Even a company that’s well-entrenched in Latin America can still go wrong when going to market.
Blind spots in certain areas, changing consumer behavior or unknown consumer habits all can cause a GTM strategy to misfire—and these won’t often show up in focus groups or surveys.
Below we share some FAQs on Latin America GTM strategies to show what can go wrong…and how, with help from AMI, you can go to market with greater confidence.
What’s an example of a go-to-market strategy that badly misread a Latin America market?
A well-documented case is Whirlpool’s entry into Mexico in the 1990s, when the country became a priority market for global companies negotiating NAFTA. Whirlpool’s washing machines had evolved over the years into fairly sophisticated products — different temperature settings, different agitation speeds for delicates versus bulky loads, all the features taken for granted today. Mexico had an expanding middle class at the time, so Whirlpool assumed the demand for a modern washing machine was there. They signed distribution agreements with major retailers, trained sales staff, and moved product into stores. It didn’t sell. They lowered the price. Still nothing.
The company that finally explained why was Grupo Vitro, the large Monterrey-based glass manufacturer they’d been in talks with. Vitro’s point was simple: what counted as “middle class” in Mexico at that income level almost always meant a household with domestic help — someone who came a few times a week to do the laundry by hand, typically a woman with a low level of education. The lady of the house might fall in love with a Whirlpool machine she’d seen on a trip to Houston, but the person actually using it was the household worker, who’d look at all those dials and options, not understand them, and keep washing clothes by hand anyway. Vitro’s advice was to dig up Whirlpool’s oldest product blueprints — literally the first washing machine the company ever built, with just an on/off switch and a hot/cold setting, nothing else. Whirlpool built that stripped-down machine, priced it accordingly, and it sold immediately. The lesson: whatever market research Whirlpool had done was aimed at the buyer of the product, not the actual user of it — and in Latin America, especially for household goods, those are often two different people.
Built for the Buyer. Missed by the User.
AMI tests your product, pricing, and positioning against how Latin American consumers actually behave — not how they’re assumed to.
BUILD YOUR GTM STRATEGY
Is there another example of a Latin America go-to-market mistake?
A leading battery manufacturer wanted to enter Brazil at a time when the Brazilian real was strong, and planned to export into the country rather than manufacture locally. They asked for a standard market landscape study — demand, channels, competition. Early in the research, it became clear they needed to account for gray-market batteries smuggled into Brazil through Paraguay, since Brazil’s import tariffs on batteries ran around 20% at the time, and the gray-market product also skipped sales tax by operating in cash. The client told AMI to ignore that channel. They didn’t want to acknowledge it or factor it into the strategy.
The reality was that close to half the batteries consumed in Brazil at the time were entering through that gray channel. The client had planned to enter with a value-oriented pricing position rather than a premium, high-performance one — which meant they were positioned to compete directly on price against product that was avoiding both tariffs and taxes. They never gained real traction, largely because of a legal decision, made internally, to treat an entire category of competition as if it didn’t exist. The lesson here is different from Whirlpool’s: it’s not enough to understand the formal market. You have to account for informal competition too, because in Latin America it’s often not a rounding error — it can be half the market.
Is that gray-market and informal-competition dynamic part of why building a GTM strategy for Latin America is harder than in other regions?
Yes, and it’s worth being precise about the term. Gray market is product that’s legitimately manufactured but enters a market through informal channels, typically avoiding import tariffs and sales tax by operating in cash and staying unaccounted for by authorities. It happens everywhere in the world, but in Latin America certain categories are dominated by it — the sneaker market in Peru, for instance, is roughly 70% gray market. A company selling Nike product through department stores in Lima has to reckon with the fact that the same product is available in cash markets across the street, because a Los Angeles wholesaler that legitimately bought from Nike turns around and ships part of that order down to Latin America through informal channels. Nike counted that as a sale to the U.S.; the market experienced it as gray-market competition.
