When I worked in Berlin from 1999 to 2001, I wrote many articles for Japanese magazines and our company publications. Unfortunately, I left almost all articles on my departures from my ex-company.
Today, I found some of them from my archives of e-mails. I think there some interesting articles in them even they are written on almost 10 yeas ago. Following is the one of those articles. It was written for our publication for EU customers, and for brand builiding in Japanese market. Hope you might find it interesting.
Recently, the value of brand is getting higher and higher both in western and eastern world. Slowdown of the technological development and big consolidations in various industries lead the brand fifth and most important resource of a company.
Basically, we think the brand is the consumers' expectations for a company and its products. Also, branding is the attempt to consistently satisfy, and whenever possible, exceed along all contacts between consumers and the brand. We believe that only from this continuous attempt, a company could get deep relationship with customers' mind.
The contacts to customers mainly consist of following three media.
- Products
- Publicity (advertisements and public relations)
- Business activities (distribution, product development, management)
The key of brand management should be how to manage those activities in most effective way based on the character of products, history of company, and last but most important customers' mindset.
Because of this customers' mindset, the brand management is very tough managerial issue for many global companies. The customers' mindsets for brands are thoroughly different between Europe, US, and Japan. European people tend to see the social side of brand and treat it as symbol of class. US people tend to see the practical side of brand and treat it as a certificate of product. Japanese people are rather similar to European people in the sense that they are interested in the companies' tradition. But compared with Europeans, Japanese people tend to see the communicational side of brand, and treat it as a badge for being a certain group.
Focused on Japanese consumer market, we have to say there are terribly confused situations for branding. As we mentioned above, Japanese consumers are accustomed to treat brand as a badge of group. But now, partially because of the bubble economy, there comes two new types of consumers in the market. One is the consumer who can evaluate the products and the companies so well to be able to select the products fitting to their life culture. The other is the consumer who thinks brand as some trend or movement, and stops to have certain own opinion, simply obey their trendsetter. It's very interesting that both of those groups arise from younger generation.
A company, which tries to develop and maintain their brand in Japanese market, must be aware about the existence of those three consumers' groups. There must be needed different approach for these groups, and we have to put the branding strategy in so smart manner. We suppose it would be the Relation Mixture Strategy. We have to carefully put the mixture of media (products, publicities, and corporate activities) for those groups individually and make up integrated strategy.
As you may aware of it, Japanese market has huge potentials for the companies with good brands. And we believe you can make up your own good brand through this Relation Mixture Strategy.