Hi! This article is part of a new series of guest posts, where interesting people from IFF’s network contribute with their knowledge on various topics. For our first edition, Christine Cuoco writes about going abroad with your company. Christine spent nearly 7 years at Twitter, joining pre-IPO and rising to Global Head of Business Marketing while revenue grew from ~$250M to $3.5B, then led brand and content marketing at LinkedIn as a Senior Director. Today she’s a fractional CMO and advisor to startups on both sides of the Atlantic, with a soft spot for the Italian ecosystem.
Christine here!
Just before summer, I met Virginia and Lorenzo for coffee in Milan, excited to discuss their work with Italian startups. We got into what it takes to scale, and they shared with me the story of a portfolio company growing in Italy and testing a few international markets. As they talked, I wondered whether this startup had built a value proposition clear enough to hold up as they entered new geographies. It’s a question I faced at Twitter and have more recently worked through when advising early-stage startups.
One Company, Many Stories
I spent time with our UK team when I first joined Twitter in 2013 and saw how effectively they helped advertisers understand Twitter’s value. Early on, rather than assuming the US should lead, I borrowed one of their ideas and invited our top US clients to San Francisco for a deep dive into Twitter. Clients got a firsthand look at our tools (remember Vine?) and left even more interested in incorporating Twitter into their media and marketing plans, ultimately contributing to Twitter’s revenue growth.
By early 2016, I’d been at Twitter for three years and was interviewing for the role leading global business marketing. I knew my biggest gap on paper was global experience. But I’d been working with global teammates for three years and had a theory: our teams around the world were doing their own thing, and that had worked well when our markets were nascent, but the more we grew the more it seemed like we needed a cohesive global business identity. I wanted the chance to address this. I got the role, and less than three weeks later was on a plane to Singapore for the APAC Sales leadership offsite.
After speaking with my peers across our GTM teams, I confirmed that they wanted a shared understanding of who we were, the value we created for customers, and the problems we were uniquely positioned to solve. They needed a common foundation they could build from while retaining the freedom to make our story resonate in their own markets.
Also, our product suite was growing to meet our largest customers’ needs, but most of what we built started as a one-off request to solve a specific customer’s problem, and we assumed it would appeal broadly. It often didn’t. Advertisers could no longer tell which products solved which problems, and our own teams struggled to sell the right one. We needed to simplify the portfolio and explain what each product solved, in customers’ own language.
The problem was that we’d spent years letting every country define and explain Twitter in its own way. Early on, this made sense because we had smart teams who knew their local audiences well. It worked until customers across markets started comparing notes. A global company with offices in Tokyo, Mexico City, and Milano would hear different versions of our value proposition, and that inconsistency was starting to show up as hesitation in deals. It also meant we couldn’t tell one clear story in other rooms that mattered: with the press, with investors, or on stages like Cannes Lions and CES.
Building One Global Value Proposition
In mid 2016, Twitter was in a precarious position with stalling user and revenue growth. We didn’t have the resources to focus on what seemed like a storytelling problem that wasn’t going to move the numbers immediately.
About a year later, once Twitter’s business had stabilized, I joined a cross-functional team working across New York, London, and Tokyo to define who we were and what we stood for. We intentionally spent time in these three cities because we believed that if we wanted to build something that resonated and drove real growth, we couldn’t start with an exclusively American point of view and ask everyone else to adapt.
Working with our Product team, we found that despite the diversity of industries, company sizes, and markets we served, customers consistently came to Twitter for one of two reasons, or “Jobs to Be Done”: to launch something new or to connect with what was happening. As we tested these “jobs” via customer interviews and sales conversations, advertisers could clearly see how Twitter fit into their marketing plans.
Alongside this work, we developed our global business value proposition. Your most valuable audience is most receptive when they’re on Twitter, so every marketing strategy should start with them. We knew we couldn’t compete with Google and Facebook on scale, but our research showed that people gave Twitter more of their attention when they were on our platform.
#StartWithThem became our rallying cry for advertisers: we began naming the people who made up our audience: the trend starters, culture seekers, day ones, game changers. The clearer, more consistent story we told advertisers played a role in Twitter’s revenue growth from $2.1 billion in 2017 to nearly $3 billion by 2019, its strongest year in the company’s history to that point.
Same Strategy, Local Execution: France and Dubai
Every market launched from the same strategic foundation, and the teams closest to customers decided how to make it matter. My country marketing teams, along with sales, identified the stories that would resonate locally, validated our research with local data, and developed ideas that felt culturally relevant.
