The export lens on a bigger Australasian problem

Your distributor is not your customer

The short version of this ran in the British New Zealand Business Association newsletter. Here is the larger problem sitting behind it, and an invitation.

To be plain about it: the research we have published looks at Australian and New Zealand businesses generally. It is not about Britain, and it is not about export. What we want to measure next is what a border does to the same problem, because in New Zealand that question is acute. Once the domestic runway runs out, growth has to come from somewhere, and for most of our clients that somewhere is offshore. So we would like the people who advise exporters to help shape the study before we field it.

Help shape the UK studyRead the research behind it
The Silence of the System white paper open on the lead finding: 82 per cent of Australian and New Zealand leaders gather customer feedback, 23 per cent have a clear process to act on it

Five things that do not survive the journey home

Most New Zealand businesses selling physical product into Britain have nobody on the ground there. So in practice the customer is the distributor, or the supermarket buyer, and the person who actually opens the packet is two steps further away again. What reaches you is whatever survived that journey.

  • The end consumer’s voice, filtered through a distributor whose priorities are reasonable and are not yours.
  • Cultural translation, because a complaint can change meaning before you have even read it.
  • Logistics, where a delivery failure arrives on your desk looking exactly like a product failure.
  • Technology expectations, set by whoever your customer bought from last week rather than by you.
  • The broker relationship itself, a business-to-business signal sitting on top of a consumer one, each masking the other.

Service exporters have an easier time of it, because they sell direct from New Zealand and carry their own practices across with them. Physical product is where the distance bites.

None of that is measured yet. It is a hypothesis, built from what exporters and the people who advise them tell us, and it is precisely the part we would like someone to test properly.

What we have measured is the general version, with no border involved at all. Across 123 senior leaders in Australia and New Zealand, 82% gather customer feedback and 23% have a clear process to act on it, and inconsistent action rises from 27% in small firms to 55% once a business passes fifty staff. Think of that as the floor. The export question is what happens to those numbers when you add eighteen thousand kilometres and somebody else’s shelf.

The Jerusalem Tavern on Britton Street, Clerkenwell, its front door and panelled shopfront

The brand travels. The conditions do not.

There is a pub in Clerkenwell that has been open for three hundred years. It is still open, and it is also not the same pub, which turns out to be the useful part. A New Zealand brand landing in Britain has that problem in reverse: the name arrives perfectly intact and almost nothing around it does. Different shelf, different buyer, and expectations set by somebody else entirely.

We wrote about that pub in the context of AI projects and why most of them fail, but the mechanism is the same one. Continuity of the label is not continuity of the thing. What holds a business together across that distance is set out in The Crossing Model™, and the wider programme lives on our research page.

We know the London end, not just the Auckland one

This is not a New Zealand practice reading about Britain from a distance. Most of this team has lived and worked there, on British brands, for British customers.

Liz Pinfold Reed spent twenty years in strategy at MRM McCann, BBDO and Havas across Europe and beyond before founding Good CX. Stu Reed built commercial, pricing and distribution work in London for Heineken UK, Tesco, Johnnie Walker, Stella Artois and Pepsi UK. James Brosnahan worked across the UK and EMEA in SaaS and cloud technology before returning to Auckland. Pasan Thilakasiri took his degrees at the University of Greenwich.

So when we say the conditions do not travel with the brand, it is because we have stood at both ends of the journey and watched it happen.

The UK study does not exist yet

The research so far covers Australia and New Zealand. The export version is a different question, and we do not think we can write it on our own. So if you advise New Zealand businesses selling into Britain, or you run one, tell us what it ought to ask.

Reach out to participate in the research. We will send you the findings when they exist.

Good CX is a member of the British New Zealand Business Association.

British New Zealand Business Association logo, a silver fern beside a Union Jack sail
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