There’s a temptation in business to mistake a big strategic plan for a good strategic plan. We build elaborate market-entry models, assemble committees, and spend months debating which country, customer segment, or product line deserves our next investment.
Meanwhile, customers may already be telling us where to go. We just have to notice.
That was one of the most interesting ideas to emerge from a new Rethink Retail conversation I hosted with Kasturi Pal, who leads worldwide marketing for Amazon’s international cross-border business and Amazon Bazaar app. Recorded at Shoptalk and released October 21, 2026, the 15-minute episode explores how Amazon reads demand in markets where it doesn’t necessarily have a full domestic operating footprint.
Why Colombia stood out
Amazon has full operations in 22 countries, but shoppers in more than 100 countries buy from the company. That creates an interesting strategic question: when customers are already finding their way to you, which signals justify investing more deeply?
In Latin America, Pal described how Colombia stood out for its relative resilience amid regional volatility. More importantly, Colombian shoppers demonstrated specific needs: broader selection, faster shipping, and better prices. Those patterns helped inform Amazon’s decision to launch Prime there with its shopping and entertainment benefits, despite not having full in-country operations.
To me, that’s the bigger lesson. Market expansion doesn’t always have to begin with a company deciding where it wants customers. Sometimes it begins with recognizing where customers already want the company.
Good numbers should trigger questions, too
One idea from the conversation deserves a place on more marketing dashboards: when something performs unusually well, don’t just celebrate it. Investigate it.
A campaign’s click-through rate beats expectations. Great. But why? Did the audience change? Did the message resonate differently? Was the timing unusually favorable? And why didn’t a similar approach work before?
It’s easy to investigate failures because they demand explanations. Success is more seductive. We congratulate ourselves and move on, potentially missing the very insight that would make the result repeatable.
Of course, not every data anomaly deserves an endless investigation. Part of analytical maturity is learning how deeply to dig—and when enough evidence is enough.
The case for smaller teams and clearer problems
Pal also described an approach that runs counter to the image of a sprawling global enterprise: teams that can begin with fewer than four people and, in some cases, budgets below $1 million.
The discipline is deceptively simple. Define the customer problem in one sentence. Bring in the people needed to solve it. Keep everyone else informed without turning everyone into a decision-maker.
That last distinction matters. Companies often confuse collaboration with universal participation. But the more people required to approve a decision, the harder it becomes to respond to the customer signal that prompted the work in the first place.
What other businesses can take away
Not every company has Amazon’s data, resources, or cross-border customer base. And one market’s success is not a plug-and-play formula for another. Still, the underlying principles travel surprisingly well.
Watch what customers actually do, especially when their behavior surprises you. Ask why your best results happened, not just your worst. And resist the urge to make a straightforward customer problem organizationally complicated.
We talk endlessly about becoming more data-driven. The more interesting ambition might be becoming more curiosity-driven: using data to ask better questions, then building teams capable of acting on the answers.