The Anchor You Used Last Market Is Probably the Wrong One This Time
EXECUTIVE TAKEAWAYS
A pricing comparison is only as valid as the competitor set and reference product it's built on — get the anchor wrong and every downstream number inherits the error.
"Best-selling SKU" and "relevant competitor" are market-specific facts, not fixed brand attributes — they change as a brand scales into new markets and as competitive sets mature.
Reusing a prior market's anchors feels efficient but produces a pricing recommendation benchmarked against the wrong reality.
Re-establishing anchors per market is a small, disciplined step that protects the credibility of every pricing decision built on top of it.
STRATEGIC CONTEXT
Expansion Brands rarely think of pricing analysis as something to redo. By the time a brand is entering its third or fourth Asian market, the pricing exercise already feels familiar — the team has a process, a template, a sense of what "competitive" looks like for the category. That familiarity is useful for speed. It is less useful for accuracy, because the thing being measured has quietly moved.
A brand's competitive landscape does not travel with it from market to market. The distributors, platforms, and shelf competitors in Singapore are not the ones in the Philippines. The SKU driving volume in Malaysia may not even be listed yet in Vietnam. As commercial teams scale their pricing exercise across more markets, the temptation to treat pricing research as a repeatable template — rather than a market-specific investigation — grows. That temptation is where the risk sits.
COMMON EXECUTIVE MISTAKE
The common mistake is carrying forward the reference points from an earlier market instead of re-establishing them for the new one. A team that identified its best-selling SKU and its three or four leading competitors when it entered Market 1 often reapplies that same SKU and that same competitor list when building the pricing case for Market 3 — sometimes without realizing they are doing it, because the process feels continuous rather than repeated.
The underlying assumption is that a brand's identity — what it's known for, who it competes with — is fixed. It isn't. It's a function of where the brand has actually built volume and reputation, and that changes market by market.
MARKET & OPERATIONAL REALITY
Two things drift, independently of each other, and both invalidate a pricing comparison if left unchecked.
The first is the "best-selling SKU." A brand's flagship product at home, or in its first Asian market, is often not the product doing the most volume elsewhere. Local taste, format preference, and channel mix reshape which SKU actually anchors the brand's identity in a given market. Benchmarking a new market's pricing against a SKU the local consumer barely buys produces a comparison that is technically completed but commercially meaningless.
The second is the competitor set. The three to five brands worth benchmarking against are defined by who is actually visible, credible, and selling at scale in that specific market and on that specific platform — not by who competed against the brand somewhere else. A competitor that dominates in one country may be a minor or absent player in the next. Carrying over a competitor list saves research time, but it also means the pricing conclusion is measured against a market that doesn't exist where the brand is actually launching.
Neither error is visible in the output. A pricing table with clean numbers and a tidy percentage looks credible regardless of whether the inputs were right. That is precisely what makes this mistake expensive: it doesn't fail loudly, it fails quietly, and the resulting price gets defended internally as "data-backed" long after the data stopped describing the actual market.
WHAT GOOD LOOKS LIKE
Well-run Expansion Brands treat the identification of anchors as a discrete, market-specific step — not a formality inherited from the last market. Before any pricing comparison begins, they confirm, for that specific market, which SKU is actually driving or is expected to drive volume, and which brands are genuinely visible and credible to the local consumer on the platforms that matter there. They treat this as a fresh question every time, even when the category and the parent brand are identical to previous markets. The discipline is small in effort and large in consequence: it determines whether everything calculated afterward is measuring something real.
PRACTICAL BUSINESS EXAMPLE
Illustrative scenario, not an actual company. A sports nutrition brand successfully priced and launched its flagship whey protein in two Southeast Asian markets, using the same best-selling SKU and a consistent shortlist of three international competitors both times. Preparing for a third market, the commercial team reused that same SKU and competitor list to save time ahead of a distributor pitch. Midway through building the pricing table, a regional advisor pointed out that in the new market, a different format — a ready-to-mix sachet, not the tub format that anchored the first two launches — was the format actually driving category volume, and that one of the two "core" competitors from prior markets had almost no presence there at all. The pricing exercise had to be restarted with the correct anchors before the number reaching the distributor could be trusted.
STRATEGIC RECOMMENDATIONS
Executives overseeing multi-market pricing work should build in a standing checkpoint: before any new market's pricing comparison is finalized, confirm — deliberately, not by default — which product actually anchors the brand's volume in that market and which competitors are genuinely relevant there. This should be a named step in the process, not an assumption carried forward from the last market's paperwork. It costs little time relative to the pricing decision it protects, and it should sit ahead of any negotiation with a distributor or retail partner on price.
APPLYING THIS THROUGH THE SAMANA INSIGHTS FRAMEWORKS
This is precisely the discipline built into the opening stage of Samana Insights' Framework 12 — Price Research Analysis. Before any pricing comparison or recommended price is calculated, F12 requires the anchors — the home market reference, the best-selling SKU, and the relevant competitor set — to be established fresh for the market in question, rather than assumed from prior work. For an Expansion Brand layering on additional Asian markets, this early-stage discipline is what keeps every subsequent pricing figure grounded in the market it's actually meant to describe.
Closing Insight
The question worth asking before the next pricing exercise isn't "what did our pricing comparison show?" It's "are we still measuring against the right things?" A pricing table can be internally consistent and still be answering a question about a market that no longer exists. Getting the anchor right is the cheapest, least visible, and most consequential step in the entire exercise.
Explore the complete Samana Insights Price Research Analysis framework to see how re-establishing the right anchors, market by market, turns a pricing comparison into a number your team can actually stand behind in front of a distributor.
