Sending the right signals: in the Japanese consumer market, without the right marketing, even the most brilliant products and original ideas can fall flat on their face. J@pan Inc spoke to Kiyofumi Someya about marketing in Japan, and specifically of the hurdles facing small-medium enterprises

Japan, Inc., May-June, 2008 by Joseph Greenberg

Marketing in Japan

Last summer, a very strange product stood in the fridges of convenience stores across Japan for a period of about one month--cucumber Pepsi. Bloggers and media picked up on this curious item and it quickly emerged in headlines around the globe.

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Why did Pepsi pick Japan for this experiment? In many ways the convenience store is a microcosm of the Japanese market. A remarkable number of new products are tested on the shelves. Rather than manage one brand and one line,Japanese marketers tend to fire out new products at a much higher rate than in other commercial cultures. It is then up to the consumer's choices whether they pick up enough sales to survive: if they do they stay, if not they are removed.

Much is made of this when it comes to foreigners setting up in Japan but domestic companies find the process equally harsh and confusing. For new businesses and SMEs one of the biggest challenges can be that because of the volatile nature of the market, and the short margins allowed by stores to wholesalers to test out their products, expensive and all encompassing advertising campaigns are necessary if the product is to become popular. For those unable to afford the major ad agencies, Dentsu or Hakuhodo, becoming well known can be an unexpected and painful hurdle to get over. This can be a source of frustration for inventors or entrepreneurs with a product they see as a definite winner.

There are however some smaller agencies and the evolution of marketing techniques and know-how is definitely out there, if you know where to look.

Getting the message out

Back in 2001, an inventor in Nagoya thought he had struck gold. He had designed and successfully patented a thin strip of copper that when placed in the battery case of a mobile phone, significantly boosts reception. Although the major cell phone carriers in Japan do a relatively good job of providing decent signals out in the countryside, in basements and on smaller islands (of which Japan has many) there are still many users frustrated by poor signal. Furthermore, as many of us know, some devices just don't seem to get decent reception. Critically, it is signal that also impacts on battery life--when the phone searches for an emitter it uses battery power, the harder it searches, the more battery life it takes. Therefore using the copper strip effectively increases battery life by 1.5 times as well as improving reception.

However, largely due to the marketing difficulties outlined above, the inventor couldn't get his product off the ground commercially. He had being trying to sell it in convenience stores and tried various different ideas. However, after three years he gave up and decided to seek professional help; it turned out to be one of the best moves he ever made.

Without the level of funding necessary to approach one of the larger agencies, the inventor found a smaller outfit based out of Saitama called Kakudai. The president of the company, Kiyofumi Someya, was impressed by the technology and quickly figured out some of the problems. He told us "Nobody would have wanted to buy it marketed as it was. Even the name was in appropriate." The name given was Fukkat-su-kun, meaning "reviver" but, as Someya explained, the key selling point of the product was not that it revived signal or battery power--it boosted the former and prolonged the latter. Therefore, it didn't make sense to market it as something that revives battery particularly when people can easily buy portable chargers. The value to the consumer is that no matter how good their model of phone, for a small price they can greatly improve its efficiency.

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The name was one of the first things that Someya changed. Palying on a colloquial expression for "extremely" (bari bari) he settled on Bari5 (pronounced barigo) and created a logo that instantly tells the consumer the product is connected to signal. Normal signal on Japanese phones is represented by three bars and bari-san (bari3) is a popular term meaning full strength reception, bari5 then is instantly suggestive of very good reception, hence the five bar logo too. Beyond cleaning up these basic errors, Someya implemented a ferocious marketing strategy.

"My goal was to associate the product with anything that was hot--anything that was cool." For example, he bouth and decorated a 'Drift Car' (very much in vogue with Japanese youth) with the logo that he drove around the trendy districts of Harajuku and Omotesando, parking it in various locations with the bonnet up drawing the eyes of the passers by from the billboards above. Additionally, he got onto the big TV screens on the Shibuya crossing above Statbucks and for total exposure, even laundhed and advertising campaign on the handholds dangling down on trains on the subway Another interesting change was to double the price from [yen]2000 range. It is still good value and of course, advarts need to be paid for. But rather than charge my clients astronaomical prices, I factored the extra costs into the strategy."