“You get stable client relationships over an extended period of time. This equates to stability of income for us. Of course you like growing but the one thing that businesses hate is uncertainty. You do not want to wake up one day and find that your key client services person has left to join the competition. You don’t want to wake up to find that your key client has gone to your competitor. Here, I can at least be reasonably certain that the client-staff relationships which are the key to our business are relatively stable. I would manage the situation a bit differently if I wasn’t so certain – I would be more interventionist – but it’s not necessary. Everyone is comfortable and we get along – like a family. But the trade off is that it’s not creative.”
“Clients in Japan don’t generally ask for advice from their suppliers, they generally tell their suppliers what to do and tend to be very prescriptive. They tend to go into great detail about how they want something to be done. The client generally wants to have a very detailed input into everything. I think my strength is in coming up with creative solutions for a client’s marketing problems and working out a way to measure them – developing a framework for looking at the problem. But if you have a client that is very prescriptive then, to be brutally frank about it, they tend to ruin the process for themselves. Of course not all clients are like that but in general they tend to be so controlling that it destroys any creative aspect. Creativity involves taking a risk, right? If I do something in a new way, or use a new technique, then there is a risk that it may not work. But clients in this country do not want to take risks, and they have a need for control and detailed input. That can tend to kill the creativity. This is something that I have found frustrating at times.”
“The bottom line on everything with client-service businesses is that the client sets the standard. It’s the level of openness of the client towards new ideas that will determine how many new ideas are put forward. Clients will complain about there being no new ideas but when they are presented with a generally new idea they can’t cope with it. There sometimes tends to be a bit of bitching and moaning about the fact that their ad agency is not creative enough or that their research company doesn’t come up with interesting solutions but in 9 cases out of 10 it’s not that there is a lack of will on the agency side. The issue is that the companies themselves are not demanding it. If a company says something like “I want something highly creative” then the agency will go out and find someone who can do it, or if they can’t another agency will. You can’t provide a service in a vacuum. The buyer is the party that actually sets the scene for everything. So if there is not a demand for creative response then there will not be such a response. I think that the whole structure of the way decisions are made mitigates against creativity.”
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This post is part of a series of excerpts from interviews with foreign executives in Japan, focusing on creativity. Excerpts have been edited for confidentiality.
We’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences in relation to this topic. Please feel free to comment directly on this site or get in touch at chris@a-small-lab.com (Chris Berthelsen)
All content on this IDEAS and DISCUSSION blog is provided by a-small-lab under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License: You can SHARE this content as long as you CITE this work, and TELL US about your work (and send us a copy or link!). See Creative Commons for more detail
“First of all you don’t have those personal relationships so you need get out socialising. You need to do the Japanese thing. You need to go out in the evening and you need to drink. You need to drink and you need to go to karaoke. You need to do whatever it takes to get that personal trust before you even start talking about the business. I think that once that starts you get a nucleus, and the network spreads and they tell their friends that you can be trusted, that you are a person that they can do business with, and then you start to get more contacts. So you have to behave, and obviously you have to act with high integrity and be honest and assume you are under scrutiny all the time.”
“I’ve had to do the five nights a week and use the weekends on the golf. I have managed to build relationships to the point where I’ve been to clients’ children’s weddings. That was the ultimate, to earn that kind of trust and respect. If you can get that, I think that there is huge potential for your company and that person or group of people working here. At the end of the day the Japanese, like most Asians, fear a loss of face and personal embarrassment. They don’t want to take a risk with somebody that they don’t know. Every purchase is a risk and we are talking about high value components in our case and they don’t want to take a risk with someone they don’t know and isn’t going to help out their friend when something goes wrong. They want someone who’s not just going to refer to the contract and say “it’s not specified here”. They want someone who is flexible, and can work outside the contract and fix it for them without their boss knowing.
I think that’s what you have to do here. I’m not saying that we give everything away but we respect the personal relationships and we make sure that the people who put the trust in us don’t regret it later.”
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This post is part of a series of excerpts from interviews with foreign executives in Japan, focusing on creativity. Excerpts have been edited for confidentiality.
We’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences in relation to this topic. Please feel free to comment directly on this site or get in touch at chris@a-small-lab.com (Chris Berthelsen)
All content on this IDEAS and DISCUSSION blog is provided by a-small-lab under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License: You can SHARE this content as long as you CITE this work, and TELL US about your work (and send us a copy or link!). See Creative Commons for more detail
