Spend Matters — Moving from the UK to Europe

Without stealing the thunder of some announcements we plan to make next year, 2012 will mark our first geographic expansion since 2010 (when we originally launched our UK/Europe venture which thus far, has ended up focusing almost entirely on British market). We're keen to bring Spend Matters to readers with both local language and flavor in markets that don't rely on English as a primary business language. Yet we haven't yet finalized our decisions and are in fact keen to gather input on this from the Spend Matters community. It's our hypothesis that the UK, Ireland and Nordics are fairly well taken care of with our English language site -- although more local color might be useful in the case of the latter countries -- so that leaves a few other regions you can probably zero in on that we're evaluating.

This expansion begs a number of questions for us as an organization:

• To what extent does a brand (e.g., Spend Matters) matter more or less in a market than the insights (or brand) of the main contributor? It's our gut feel judging by the success of the UK that the person who leads the effort in any region must also be a magnet for any venture to work
• How important are on-the-ground insights in various markets vs. just translating and providing, perhaps, a bit of additional context around news and analysis on the global sites? Again, it's our gut local content and flavor is essential
• Within each market, what matters most: private sector or public sector? Or in Germany, for example, the middle market within the private sector vs. large cap companies? We're not convinced there's a uniform answer to this question

We'd love to get reader input on where they would like to see Spend Matters and our associated sites venture to internationally, especially in Europe and Latin America (which are the immediate priorities for us). We're interested not just in what countries people would like to see coverage of and in, but the types of local flavor and content that will prove most insightful as we expand the Spend Matters global footprint.

Unfortunately, though, this site won't be happening anytime soon, as much as we'd like to think better procurement could help out the EU: SPEND MATTERS TRANSLATED INTO GREEK (our text editor butchered it, apologies). Too little, too late.

Jason Busch