What nobody tells you before entering Central and Eastern Europe

Entering Central and Eastern Europe is often described as difficult — and it is one of the least well-supported decisions a company can make. There is plenty of advice on the legal entity, the hiring, the logistics. There is far less on the part that quietly determines how the launch actually lands: whether anyone here knows who you are, and whether they have any reason yet to trust you.

There is a preliminary point worth making, because it reframes everything that follows. CEE is not a hard region to enter — that reputation is mostly a myth, and often a self-fulfilling one. It is, however, a more relational region than many Western companies expect. Business here tends to move at the speed of trust between specific people, rather than at the speed of a well-structured proposal. That is not inefficiency, and it is not the absence of professionalism — it is a different sequence. In much of Western Europe, the deal tends to build the relationship; here, more often, the relationship builds the deal. A company that understands that ordering finds the region surprisingly warm and open. A company that does not can spend a year mistaking politeness for progress.

Most companies still arrive with a distribution plan and no credibility plan. That is not a failure of diligence — it is what the available playbooks prepare you for. Legal, tax, hiring and pricing all come with checklists. Communication tends to be treated as something that begins on launch day. But in a region where an unfamiliar foreign brand starts from a trust deficit rather than from neutral, that sequencing works against you, and usually without anyone noticing until later.

So which are the top five things worth thinking about in the six months before launch?

1. CEE is not one market

This is the most understandable mistake, and also the most expensive, and it is made by very sophisticated companies all the time. The region looks like a single bloc from the outside, and almost nothing about it behaves like one. Different languages, two alphabets, several currencies including Bulgaria’s recent euro transition, media landscapes that share very little, regulatory regimes that differ by sector and by country, and consumer habits that simply do not map onto one another. A plan built for Poland will underperform in Romania and can struggle badly in Bulgaria — not because the plan was weak, but because it was built for somewhere else.

The relational dimension is not uniform across the region either. The warmth, and the weight placed on personal trust, tend to be stronger in the south and east than in the more Nordic-influenced north — another reason a single “CEE relationship playbook” is as risky as a single media plan.

What we see most often is entirely reasonable: a company arrives with a model that already works at home and assumes it transfers. Sometimes it partly does. The rest has to be rebuilt locally, and that remainder is almost always the communication, the relationships and the context. The more regulated the sector, the larger the share that does not transfer — because that is exactly where public trust is part of the product.

Netflix, January 2016. Netflix entered Poland as part of a simultaneous launch across 130 new countries, taking it past 190 markets — one product, one catalogue, executed centrally. But Poland is a dubbing market, and audiences there were used to localised content, which meant an English-heavy catalogue spoke to a niche from day one. That is the kind of detail that is almost invisible from headquarters and obvious to anyone who has spent a month in the market. It is no one’s fault. It is just very hard to see from far away.

2. Global brand equity does not automatically travel

A company that is a household name at home may be genuinely unknown here — or, sometimes, known through a previous distributor who did not do it justice. So the most useful opening question is not “how do we extend our brand,” but “what, if anything, do people here already believe about us?” It is an easy question to skip in the rush of a launch, and a surprisingly inexpensive one to answer.

This is also where the relational nature of the region cuts against a common Western instinct. A Western brand often arrives assuming reputation is something the company owns and carries with it; here, reputation is more often something conferred — extended to you by people who already have standing, and withheld until then. The brand does not precede the relationships. It accumulates through them.

The gap tends to show up first in marketing and PR. A company with decades of history and strong recognition at home arrives, books outdoor space, and assumes the message lands on a foundation of familiarity that is not there yet. A billboard does not build awareness where the brand is starting from zero — it needs an integrated approach across the channels that matter locally, sustained presence, and the benefit expressed in terms the local audience already recognises as their own.

The reassuring part is that the diagnosis is cheap. An awareness and perception audit, a look back at local press mentions over recent years, a handful of conversations with sector journalists, distributors and prospective partners — five or six weeks of work, at a fraction of the cost of the first campaign. It is one of the highest-return things a company can do before spending on media.

Netflix, eight months later. In January 2016, Netflix was already one of the most recognised brands in the world — and that still did not spare it a local relaunch. On 20 September 2016 it announced, specifically for Poland, what it called a genuinely Polish service: a localised interface, local currency, Polish titles, and more than 80% of its content dubbed or subtitled in Polish. Global fame bought attention. It did not buy local relevance — and the two really are different line items.

3. Who speaks for your brand is a strategic decision, not just an HR one

In these markets, a credible local voice tends to outperform a visiting regional executive by a wide margin. The country manager, the local specialist, the local partner are all communication assets — and it is easy, understandably, to hire for commercial competence without also asking whether the person can carry the brand publicly. The two do not always come together, and there is no reason to assume they should.

This is not a regional quirk to be tolerated; it is worth understanding on its own terms. In a relationship-first culture, who is speaking is not separable from what is being said. A message from a trusted local figure and the identical message from an unknown head-office executive are not the same message — they carry different weight, because trust attaches to people before it attaches to claims. Western communication often assumes the reverse: that a strong enough message stands on its own, regardless of the messenger. Both instincts are internally consistent. Only one of them works here on day one.