In France, many marketers and advertisers weren’t active Twitter users themselves, so the French team knew they couldn’t simply explain the platform’s value. They needed clients to experience it. Working from our office near the Paris Opera, they transformed an entire floor into #ExpoTwitter, a hands-on exhibition that brought some of the year’s most influential Tweets into the physical world. Each installation showed how Twitter shaped culture, allowing visitors to experience the platform as a living record of the conversations influencing millions of people.
The exhibition drew clients, agencies, journalists, and the broader marketing community. People began asking to return with colleagues who had missed the opening, and conversations with our sales team were reignited.
Standing in the middle of #ExpoTwitter at our December launch event, I realized we never could have created something like this in NYC or San Francisco. There was an intimacy that only a smaller market could create. The experience reflected a French sentiment while our global value proposition remained intact.
Dubai delivered a very different expression of the same value proposition through #ElevatorTweets. The team turned an elevator in a Dubai media building, housing agencies that serve clients across the Gulf, into a live feed of what people were saying, tailored floor by floor. If you stepped into the elevator as an agency executive who worked on a particular floor, the walls filled with the day’s conversation about your clients and their competitors in Saudi Arabia. If you hit the floor belonging to a CPG brand, you’d see that conversation instead. The idea originated from the same insight as #ExpoTwitter - bring the conversation into the room, physically - but the execution answered a local problem: agencies in the UAE needed a window into a market next door that they didn’t have time to track themselves. Every market started from the same value proposition, and every execution felt local.
Learning from Clay: Building Identity Early
Recently, I caught up with Davide Grieco, a Torinese who leads Growth at Clay, a fast-growing startup that helps companies build systems to grow revenue. I wanted to understand how Clay is approaching its European expansion after opening an office in London earlier this year. He started our conversation talking about credibility, not growth metrics. “You can’t rely on playbooks,” he said. Hearing a Growth leader say this caught my attention because many growth careers are built on finding a playbook and scaling it.
After joining Clay, Davide realized that very little from his previous roles transferred directly. So before driving demand across Europe, Clay focused on earning trust and credibility. The company invested in local data providers, localized content, and European customer stories to ensure buyers had a strong first experience. As Davide put it, the cost of reacquiring someone after a poor first experience is far greater than getting that experience right from the start.
Clay Clubs, created by customers, illustrate his point too. People experimenting with the product started gathering in their own cities to share workflows and solve problems together. Clay recognized what was happening and invested in those communities, providing support and resources while keeping the energy customer-led.
Most interesting to me, Clay appears to be asking the hard questions about identity and value proposition earlier than many companies do. So many companies don’t ask until customers start comparing notes and the story falls apart, which is what happened to us. Clay is asking before the cracks show, and that should help them gain and keep momentum as they grow.
I understand why founders postpone this work because we did this too. When there are a million balls in the air, near-term metrics to hit, and emergencies to address, sharpening your identity feels optional. The problem is that the larger you become, the harder this work gets. Customers who don’t understand exactly why or when to choose you start to turn their attention elsewhere rather than build you into their plans. That’s part of what made Twitter’s France and Dubai work so important; it gave people a reason to pull us back in.
Every interaction customers have with your company - the product they use, the conversations they have with your team, the events they attend, the stories they hear from other customers, and the communities they become part of - shapes how your company is understood.
That’s why defining your identity is one of the most impactful things founders can do. It becomes the foundation for product decisions, customer conversations, and expansion into new markets.
You can begin this work in a simple way by bringing your cross-functional leaders together and discussing these questions:
What is our purpose, and who do we serve?
What problems are we uniquely positioned to solve for our audience? (In Jobs to Be Done language, what “jobs” do our customers “hire” us to do?)
How do we communicate the value we provide in a way that a customer could repeat back to us in their own words?
As we enter new markets - whether scaling from Torino and Milano to Napoli and Lecce, or from Italy to Spain and Argentina - how will we tell our story so that we’re communicating what is absolutely true about the value we provide while honoring local nuance and culture?
Over the past few years, I’ve met Italian founders building companies with ambitions far beyond their home markets. They’re solving important problems across a range of industries, and they will face the same challenge every company encounters as it grows: How do you remain unmistakably yourself while becoming relevant somewhere new? Start with the questions above.
That’s exactly what I’d sit down and work through with the founder I learned about in Milan, helping their team get to the value proposition that feels unmistakably true to them. A company’s identity should remain consistent. How it earns trust should flex, and that work belongs to the people closest to your customer.