National competitors also don’t always play by the same rules multinationals do. Labor law is a good example: in most Latin American countries, an employee taking home $100 a week can cost the employer $150 to $250 a week once severance, seniority, and profit-sharing obligations are added in. In Mexico, once an employee passes a few months on the job, they start accruing seniority, and firing them after that requires at least three months of severance — more the longer they’ve stayed. So local companies in labor-intensive businesses, like secure logistics and cash transport, will simply let employees go every few months and keep them on temporary contracts, avoiding both severance and the legal requirement to share 10% of profits with staff. They’re not breaking the law, but they’re bending it hard, and multinationals that don’t play that game are at a real cost disadvantage. On top of that, Latin American markets outside Mexico and Brazil are often ones that competitors from the U.S., Europe, or Japan simply haven’t gotten to yet, which makes the competitive landscape unusually dynamic — new entrants can show up at any point. And politically sensitive industries — utilities, energy, mining, food — can become targets for political retaliation if a company, its country of origin, or its biggest local rival has the connections to make that happen. There’s a case from the 1980s of a major Brazilian broadcaster using its political connections to make life very difficult for a U.S. television network trying to enter that market.
Can You Actually Compete?
Before you size the market, AMI shows you exactly who — and what — you’re up against, including the gray and black market competitors most companies never see coming.
SIZE UP THE COMPETITIONGiven how old some of these examples are, has go-to-market risk in Latin America actually changed?
Some things have. Intellectual property is easier to protect in Latin America today than it was 20 or 30 years ago — a large enough company that structures its government contracts with an international arbitration clause gives a country real pause before interfering, and enforcement of basic IP protections has improved. But that protection tends to scale with size and political backing. A smaller player without strong political relationships, or without a home country willing to go to bat for it, is still exposed to the same kind of interference that’s always existed in the region.
Isn’t hiring a good local law firm enough to handle market entry in Latin America?
Good legal advice matters in any new market, but Latin America doesn’t lack laws — its legal frameworks are as thorough as anywhere in the world. The real question is how those laws are applied: whether they’re enforced at all, and whether they’re enforced evenly against a foreign entrant compared to the local competitors already operating there. A serious local law firm will actually be less naive about this than a foreign one working without local counsel; Latin American lawyers tend to be sharper dealmakers than their American counterparts, because so much of their job is helping clients stay technically compliant while navigating laws that are often impractical or unrealistic as written. But legal counsel isn’t the same as commercial insight. A law firm can offer a reasonably informed view of how the gray market operates in a given category, but it isn’t the source to go to for understanding consumer behavior or the competitive landscape from a business standpoint — that requires a different kind of research entirely.
What are the different situations a Latin America go-to-market strategy actually needs to account for?
Broadly, two very different scenarios. One is a company entering a market for the first time, where it doesn’t know the landscape well at all. The other is a company already established in the market that’s launching a new product, testing a new channel, or repositioning something it already sells. Both require thinking through the channels to market, but the starting point is different — one involves a steep learning curve about a market the company barely knows, the other involves testing new assumptions inside a market the company already understands.
Who Else Has a Stake in Your Success?
Governments, competitors, and communities can all have a reason to see you fail. AMI maps the stakeholders who could help — or block — your entry into Latin America, before you commit resources.
MAP THE STAKEHOLDERS
When a company starts building its Latin America go-to-market strategy, where should it focus its attention first?
For most companies selling to consumers or other businesses, the first thing to establish — and the thing companies most often get wrong by skipping it — is competition. There’s no point sizing a market or its growth rate if the company can’t actually compete in it. That means looking at the full competitive picture, including gray and black market competition, and at what’s happened historically when other companies tried to enter. A useful example: a major U.S. telecom operator considering entry into Mexico’s long-distance market, once Telmex’s monopoly was forced open under NAFTA-driven deregulation, chose to stay out entirely. Telmex had done everything in its power to make life difficult for the domestic startups and foreign entrants that the deregulation was supposed to welcome, and this company recognized that winning market share there would be extremely expensive, in spite of how attractive the market looked on paper. Only after establishing whether a company can actually compete does it make sense to look at demand growth and customer needs.
The exception is commodity and utility businesses. A mining company isn’t primarily worried about other mining companies; its biggest concerns are the full range of potential opponents to a project — different levels of government, unions, NGOs, local communities, and other stakeholders. For that kind of business, the competitive landscape isn’t the first focus. The broader stakeholder and business context is.
How does market intelligence fit into building a Latin America go-to-market strategy from the start?
