“So if you had a brochure site, 3 almost identical sites, but targeted at completely different countries, would Google look at that as negatively in any way? Would Google penalise you?
”
In an ideal world, all content is unique. In reality there is no issue having the same content served up to
different audiences, ie different country level URLs.
Here's from the horses mouth..
“Websites that provide content for different regions and in different languages sometimes create content that is the same or similar but available on different URLs. This is generally not a problem as long as the content is for different users in different countries. While we strongly recommend that you provide unique content for each different group of users, we understand that this may not always be possible
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en#3” 
