Market research in Japan: it's one of the world's biggest consumer markets, but when it comes to market research, Japan is way behind. Now two companies are changing all that for good - Special Advertising Section

Japan, Inc., August, 2003 by Benjamin Freedland

"Japan is one of the most cluttered marketing environments in the world, and the eyes are the gateways to breaking into it," says Oshima. "The four key words for advertisers are 'attention-grabbing, memorable, meaningful and motivating.' Until now, the 'attention-grabbing' part of that has been hard to quantify, but eye-tracking allows you to assess it."

People are asked to volunteer, and their eyes are calibrated for the machine They are then asked to look at the screen, on which anything can be projected--anything from an advertisement to a mock-up shelf in a shop. A camera records every motion of their eye, and this movement is then superimposed on the projection. Thus JMI is able to record exactly where, and in what order, people looked at the image. Coca-Cola was once a client when it wanted to find out more about product positioning in vending machines.

"In the case of a shelf, eye-tracking gives clients vital information on the importance of positioning and the attention-grabbing ability of packaging," says Oshima. "A major food brand decided to change its trademark purple packaging to a crisp white design. The company went through the usual route of bringing in focus groups to do qualitative tests and they absolutely loved it - it was a winning design. When the eye-tracking test was conducted, however, the crisp white packaging that everyone liked so much was completely lost against the competitors. It became recessive on the shelf."

Eye tracking also gives advertisers vast amounts of information about the effectiveness of their campaigns. Eye-tracking can explain, for example, why people could look at a poster or print ad for several seconds but come away not recalling the brand. "With normal research, you would scratch your head and wonder why. Eye-tracking would show that it was because two-thirds of people did not even look at the corner of the advertisement where the brand name was written," says Oshima. "We are approached by global companies who are sick of hearing that Japan is a difficult market to crack. Conducting one of our eye-tracking tests will only really add about 10 percent to the overall cost of market research, but its results could end up saving millions of dollars in wasted advertising. IBM are big adopters of this--every print ad they produce gets tracked."

But eye-tracking is only one of a number of techniques. Intage, meanwhile, has begun to use its history of innovation to even greater advantage. As a demonstration of its confidence, in 1999 Intage started operations in Shanghai. "A modern consumer society is developing there with remarkable speed, and we expect marketing research needs to increase," says Taori. "Our current investments in the businesses are expected to produce large returns. This is especially true of our expertise developed in targeting the highly demanding Japanese consumer."

A prime example of one of Intage's new innovations is its ability to track the effectiveness of TV advertising. As Taori explains: "As the company is evolving into an Intelligence Provider, we will expand operations to pure intelligence provision by leveraging our strengths in new business domains. The recession is forcing companies to create ever more accurate management strategies. We have a market survey system that can measure advertising effectiveness through the dual analytical tools of television ratings and product purchasing data. By integrating SSJ's business with our existing businesses, we can create new intelligence from the seamless integration of three sources of consumer, retail and advertising data."