Market intelligence, by an old but still valid definition, comes down to three C’s outside the company itself: the customer, addressed through different forms of market research; the competition, addressed through competitive intelligence; and the context, which is the regulatory environment today and how it might change, the economy today and how it might change, and the political environment, which in turn shapes how the regulatory and economic pictures evolve. Understanding those three C’s gives a company the information base it needs to build a go-to-market strategy that fits within its actual resources.
What kind of surprises catch companies most off guard when they skip Latin America market research?
The central question to ask is: who has a vested interest in your failure? One clear example: a foreign government that was a major exporter of potato seed hired AMI to look at Mexico’s upcoming presidential election, because despite a free trade agreement, the client had been running into constant non-tariff barriers getting potato seed into the country and suspected political interference. Researching the two leading candidates turned up that one had a brother who grew potato seed domestically, and the other held investments in another domestic potato seed grower. The conclusion was straightforward: regardless of who won, that interference was going to continue — and it did.
That’s an example of a powerful position with a direct, personal stake in a company’s failure to enter a market. More often, it’s a strong competitor with political connections who doesn’t want a new entrant to succeed, and who will use those connections to get in the way. Countering that usually means finding an equally powerful ally, marshaling the diplomatic weight of your own country if it carries commercial importance in that market, or in some cases partnering directly with the powerful opponent instead of fighting it. This is exactly where stakeholder mapping earns its place in a go-to-market strategy. In industries like mining, energy, and infrastructure, mapping every stakeholder who could help or hinder a project is standard practice, usually done before a company even acquires an asset. Companies more used to a straightforward export model or a fairly benign type of market entry often aren’t in the habit of doing this — which is exactly why it’s worth raising early, before a strategy gets built around an incomplete picture of who’s actually invested in the outcome.
Why would a company hire AMI for Latin America market research instead of running it internally?
Two reasons stand out. The first is expertise: AMI has worked in Latin America for more than 30 years, in several core industries for nearly as long, and expertise in anything comes from doing it repeatedly. Companies that try to run this research with their own staff are usually pulling people away from their actual day-to-day jobs and asking them to take on an unfamiliar assignment. The learning curve for someone doing this once or twice is steep, and the risk of missing something important — a channel, a competitor, a regulatory wrinkle — is high simply because they haven’t done it before.
The second is objectivity. Once research carries a real dollar value — the kind that leads to launching a product, acquiring a company, shutting something down, or shifting resources away from one part of the business toward another — there are people inside the company, however loyal, who don’t want that initiative to succeed, because it draws resources away from theirs. Internal research is vulnerable to exactly that kind of pressure. As an outside, objective party that has defended its methods and results for over 30 years, AMI can tell a client something they don’t want to hear — that a promising idea isn’t going to work in Colombia, and why — with the same confidence it delivers good news. That’s often just as valuable as a green light. There’s also a simpler, more practical reason: certain research methods, particularly competitive intelligence gathering, are ones a company may not want its own employees doing, for legal or reputational reasons.
One Region. Many Ways to Get It Wrong.
AMI builds go-to-market strategies grounded in how Latin America actually works — not how it’s assumed to.
START YOUR GTM STRATEGY
Once the research is done, does AMI also help build the actual Latin America go-to-market strategy?
It depends on what the client wants. Some clients only want the research inputs and prefer to build their own strategy from there. Others want strategic recommendations without a fully built-out action plan. And others want AMI to handle the full process, research through execution plan. The most effective way to build the strategy itself, in most cases, is collaboratively: AMI brings an outside point of view on the market, but the client brings knowledge of its own resources, internal biases, and operational strengths and weaknesses that has to be part of the conversation too. The most successful projects tend to be the ones where AMI goes beyond handing over a list of recommendations and works directly with the client to build the strategy together.
Bottom Line
Every one of these examples — Whirlpool’s washing machines, the battery manufacturer’s gray-market blind spot, the telecom operator that wisely stayed out of Mexico — comes down to the same root cause: a go-to-market strategy built on assumptions instead of ground-level intelligence. AMI has spent more than 30 years building the kind of market, competitive, and stakeholder intelligence that keeps those assumptions from becoming expensive mistakes.
Learn more about AMI’s GTM Strategy service for companies entering or expanding in Latin America, explore AMI’s full range of research and advisory services, or see why global companies rely on AMI — including AMI’s current clients — for objective, on-the-ground Latin America intelligence.
