People in the West just don’t understand that and if you want to do business here you have to understand. It’s necessary to understand how people are.
(C: And that’s more important here in Japan than in other countries you have worked in?) Yeah totally. Of course wherever you are you say ‘the Sydney person likes this’ or ‘the Melbourne person likes that’ but it’s really not so different. Japan, however, is an incredibly specific market. Of course I can only speak for our industry but I’m sure for every other industry it’s incredibly specific too. There are definite ways of doing things and if I want to break rules I can…..but I have to know them first.
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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
Another thing that I tell people when they are talking to me about bringing their products over here and saying things like “everyone says it’ll really do well in Japan” is that Japanese people aren’t stupid. They’re not stupid consumers, they are actually really intelligent consumers. People who have never even been to Japan before say these things. If you think that your brand is good enough to bring over here, tell me why. It’s incredibly important for you to know the marketplace before you get carried away. Come and visit, check it out, see if it really is the place for you because Tokyo is a tough city to live in. It’s expensive, it’s crowded, is that really what you want?
That’s some more advice that I always give people when they say “ah I’d love to live in Japan” – do you REALLY? Or do you just want to live in Memoirs of a Geisha? Do you want a Western interpretation of what Japan is?…because it’s really not like that.
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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
“(CB: And that new product development function, where is that located in Japan? Who takes on that role?)
Advertising agencies don’t take on that role here, it’s usually companies. This is one of the issues that we find. A lot of Japanese companies do innovate but they do it incrementally. For example they will take a product and next week it will be in green paper and the week after that it might be in washi (Japanese-style paper)..the week after that they might change the design. It’s just incremental. They will never think something like ‘oh let’s put this in a see-through plastic container…or let’s not put it in a container at all let’s hand it over to consumers and get them to take it home in their own furoshiki to make it more eco…’ things that might be a big jump. Innovation here is incremental as opposed to reinventing the wheel. And the other thing is that in Japan it is almost never done with consumer insight. It’s almost like a bunch of scientists in an office in their white coats who walk around saying “ooh must come up with an idea, here’s a wacky idea, let’s see if it resonates”.
Consumers will never tell you what they want so never ask them directly but what you can do is study them, talk to them, and see what their issues are. And then using those insights you can then go away and come up with some real ideas. I think that that is the big problem here, they don’t do that. (CB: Do you have any idea why it is this way?). No I don’t, not really…..Companies here like to innovate because it is such an innovative market. They have to innovate incrementally because it’s so competitive that you need to have a product on the shelf in two weeks. It’s all about how you produce, not picking a product that will resonate and sit on the shelf for not just one year but perhaps even five years.”
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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
