A company wanted to attract new types of candidates for shop assistant jobs. Recruiters at the company’s head office really tried to produce a job ad that would reach a broader target group. With the help of various tools and experts, they adjusted the official title of the role, worked on the language of the job description, and widened the background and knowledge that the role required. No takers. The only place the recruitment team published the ad was on LinkedIn. However, people in the target group they hoped would apply for the job did not have LinkedIn accounts. The recruitment team only grasped this when one of the recruiters finally thought of visiting one of their own stores to get advice. Existing store staff suggested they publish the job ad in one of the city’s free newspapers. And when they did this the applications came flooding in.

Customer complaints suddenly increased in a new market segment. Entirely new (and inexplicable) errors and omissions were reported to the company – trucks with corrosion damages. No customers in the markets near the company’s headquarters had ever reported similar complaints. And the extensive test phase had gone as planned and was carried out as it always was in the environment and context in which the headquarters were located. Eventually, a group responsible for the test phase visited the new market to see what had gone wrong. None of the group had visited the region before but they quickly identified where they’ve failed. In the new market, customers washed their cars in salt water because that was what they had ready and easiest access to. A very different set of circumstances to the home region. If the team had visited the region before the market launch or consulted someone from the local office in the region, they would probably have been able to adapt the test phase before the complaints started.

A consumer company had quickly and successfully restructured its sales platform so that customers could shop online. The company was known for its strong presence on local markets. Given that a large proportion of sales were now centralized online, the digital platform needed to be at least as relevant as the company’s bricks and mortar stores. To help customers find the right geographical site, various categories were developed that would make navigation easy for consumers. Web development work was carried out in northern Europe and soon the company was receiving complaints from disgruntled customers. On the menu where customers could choose which region they wanted to buy clothes from, different geographical regions were presented: Europe, South America, North America, Africa, Oceania and the Orient. It was the latter that caused offence as this word has racist and colonial undertones for people from the region, something that had been missed by northern European programmers. This category was quickly replaced by “Asia”, which of course should have been done from the beginning, but nobody in the group reacted to it.