Two roles get blurred here, and it helps to separate them. The first is the spokesperson: someone inside the company who knows the product, can field an uncomfortable question without waiting for sign-off from another time zone, and who is given media training, key messages and actual time for the role. The second is the brand ambassador or external voice: someone with real standing in the local market who can carry the message and open doors. They are complementary, not interchangeable — and neither tends to appear in the org chart on its own. The test is a gentle one. If a difficult question from a local journalist arrived tomorrow, who answers it — in the local language, the same day? If no name comes immediately to mind, that is simply the first thing worth sorting out. It is very fixable.

Netflix and the local voices. When Netflix built its Polish offer, part of the first wave of local content was stand-up specials featuring Polish comedians the audience already knew and trusted. The logic is the same as with a spokesperson: recognition travels through people, not logos, and the quickest way into a new market’s attention is a voice it already recognises.

4. What to centralise and what to localise

Narrative, positioning, data and thought leadership can and should be built centrally. Media relationships, spokespeople, timing, sector sensitivities and message framing generally cannot be. It is common — and completely intuitive — to get this the other way round: to centralise the tactical execution to save money and localise the strategy. That is how a company ends up with translated global messaging that reads as slightly foreign, and a media list bought from a database.

   Worth building centrally: the narrative and positioning, proprietary data and research, thought leadership, visual identity and brand standards.

   Worth building locally: journalist and trade press relationships, spokespeople and their preparation, launch timing and  sequencing, message framing and the examples used, sector and context sensitivities.

The difference is not really linguistic, it is cultural. What works in one market can be neutral in the next and counterproductive in the third — and translation, however good, does not close that gap. A perfectly translated text can still be a text written for someone else.

Netflix, September 2016. The split is visible in the sequencing. The brand, the catalogue and the technology stayed central. Language, currency, dubbing, subtitling, local titles and the timing itself were handled market by market — Poland on 20 September, Turkey two days later on 22 September. Not one regional switch for the whole region, but a separate, deliberate operation per country.

5. Market entry is also a talent and partner question

You are not only selling into the market — you are hiring in it, and looking for distributors, associations and partners. Employer reputation and B2B credibility are part of the go-to-market job, even though they rarely make it into the launch brief. That is understandable: there is a lot to hold in mind at once. But it is worth pulling these forward.

The mechanism runs the same way in both directions. A strong candidate will look you up before the first interview. If they find nothing in the local language — no presence in the business press, no employee talking about the company — the conclusion usually is not “discreet brand,” it is “uncertain bet.” The same is true for a distributor or an industry body. Before they put their name next to yours, they will look for evidence that you are really here, and that you have some kind of track record.

There is a relational reading of this too. When a distributor or an association hesitates before attaching their name to yours, they are not being bureaucratic — they are doing the thing the culture does instinctively, which is to treat their own reputation as something they lend, carefully, to people they have reason to trust. A Western company can read that pause as friction. It is more useful to read it as the region telling you, accurately, how it works. Which is why employer branding and B2B communication are not year-two luxuries. They are part of what gives the launch someone to carry it forward.

Netflix and T-Mobile. Alongside the Polish localisation, Netflix named its first local partner: mobile operator T-Mobile, with an arrangement that let subscribers pay for Netflix through their T-Mobile account. Read it as a distribution deal and it is a payments mechanism. Read it as communication and it is borrowed credibility — a familiar local name standing beside a brand that was still new. Partnerships quietly do both jobs, whether or not you planned for the second one.

What the Netflix story means for a mid-sized company

It is worth being honest about the asymmetry here. Netflix could afford to correct course in eight months, with a content and marketing budget almost no one else has, and with a product where a poor first impression costs a cancelled subscription rather than a lost tender.

A mid-sized company entering CEE usually does not have that room. It gets one launch. If that launch misses the context, the second attempt begins from a weaker position than the first — because by then the market already has an opinion, and opinions cost more to change than to form.

That, in the end, is the whole case for investing in credibility before launch rather than after. Not because it is more virtuous — because it is simply cheaper, and kinder to your own team, who otherwise spend year two undoing an impression they never meant to make.

What we tell our clients

What we tell our clients usually comes down to the same sequence, and we try to say it early, before the pressure of a launch date makes everything feel urgent at once. Communication is better started around six months before launch than on the day itself — and the first thing worth paying for is not a campaign but a diagnosis: what is known about the company here, through whom, and since when.

From there, most of the work is about people and proportion. One well-prepared local spokesperson will carry more than three translated press releases — which is also why the narrative is worth writing once, centrally, while the framing is rewritten market by market. Relationships follow the same logic: a media list can be bought, but journalist relationships can only be built, and the difference tends to show the first time something goes wrong.

The same is true of the audiences companies rarely think of as audiences — the candidates and prospective partners already forming an opinion from day one, whether or not anyone is speaking to them. All of this is far easier to protect when credibility has a budget line of its own, because a priority without a budget rarely ends up with an owner.

If there is a single reframe we come back to, it is this: the companies that find CEE difficult are often the ones treating it as a transaction that happens to involve people. The ones that find it welcoming treat it as a set of relationships that happen to produce transactions. The region rewards the second instinct generously — it tends to be loyal, warm and durable once trust is real — but it rarely rewards it in advance.

And if some of this cannot be done in-house, that is genuinely fine — it is precisely the kind of work local partners exist for: people who already know the media landscape, the sector sensitivities, and the quiet distance between what you meant to say and what actually gets heard here. None of this is about doing more. It is about doing the right few things, in the right order, early enough for them to help.