I don't think so because they're not talking about a marketing gimmick, but rather talking about an actual business strategy - I just found it distracting. They could have at least put it in quotation marks if they really meant to include it in their writing for some reason. I've withdrawn the criticism.
I think you didn't get the point blazespin wrote: they said (or I read it as them saying) that since there's no way to get a "test market" in the U.S., rather than blow their "one shot" on the launch version which they can't iterate on before the whole U.S. market sees it, they use a proxy for a U.S. test market: they use a smaller foreign market. They don't care about "burning" those users or losing their "one chance" to launch, since those markets are small or at any rate a smaller launch. They then take their learnings, incorporate them and launch in the U.S. with a first version that is markedly better.
so it's product development. the point isn't about marketing at all. (Except in a broad sense.) it's a product development trick, like a closed beta. I don't think you would call a closed beta "marketing" exactly.
That was the point I got from it. My point was that it sounds a lot like what's done by the people I know who work in marketing at big companies. Marketing is not just (or even mostly) advertising.
