What happens today
The patchwork
- A gut feeling that "it should work over there too"
- One agency deck built on a country you have never sold in
- A focus group you cannot afford until after launch
- A local hire who joins the week the campaign ships
Simulate playbook
Rehearse a new market
Spot what does not translate before you spend a penny.
- 5 min read
- Intermediate
- 4 moves
- Run per market
The number
You walk into launch knowing which lines land in the new market and which ones to rewrite, before the media spend, not after.
Cultural fit
The situation
From a launch you hope translates to messaging you know lands.
Hand Simulate the messaging you already run at home and the country you are entering. It spins up simulated customers from that market (with local values, references, and reflexes) and puts your copy in front of them. You see what lands, what confuses, and what quietly offends before a single ad goes live.
With Simulate
The workflow
- One brief, one target market, one place to read the reaction
- Every "this confuses" or "this offends" traced to a simulated customer
- A read on cultural fit before the media spend, not after
- You walk into launch knowing which lines to keep and which to rewrite.
How the work moves
Four moves.
Simulate runs your existing messaging past a market you have never sold in and shows the reaction line by line. Skip freely once you know which parts of your copy carry the risk.
Simulate at work
One brief travels through the whole job. Context stays attached until the finished work lands.
Frame
Name the market you are entering and paste the messaging you run today.
Simulate starts with your real copy and the target country, and asks only for what is missing: no translation brief, no lengthy cultural questionnaire.
Populate
Simulate builds customers from the country you are entering.
Hundreds of typed agents with local values, references, and social graphs: buyers, not demographics. Each carries the knowledge and reflexes of the market you have not sold in yet.
React
Watch what lands, what confuses, and what offends.
Your messaging goes in front of the swarm and the reactions rank by line. The claim that reads as confident at home may read as pushy abroad, and Simulate names why.
Read
Take the cultural-fit read and rewrite before you spend.
A packaged read lands in the format your team already uses: keep, rewrite, or cut, with the reasoning attached. You fix the messaging on paper, not in market.
Prompts worth keeping
Paste these into Simulate.
Three prompts, a kickoff, a full run, and a packaging pass. Copy the one that matches the phase you're in. Swap in your own market and messaging.
Kick it off
You are Simulate. I am entering a new market and want to rehearse it before I spend. Here is the messaging I run at home: [paste your headlines, taglines, and ad copy]. The country I am entering is [target market]. Build simulated customers from that market and walk me through the first move: tell me what you need from me.
Run it in one shot
Run the full playbook end-to-end for [target market]: build hundreds of local simulated customers, put my existing messaging in front of them, and show me line by line what lands, what confuses, and what offends. Rank the reactions and name the cultural reason behind each one. Ask before skipping any step, and show your work as you go.
Package the output
Deliver the output as a single cultural-fit read I can share with the team: lead with the verdict on whether this messaging is ready for [target market], then the receipts: which lines to keep, which to rewrite, and which to cut, each tied to how the simulated customers reacted.
What goes in. What comes back.
Inputs in, outputs out.
Simulate runs on the inputs on the left and hands back the artifacts on the right. Skip any input, the agent will ask for it the first time it needs it.
Give it
- The messaging you run today (headlines, taglines, ad copy)
- The country or market you are entering
- Any local context you already have (positioning, competitors)
Get back
- A cultural-fit read on what lands, confuses, and offends
- A line-by-line keep / rewrite / cut list with reasons
- A shareable brief your team can act on before launch
The finished artifact
A cultural-fit read, not a hunch.
Every run ends the same way, a packaged read in the channel your team already reads. Here's a preview of what shows up.
Simulate → your team
Rehearse a new market, cultural-fit read ready
playbooks
Tue 9:12 AM
Here's the read for the market you're entering. I built simulated customers from the target country, ran your existing messaging past them, and flagged every line that lands, confuses, or offends, with the cultural reason attached.
- Name the market you are entering and paste the messaging you run today.
- Simulate builds customers from the country you are entering.
- Watch what lands, what confuses, and what offends.
- Take the cultural-fit read and rewrite before you spend.
What moved
Cultural fit
You walk into launch knowing which lines land in the new market and which ones to rewrite, before the media spend, not after.
cultural-fit.pdf · line-by-line.csv · rewrites.md
Before you run it
Where teams stall.
Three ways we see this go sideways and how to avoid each one.
Keep judgment with the team. The playbook should make the work clearer, not hide the assumptions behind it.
- Running your translated copy instead of your real copy. Feed Simulate the messaging as it actually ships so the reaction is honest.
- Treating a green read as a guarantee. Cultural fit tells you what lands with simulated customers: pair a strong read with one local reviewer before you commit the budget.
- Rehearsing every market with one run. Reactions do not transfer across countries, so run the playbook once per market you enter.
Questions
Before you start.
No. Feed Simulate the copy exactly as you run it today and name the market you are entering: the simulated customers react in their own cultural frame. If you already have a translated version, run both so you can see whether the translation kept what made the original land.
A focus group gives you a handful of people after you have already booked the market. Simulate builds hundreds of typed customers from the target country in minutes, so you see what lands, confuses, or offends before you spend, and you can rerun the moment you change a line.
It is qualitative on purpose, because what kills a launch abroad is rarely a number: it is a line that reads as pushy, a reference nobody gets, or a joke that offends. Simulate ties every reaction to a specific simulated customer and names the cultural reason, so the read is traceable even when it is not a percentage.
Whoever owns the market entry: usually the growth or marketing lead running the launch. They take the keep / rewrite / cut list into the campaign, while a local reviewer or regional hire sanity-checks the final rewrites before the spend goes live.
