I’ve been advising a DTC founder on their US market expansion, and we’re at this interesting crossroads about when to bring creators into the planning process.
Right now, the conversation is happening between senior leadership and market research folks. They’re figuring out positioning, product modifications, pricing strategy. Eventually, they’ll create a marketing brief and hand it to creators to execute.
But I keep thinking: what if we involved creators during the planning phase, not after? They could give insights about what actually resonates with their audience, what concerns they hear, what competitors are already doing well. That could inform strategy, not just execution.
The pushback I’m getting is that it’s premature—creators shouldn’t have decision-making power, and their perspective might be too narrow. Plus, there’s a coordination problem: how do you systematically gather insights from enough creators without the planning process becoming chaos?
But here’s the thing: I’ve seen market entries fail because the strategy was brilliant on paper but didn’t account for how the target audience actually thinks. Creators live inside that audience. They’re not decision-makers, sure, but they’re incredible information sources.
I’m trying to figure out the right timing and structure. Should creators be part of early research interviews? Should you test positioning with a small creator group before building out full campaigns? Or is that overcomplicating things?
Have you involved creators early in expansion planning? What was actually valuable, and what felt like a waste of time?
This is such a good question because I’m actually living this right now with our European expansion.
Honestly, we didn’t bring creators in early enough, and it cost us. We did all the strategy, positioning, market research internally, then approached creators with a finished brief. They immediately started picking holes in our assumptions about what the market actually wanted.
With our second wave of expansion, I’m changing that. We’re talking to creators in the target market during the research phase before we even finalize positioning. Not asking them for strategic decisions, but asking: “What does your audience actually care about? What problems are they trying to solve? What are the objections we’ll hear?”
It’s been eye-opening. Creators have picked up on market gaps we completely missed because we were looking at top-level data, not actually listening to the audience.
My recommendation: bring in a small group of 3-4 thoughtful creators during the research phase. Not as consultants, but as audience proxies. 30-minute interviews, structured questions about their market. It costs basically nothing and saves huge mistakes downstream.
The key is making clear they’re not strategic decision-makers—they’re information sources. That keeps things clean and prevents the coordination problem you mentioned.
I’ve been through a couple of market entries now, and I’m convinced you should involve creators earlier, but strategically.
Here’s what worked for us: During market research, we included interviews with 4-5 respected creators in the target market. We asked them about audience pain points, competitive landscape, messaging that resonates. We didn’t ask them to design strategy, but we listened hard to what they said.
Then, when we built our strategy, we validated our positioning through a round of creator feedback. “Here’s how we’re thinking about it—does this feel right to your audience?” Their response shaped refinements.
Only then did we move to full campaign development with broader creator networks.
The benefit: we caught several assumptions that would have wasted budget. The downside: it added about 4 weeks to the timeline.
But honestly? That 4 weeks saved us from what probably would have been 3-6 months of campaign optimization because we were chasing the wrong angles.
I’d do it again. Just be clear about the scope—creators are research partners during strategy, then content partners during execution.