In 1993, McDonald’s opened its first McCafé in Melbourne.
It wasn’t a global launch, it was a trial. A bet placed in a market sophisticated enough to give a meaningful signal, but contained enough that getting it wrong wouldn’t be catastrophic. And it worked.
Australia subsequently became something of a testing ground for McDonald’s, a place to try new concepts before rolling them out more broadly.
I actually know that playbook first-hand, although in my case it was office furniture..
In the early 2000s I had been posted to Australia, and was working on office furniture product development, managing an Engineering dept. Our team set out to overhaul a legacy portfolio, develop new solutions, and put them into production locally.
The industry was going through a pretty fundamental change at the time: moving away from the enclosed cubicle, towards open desking systems.
Australia was where we piloted it. Not because it was the biggest market, but because it was a useful one. It was sophisticated enough to give us a genuine read on whether the idea worked, but contained enough that if it didn’t, the damage was limited.
Once a concept proved itself, it moved on: tooled up for mass production in China, then rolled out across the larger APAC markets.
Why Australia?
There is something quite useful about Australia as a test market.
It’s a mature, sophisticated market. Consumer and business behaviour is broadly comparable with other developed Western markets, so the results actually tell you something.
But it’s also relatively contained. You can test, learn, adapt (and occasionally fail), without the consequences you’d face launching simultaneously across a much larger region.
And geographically, it sits neatly within the broader APAC story. That’s useful when your next step might be Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, China or India.
The interesting bit
It’s not a coincidence that two completely unrelated industries arrived at a similar approach.
McDonald’s used Australia to test coffee and other concepts. The office furniture industry used it to test a fundamental change in how people worked. The products were completely different, the thinking wasn’t.
Prove the idea before you scale it.
And that brings me to the question I think companies entering APAC should ask. It’s tempting to start with:
Where should we manufacture?
Where should we establish our regional office?
Who should distribute the product?
Those are important questions. But perhaps there’s an earlier one: Where should we prove that the idea actually works?
That might be Australia, it might be India, It might be somewhere else entirely.
But finding your own “Australia”, the market where you can test, learn and refine before committing serious capital, can be a very smart first step.
McCafé answered that question in Melbourne in 1993. My industry at the time answered it a decade later, also in Australia, but with desks instead of coffee cups. The specifics change, the strategy doesn’t.
