Strategies that lean heavily on conversion and bottom-funnel tactics can work in many markets. In the United States, they routinely fail.
The reason is not product quality or execution. It is a misunderstanding of how American consumers make decisions. The US market rewards familiarity, loyalty, and trust more than efficiency or novelty. Brands that reuse their home-market playbooks without earning legitimacy first pay for it through higher acquisition costs and stalled growth.
American Brand Loyalty Is Deep and Valuable
American consumers show strong attachment to brands they trust, even under economic pressure.
McKinsey’s US consumer sentiment research shows that brand trust and familiarity remain primary drivers of repeat purchasing in the United States, even as inflation rises. McKinsey notes that many US consumers cut back overall spending before they abandon brands they already know. Loyalty acts as a stabilizer, not a luxury.
This matters because familiarity changes conversion economics. When trust exists, conversion becomes cheaper. When it does not, performance spend has to work harder to build demand that should already be there.
American Brand Loyalty Exceeds Global Norms
Americans sit above global averages when it comes to loyalty and willingness to pay.
Industry research shows that more than 75 percent of US consumers are willing to pay more to shop with brands they feel loyal to, compared with roughly 63 percent of consumers globally. That gap matters. It means foreign brands entering the US often underestimate how much pricing power incumbents hold once trust is established.
Playbooks that assume high elasticity and fast switching break under those conditions. In the US, loyalty has to be earned before it can be monetized.
Brand Relationships Are Harder to Earn and Stronger Once Formed
Brand relationships in the US are not casual.
Recent brand loyalty studies show that a majority of US consumers can name multiple brands they feel loyal to, and those relationships persist over time. Loyalty here is not transactional. It is emotional and habitual. That depth creates a structural advantage for incumbents and a real barrier for newcomers who have not earned trust.
Once a brand earns a place at the table, it is difficult to dislodge. Until then, unfamiliar brands face skepticism, not neutrality.
Cultural Differences Change the Math
These dynamics are not universal.
Comparative research shows that Western consumers, including Americans, are more likely to maintain long-term brand relationships once trust and familiarity are built. In contrast, some Asian markets show higher experimentation and switching outside of luxury or status-driven categories.
Foreign brands that succeed in markets where novelty and price do more of the work often assume the same logic applies in the US. It does not.
Failure Cost: Misallocated Spend and Rising Acquisition Costs
Brands that favor performance spend without prior brand investment see rising CAC, increasing reliance on promotions, and diminishing returns as performance channels are forced to create demand they cannot generate.
Real-world examples help illustrate this.
Peloton treated pandemic demand as durable and leaned on performance marketing to carry growth forward. When cultural relevance and trust faded, paid channels were left doing the impossible: rebuilding demand while closing sales. The result was predictable. Marketing spend was slashed, discounting increased, and layoffs followed. Acquisition costs rose not because ads stopped working, but because brand momentum disappeared. Performance marketing was asked to compensate for a demand problem it was never designed to solve.
WeWork scaled growth and performance spend faster than it built credibility. When trust in leadership and governance broke, demand evaporated and valuation collapsed from $47B to a fraction of that. No amount of acquisition spend could compensate for the legitimacy deficit.
Reusing a home-market playbook in the US without first establishing credibility produces a familiar pattern. Conversion spend comes too early, familiarity stays low, CAC climbs, and promotions become necessary to close sales. That is not optimization. It is reactive spending, with performance channels asked to manufacture demand they were never meant to create.
Why PR Matters
PR is what builds credibility before conversion.
Earned media, thought leadership, third-party validation, and consistent narrative presence give unfamiliar brands the mental availability required to enter consideration sets. Once consumers recognize and trust a brand, performance marketing can convert that demand at lower cost.
Without that foundation, performance marketing becomes a cruder, more expensive way to chase demand that should have been built upstream.
Bottom Line
Foreign brands do not fail in the US because of price, quality, or product-market fit alone. They fail because they apply strategies built for markets where consumers convert more readily without first needing brand trust.
Foreign playbooks that work elsewhere routinely break in the US because Americans:
- Stay loyal to preferred brands
- Are willing to pay premiums for them
- Form deeper, longer-lasting relationships with brands they trust
To succeed, US market entry strategies must build familiarity and legitimacy first, not treat brand as optional.