Cross-cultural Marketing & Management: Walk the market (podcast episode #151)

Data, data everywhere, but not a drop of insight. Excuse my remixing of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, but doesn’t it feel that way when staring at a dashboard sometimes. We have so much data – and frankly, our competitors probably have a lot of the same data – but can we turn those numbers into real insights to better serve a customer? Here’s one way to do it, that I read in a recent podcast guest application, but you have to close your laptop first – “Walk the market.” To hear the story behind that lesson, along with many more lesson-filled stories, I talked to Katherine Melchior Ray, faculty member and lecturer at the University of California Berkeley Haas School of Business [https://haas.berkeley.edu/], and author of the book ‘Brand Global, Adapt Local: How to build brand value across cultures’ [https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/brand-global-adapt-local-katherine-melchior-ray/1146174119]. Berkeley Haas ranked No. 8 among U.S. business schools in the 2025 Financial Times Global MBA Ranking. During her career, Ray managed teams up to 150 and reported to CEOs in Germany, France, Japan, and the US. Lessons from the things she madeNurture your curiosityHistory is not just for schoolPrioritize relationshipsWalk the marketInfuse a founder’s values into the brandCombine audacious risk taking with care Our next event Join us for ‘AI Executive Lab: Transform billable hours into scalable AI-powered products’ on September 10th at 2 pm EDT. Register here [https://join.meclabsai.com/mec050]. Discussed in this episode Customer Experience: Great experiences are invisible, but they require relentless alignment (podcast episode #145) [https://marketingsherpa.com/article/interview/customer] An Effective Value Proposition: What it is, why it is so important to business and marketing success, and how to use it [https://marketingsherpa.com/article/how-to/value-proposition-business-marketing%20success] Get more episodes Subscribe to the MarketingSherpa email newsletter [https://www.marketingsherpa.com/newsletters] to get more insights from your fellow marketers. Sign up for free if you’d like to get more episodes like this one. For more insights, check out... This podcast is not about marketing – it is about the marketer. It draws its inspiration from the Flint McGlaughlin quote, “The key to transformative marketing is a transformed marketer” from the Become a Marketer-Philosopher: Create and optimize high-converting webpages [https://meclabs.com/course/free digital marketing course. Apply to be a guest If you would like to apply to be a guest on How I Made It In Marketing, here is the podcast guest application – https://www.marketingsherpa.com/page/podcast-guest-application