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Shibuya’s Butlers Cafe makes CNN

Financial markets are closed today, so here’s the latest mass-media fluff piece to be done on Japan:

CNN is reporting on the “Butlers Cafe” staffed with western men in Shibuya with the sub-headline, “Japan’s women go ga-ga over a cafe filled with Western servers.” ¹

The two customers definitely could have played along and seemed a bit happier to be there.

¹ The headline itself is actually, “White man cafe in Tokyo.”

Butlers Cafe website

Apple’s iPhone goes on sale in Japan right now - Softbank makes a solid opening marketing move

It’s 7AM, and that means Apple’s 3G iPhone is going on sale at Softbank’s Omotesando location right now - but not until noon elsewhere. Am I posting from there? Heck no - I already have a phone, an iPod and two pockets, so I’m waiting for all the bugs to be worked out and for AU to start selling the thing.

There has been quite a bit of hoopla and discussion concerning the sale of the iPhone in Japan, and I think Softbank has made a brilliant marketing/PR decision in putting the iPhone on sale in Omotesando five hours before anywhere else in the country. First, this meant that the first iPhone bought in Japan would be bought in Omotesando, which is fashion culture center for the younger generation (or, perhaps better put, lies between Shibuya and Harajuku, the fashion culture centers for the younger generation). Read more

News Corp moving into Japan’s online advertising market

According to Tuesday’s Nikkei, News Corp has plans to enter Japan’s lucrative online advertising market. Back in April 2007, we reported that Dentsu claimed Japan’s online advertising market would experience “growth into a 750 billion yen plus market by 2011.”

Was Dentsu lowballing those numbers? In 2007, the online advertising market in Japan totaled about 600 billion yen. This was about a 24% increase over 2006. Dentsu’s report projected the market at 453.4 billion yen in 2007, with a jump over 600 billion yen happening in 2009.

News Corp’s operations will differ significantly from those of Google or Yahoo primarily in that they will not involve search-based ads. Rather, News Corp is looking to set up networks of sites that target similar demographics, and sell ads on behalf of webmasters who happen not to have a sales force at their disposal.

News Corp is looking to draw 10 billion yen annually in ad revenue from Japan within five years time.

DoCoMo has a new logo; increased market share to follow?

We’ve touched before on the struggles facing DoCoMo, Japan’s mobile market leader. As the introduction of number portability and aggressive advertising and pricing campaigns from rivals AU and Softbank have driven DoCoMo’s market share under 50% for the first time since late 1998, the firm is at a crossroads. It has attempted to reassert itself as an innovator by launching a line of phones that emit scents, and is pushing the same kind of family discount packages on its website that Softbank has leveraged into market share expansion over the past year. Read more

Matsushita to rename itself as Panasonic from October

Two days ago, when writing the headline for our “Google, YouTube to team up with Matsushita to deliver internet-enabled flat screen televisions” article, I wondered if it might not be better to refer to Matsushita as Panasonic, since most folks know their televisions by that brand name. In Japan, the parent company’s name tends to get used more often, so the decision was made to stick with that naming convention.

It’s too bad the news couldn’t have come a few days later, as the confusion is about to disappear. It was announced today that Matsushita will be officially renaming itself as Panasonic from October 1 of this year.

Matsushita Chairman Kunio Nakamura announced that the company has taken this step in order to remain globally competitive with rival electronics firms, and that the change of name would cost the company about 30 billion yen. Matsushita also announced plans to drop the domestic brand National from its lineup.

I guess some of that 30 billion yen will be spent on sending someone to my house to file down the brand name on the microwave and replace it with a new one.

W. David Marx on the meaning of trends in the Japanese marketplace

Anyone at all interested in marketing and Japan should already be aware of the Clast blog, which W. David Marx writes for the Diamond Agency. A piece published on December 12 concerning trends and trend identification in the Japanese marketplace is a must-read.

One point Marx makes concerning the recent phenomenon of keitaishousetsu, or novels meant to be displayed on mobile phones, is that the trend “says more about the constancy of promotional power in Japan than the innovation in content creation.”

I think this is spot on; if these novels were actually good, we’d be seeing them at the bookstores in paperback as well. The trend here has been promoted, and promoted in the right demographic. The medium and the story are not innovative in the least, just as the change to color film from black and white did not mean that writers wrote better or worse scripts for movies.

