a cohesive view of all your marketing and PR activities across countries. This includes understanding your coverage across channels (print, online and social media), Voices (Celebrity, Media, Influencers, Partners and Owned), regions and more.
Most metrics measure performance in isolation, making it difficult to compare across channels, regions or Voices. What’s needed is a consistent way to evaluate impact across all of them—that’s where MIV comes in.
Media Impact Value® (MIV®) is Launchmetrics’ proprietary metric that enables you to consistently measure your media impact by assigning a monetary value to each placement. Used specifically within the Fashion, Lifestyle and Beauty (FLB) industries, it enables brands to quantify brand visibility, track campaign performance and compare media impact across platforms, Voices and Regions.
When measured consistently it puts together a clearer picture of your brand performance, revealing who is driving impact, where it’s happening and how it differs by country. This becomes the foundation to a strong market opportunity analysis.
How to conduct market opportunity analysis
As we focus on brand performance, we’ll be using Launchmetrics as the brand performance platform to show you what market opportunity looks like in practice.
Begin by defining what you’re looking to understand and what decisions it should inform. From there, the process moves through a set of core stages, from understanding the market and demand, to assessing brand and competitor positioning, before shaping the right strategy and commercial approach. Let’s dive into each stage below.
1. Understanding the Landscape
You may be tasked with identifying the markets where your brand can grow, but without a clear starting point. Begin by understanding how competitors are performing globally and where they are gaining traction. This gives an early view of market saturation, where brands are investing and what strong visibility looks like in each country.
This can be explored in three ways:
- Industry: See where your brand and others rank by MIV in your industry within your chosen locations.
- Benchmarking: Look at how competitor brands perform by country to understand which brands have the most coverage (Share of Value).
- Brand-level analysis: Take a closer look at individual competitors to understand where their impact is coming from globally. Go deeper by focusing on these key locations to understand which Voices and channels are driving their traction.
This reveals not just who is leading in your industry category overall, but where and how this is generated.
2. Identify Demand Signals and Assess Your Brand Presence
Next, assess whether demand already exists for your brand and how that translates into real traction in the market. Typically, brands look at search behavior through volume trends, regional website traffic and ecommerce data such as international orders to understand if there is genuine interest to build on, not just short-term spikes.
Brand performance adds another layer of accuracy by showing how that demand translates into visibility. Looking at Voice types, individual Voices, channels and top placements helps reveal how impact is generated in specific locations and who is driving it.
Evaluate how your brand is currently performing in that market. Are you already visible, and if so, where is that visibility coming from? While every brand works differently, strong indicators often include high-authority Media coverage, organic Influencer traction, consistent presence over time and a balanced mix of Voices contributing to impact.
Note: Many brands mistake activity for presence. To avoid this, analyze performance over time to see whether traction is building consistently or driven by one-off moments. Looking at MIV per placement can also help assess the quality of that coverage.
3. Benchmark Against Competitors
This is where many brands realize they’re not competing where they thought they were. Comparing your performance against competitors highlights gaps, shows where you stand and reveals how others are winning in that market.
Use the same lens as your own brand performance when looking at how competitors generate impact. This helps to identify which Voices they rely on, which channels they dominate and whether their visibility is driven by a few high-impact moments or sustained over time.
This shows whether competitors are relying on strong Media authority, different Influencer tiers or a broader mix. It also helps you evaluate potential partnerships, showing whether competitors are already investing in them and the level of impact they’re generating.
4. Define Your Point of Entry and Strategy
Rather than asking whether a market is attractive, the focus shifts to what it will take to compete. This is where the market opportunity analysis comes together, giving you a clear view of the state of the market: who is leading, how traction is being built over time and where competitors are investing to be seen.
Using these insights is critical to expansion success, as they define the level of PR and marketing investment required to build visibility, compete effectively and drive demand and sales.
For example, if impact is driven by high-authority Media, it points to investment in positioning and PR. If traction is led by Influencers at scale, it suggests a need for sustained creator partnerships and content. If performance is more balanced across channels, it signals a market that requires consistency and ongoing presence, rather than one-off campaigns.
This is the first layer of direction, giving you a clear view of how attention is built and where to invest from a visibility perspective. From here, brand performance becomes the foundation for broader commercial decisions, helping teams align on where to focus across product, pricing, distribution and operations to support that growth opportunity.
Want to see how brands are successfully entering new markets and building traction?
Understanding where to expand is only part of the equation. The brands that succeed are those that understand how to build traction.
To see what this looks like in practice, download the report to benchmark your approach against global leaders, explore top-performing brands and channels by country, and dive deeper into the strategies shaping expansion across Fashion, Lifestyle and Beauty (FLB), including case studies from Orebella, Gymshark and Madhappy.
See What Successful Market Expansion Looks Like
Explore benchmarks, top brands and channels, and case studies in our latest report.
By Pawandeep Kaur
