Target had every reason to expect its Canadian expansion would work. A proven retail formula, a huge existing customer base familiar with the brand from cross-border shopping trips, a market that looked, from the outside, like an easy extension of an already-successful business.
It failed anyway — inventory shortages, prices that didn't match Canadian shoppers' expectations, a rollout that misjudged how different "adjacent" markets can actually be underneath their surface similarity.1
Evers uses Target Canada as a structural counterexample to Swift's own successful pop crossover — a case where adjacent-market expansion, done carelessly, produced the opposite outcome from the one this book spends most of its pages celebrating.
The comparison matters because it undercuts a too-simple reading of the earlier success. Adjacent-market expansion isn't automatically safer than a completely new venture just because the markets look similar on paper. Target and Canada looked adjacent. The execution still failed, because "adjacent" doesn't mean "identical," and the specific differences that actually mattered — local shopping habits, supply chain realities, price sensitivity — were structural, not cosmetic.
You're expanding into a market that looks close enough to your existing strength that the move feels almost risk-free.
The Target Canada case argues against treating apparent adjacency as sufficient reassurance on its own. Before assuming an adjacent market will simply absorb your existing formula, it's worth explicitly auditing exactly which specific structural differences — not just surface-level cultural similarity — could break the formula's actual mechanics, the way Canadian shoppers' different price expectations and Target's own supply chain assumptions broke an otherwise reasonable-looking expansion.
It's worth naming the actual failure points rather than leaving "it didn't work" as a vague summary.
Distribution systems built for the US market didn't translate cleanly north of the border, leading to chronic inventory shortages — shelves that looked understocked compared to the polished, well-supplied stores Canadian shoppers had come to expect from cross-border trips to US locations. Pricing, meanwhile, didn't match what Canadian consumers considered fair for the same goods, undermining the exact value proposition that had made Target attractive to them in the first place when shopping in the US.
Neither failure was about Canadians disliking Target as a brand. Both were about operational assumptions, built for one market, quietly failing to hold in a market that looked similar enough on the surface to not trigger the scrutiny those assumptions actually needed.
Target Canada's failure is well-documented business history independent of this book. The tension: the book uses it as a brief cautionary aside rather than a fully worked comparison, so the exact structural parallel to Swift's own successful crossover — what made her expansion succeed where Target's failed — isn't spelled out in detail, leaving the comparison more suggestive than fully proven.
The book includes this case mostly as a hedge — evidence it's aware adjacent expansion doesn't always work — without fully integrating the comparison into its main argument about why Swift's own expansion succeeded. It reads more as an acknowledgment of risk than a rigorous test of the adjacent-expansion framework itself.
Adjacent Market Expansion: Nike vs. Reebok — this case is the failure-mode counterweight to that page's success story. Read together, they suggest adjacency alone doesn't determine outcome — execution against the market's actual, specific mechanics does, and either success or failure is possible within the same broad "adjacent expansion" strategy.
Sharpest implication: looking similar to a market you already understand is not the same as actually understanding it — surface-level adjacency can hide structural differences serious enough to break an otherwise reasonable expansion.
Generative questions:
Target eventually exited the Canadian market entirely, closing all locations within a few years of launch — a rare case of a major, well-resourced retailer fully retreating from an expansion rather than correcting course and continuing.
That's worth remembering as the actual ceiling of what a mismatched adjacent expansion can cost: not a disappointing quarter, not a slow course-correction, but a complete, expensive withdrawal — years of investment, real estate commitments, and inventory losses, all written off entirely rather than salvaged through adjustment. Most cautionary tales in business writing describe a company that struggled and recovered. This one describes a company that simply left.
It's worth asking directly why a company with Target's scale, sophistication, and presumably significant market-research budget still missed failures this fundamental. The likely answer connects back to the adjacency trap this page's central argument describes: a market that looks similar enough on the surface doesn't trigger the same level of scrutiny a genuinely unfamiliar market would. Nobody at Target was launching into Canada with the same wary, exhaustive due diligence they'd apply to an entirely foreign market with an unfamiliar culture and language — because Canada didn't feel foreign enough to warrant that level of caution. That misplaced confidence, produced by surface-level familiarity, is arguably the real root cause, more fundamental than any single pricing or supply-chain mistake.