Where Did They Put in Their Hours?

Before you hire a marketer for a foreign market, ask one question: Where did they put in their hours?

Not which brands they worked for. Not which awards they won. Not how impressive their portfolio looks. Where did they build their expertise—in which domain, for which audience, and inside which cultural context?

This matters because expertise is not a general-purpose tool. It is domain-specific, audience-specific, and culture-specific. It is built through accumulated hours of feedback in one particular context—and it does not transfer automatically when that context changes.

A marketer who spent ten years building campaigns for food brands knows food marketing. The instincts, the patterns, the feel for what lands—all of it was calibrated to that audience in that domain. Move them to infrastructure finance, and those instincts are starting from zero, whatever their reputation says.

Add a cultural gap, and the problem compounds. A marketeer who built their expertise within one culture has logged every one of those hours on one side of a river. They know that bank. They do not know the other one.

Here is the uncomfortable truth: a mediocre marketer who grew up on the right side of the river will outperform a genius who did not. Not because mediocrity beats genius. Because expertise built in the right context—however modest—beats brilliance built in the wrong one.

Before you hire, ask where the hours were logged. Domain, audience, culture. All three need to point at the same target.

The story behind this—and what happens when organizations skip the question entirely—is in the next layer: The Brief Nobody Could Fill.