I spent the last week and a bit in South Korea. The late fall colors were still hanging on in the parks. Busan’s coast was wild and beautiful. Gyeongju was gorgeous and deeply historical. Seoul gave us a sudden snowstorm that turned the city white overnight. It was exciting, beautiful, intriguing, unexpected. It was also one of the hardest places I’ve ever tried to navigate.
Most of us carry an assumption into any new place. For the last decade+, I’ve opened Google Maps and the world has snapped into place. Streets align. Transit options appear. You can get to a café or a train station or a meeting without much thought. In South Korea, that assumption breaks. Google Maps barely functions. It can show a general area, but most directions are unavailable. Public transit routes don’t load. Walking paths don’t show up. Even simple navigation becomes guesswork.
There is a reason for this, of course. South Korea has strict rules about exporting high-resolution mapping data. Google’s servers are outside the country, and Google does not operate a fully local mapping stack. So Google Maps can’t use the detailed base map that Korean navigation requires. The result is a global platform that becomes almost unusable in one of the most connected, technologically advanced countries in the world.
Koreans do not necessarily feel this friction, because they aren’t relying on Google Maps. They use Naver Map, Kakao Map, and a wide ecosystem of local tools and social media. Each of these platforms also has its own specialization. Kakao excels at navigation and transit routing. Naver shines for detailed listings, menus, and reviews. Instagram, blogs, and social platforms play a major role in discovering cafés, restaurants, and experiences. If something new opens, it shows up in someone’s feed long before it shows up in a formal database. Findability is distributed across channels. It is also deeply visual and social.
For someone conditioned to Google’s global dominance, it is a jolt. In South Korea, you learn quickly that the local ecosystem governs discovery. If you do not adopt the local apps, you are effectively invisible to the infrastructure that everyone else relies on.
This became a reminder of something I come back to often in marketing work. Findability depends on the market. There is no universal rule for how people look for a solution, a product, a café, or a vendor. There are only habits, contexts, and the channels that shape those habits. If your audience is looking for something and you can help them, you need to be visible in the places they look. Is that ChatGPT, or is it still Google, or is it Reddit? Nothing about this is new. But we often forget it.
In B2B marketing, we tend to assume our buyers start with one or two platforms. As a general rule, those are Google search or LinkedIn. In some sectors, there is a stop at Gartner or G2. Maybe a vendor directory. But real buyer behavior is not that linear. Buyers live in many places. They switch contexts. They follow creators. They browse forums. They ask peers. They scroll Instagram or TikTok. They see something on Facebook while decompressing after putting their kids to bed. The line between personal and professional attention is blurred.
My friend and brilliant Seattle marketer Eoin Hudson once made a point that stuck with me. Even if you think Facebook is past its prime, some B2B buyers relax there at night. You can still reach them there. And because most marketers write it off, the attention is cheaper and less competitive. That dynamic plays out across many channels. The channels you least expect can be the channels where your audience is most reachable, simply because fewer people are trying to reach them there.
Findability is not about channel preference. It is about aligning with the actual behavior of the people you serve. That behavior is shaped by geography, culture, age, role, incentives, and the invisible systems around them. South Korea is a clear example. The country chose to prioritize data sovereignty and local control of critical infrastructure. That decision shaped how navigation works. It also shaped how cafés and small businesses build their visibility. If you want to find a new bakery in Seoul, you are more likely to stumble across it through Instagram or Naver than any global search engine.
This is not so different from B2B. Every segment has its own ecosystem of trust. Senior IT policymakers in Canberra do not behave like millennial homebuyers in Chicago. Engineers evaluating observability tools do not behave like HR leaders researching employee recognition platforms. And none of them behave like Gen Z buyers of jewelry on Instagram. Each group has its own ways of discovering information and evaluating solutions. The marketer’s job is to map that terrain.
A useful question for any marketer or founder is simple. If your ideal buyer woke up tomorrow thinking about the problem you solve, where is the first place they would look? How about the second place? The third? Where do they relax? Who do they listen to? What channels shape their day? What platforms are part of their routine?
Once you understand this, you start to see the gaps. You notice where competitors are absent. You see where you can show up with less resistance. You also see where you are investing attention simply because it is familiar to you, not because it serves the audience.
Findability is contextual. It changes by country, by city, by profession, by age group, by incentives, by mood, and by time of day. It is messy and human. If people are looking for something you can help them with, you owe it to them to be present in the channels they trust.
South Korea made this visible for me because the contrast was so sharp. One of the most advanced digital societies in the world made my default tools unusable. It forced me into the local ecosystem, and in so doing, it reminded me of a simple truth. Your assumptions about how people navigate the world do not matter. Their habits do.
The work of marketing is to understand those habits and meet people where they already are.