At any rate, the article is waiting to be read…

Dentsu’s top ten 2007 hit products in Japan

Dentsu has released their list of Japan’s top ten hit products in 2007 (actually it lists their top 20), and it’s worth a look. I thought from a marketing point of view, the resurrection of Billy Blanks’ old workout videos from fifteen years ago as a new product in Japan couldn’t be beat. Let’s see how Blanks did…

1. Touch pen portable games
2. Innovative remote-controlled TV games
3. Billy’s Boot Camp
4. Digital cameras
5. Widescreen flat-panel televisions
6. 1-SEG compatible devices
7. Japanese movies
8. Cup soup
9. Electronic money
10. Eco goods

Personally, I can’t say I’ve bought any of these other than “Cup soup” over the last year, though I rented “Japanese movies” and I have a train pass which might count as “Electronic money” and I bought a new digital camera and widescreen TV in 2006.

What’s amazing is that #1 and #2 both relate to Nintendo - #1 refers to the DS and #2 to the Wii. I have to say that I think the DS is more innovative than the Wii, and should result in longer-term market domination.

As for Billy Blanks, one imagines in a few years he’ll be natsukashii.

2008 Tokyo Michelin Guide sold out already

This year’s easy Christmas gift is gone from the shelves, at least for now.

It seems that Michelin understands the pattern well: get ready to roll your product out in Japan, have the PR people place (or provoke) a few quotes in the media about how foreigners ‘don’t understand’ or ‘can’t understand’ some aspect of Japan to pique interest, and then hit the shelves with an under supply of product.

The 2008 Michelin Tokyo Guide has already sold out. It only took two days. The Krispy Kreme model, which still has people standing in line outside of a doughnut shop (now 2), seems to have been adjusted and put into play well here. The second printing should sell out like hotcakes as well.

The Nikkei also tells us that Hiramatsu, a restaurant group that had five of its restaurants awarded one star by the guide, is rushing to open more locations. Company President Hirotoshi Hiramatsu told the Nikkei, “Like Moody’s ratings for industry, these stars are a sign of excellence and directly influence the restaurant business.” No mention of quality management strategies during expansion is made in the article, probably for a good reason.

A quick look at Michelin’s Japanese website shows a nice first page, followed by some fairly rough looking design. I also couldn’t get the ‘concept movie’ to load.

If you’re interested in seeing which restaurants in Tokyo were ranked, there’s a list online at the Michelin site. That one shouldn’t sell out.

Toto’s new website aims to push the Washlet to North Americans

We’ve written about Toto brand toilets before here. Back in April, during a post concerning a string of fires caused by Toto’s products, I wrote, “I’ve never much liked the ‘Washlet,’ as the toilet/bidet hybrid is called in Japan. I had one experience where I tried to take one apart to figure out how it worked and ended up getting soaked in the process.”

Toto wants to change my mind, and the minds of thousands of people living in North America who have not given the ‘Washlet’ serious consideration when making bathroom purchasing decisions. To that end, the company has launched a new website, called “Clean is Happy.”

The website opens complete with a Flash file showing several rear ends with smily faces drawn over them. The screenshot I got even happens to have a tattooed bum. (Enlarge for better view)

My favorite line of the Flash movie? For “that happy washlet feeling, click here.”

Toto’s been making a push for some time to get North Americans to buy this product. While I fully endorse the use of the Warmlet, which pretty much makes winter in Japanese office buildings survivable, I’m still cool on the Washlet.

The site itself might end up “going viral” (no, links from this site don’t count), but it seems as though Toto’s real goals are to 1) Raise awareness of its products (which I endorse in the form of the Warmlet, not the Washlet), and 2) Humanize the process of going to the toilet by making it sort of silly and cute.

After all, who wrote Everyone Poops?

There is Hope: Housewife Doesn’t Buy Into “Cool Biz,” “Eco Bags” or the Govenment Line

I’m putting a quote here out of context, but it fits in with something I’m working on concerning appearances, marketing, empty gestures, and the urge to attach the word ‘eco’ to anything just to make people spend money on it. Just need to save it somewhere that’s searchable…

The quote is from a recent Japan Times article on garbage, so it fits right in with the marketing, though perhaps that tends to get recycled more…

Recycling has seen good progress in Japan over the past 20 years, so what kind of signal does it send to suddenly tell people to dump their plastic in the fire? And what does it say to other local governments, like the one in Yokohama, where residents now must separate their garbage into 15 different categories? The problem, as one housewife editorialized in the Asahi, is that the national government doesn’t want to take the initiative and implement policies that unify the country’s environmental and waste countermeasures. “It’s all talk,” she writes, and gestures like “cool biz” and urging people to use “eco bags” to cart their groceries home instead of plastic bags are more symbolic than practical. What’s needed is a concerted effort on the part of government and industry, but makeshift solutions are the norm.

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