SaiKaiAngel

Business Focus: Why startups should target Japanese customers

Have you ever wondered why startups in the global market don't target the Japanese market? Maybe for the same reason Japanese startups are afraid to enter the global market?

Why startups should target Japanese customers

Author: SaiKaiAngel

First of all, one thing that should definitely not be underestimated is the language barrier. The Japanese in general, are not very keen on learning other universal languages, such as English this could be a pretty big limitation. On the other hand, Japan is a very conservative society and jealous of its culture and tradition. On the other hand, in the rest of the world, the Japanese language is not among the first to be learned. This is one of the first reasons why young start-ups choose English-speaking countries and other Asian countries that are growing at a very fast pace.

Unique customs and business cultures

Every country has unique customs and cultures, but I think the situation in Japan is more intense and explicit than in any other foreign country. Adventure in Japan is definitely not to be underestimated!

Let's take some practical examples. If you want to promote your product or service in Japan, it might be difficult to do so without the support of an agency that can have a lot of influence on the market, especially if you provide technology media services for marketing. Even giants like Google and Facebook have hired local employees to support their agencies!

Some say that the Japanese love brands. In fact, I am of the opinion that the Japanese place great weight on a past reputation of trust before buying or subscribing to something. Considering these points, startups in foreign countries need a sophisticated strategy and marketing, and above all a trustworthy name.

photo credits: fiercebiotech.com

The standard strategy is to partner with a local company in Japan.

Of course, the local company should be familiar with the Japanese market and the language itself. By the way, Japanese people love the "made in Japan" brand, so they are willing to buy appliances in the shop that are not Samsung and LG, but Japanese brands such as Sony and Panasonic, even if they are obviously of lower quality and higher price.

This is not necessarily a bad thing in Japan, on the contrary! A company that wants to make a name for itself in Japan, should target the Japanese market from the start, so that it becomes better known.
Let's take a look at the reasons why startups should target the Japanese market while taking some risks.

Market size

We are talking about a huge size, because the size of the Japanese market is the third largest in the world, so a huge potential for startups.

China has the second largest market, but let's not forget that the Chinese Communist Party has run the entire nation and this has put a crackdown on foreign companies because they want to control every piece of information. While some American companies like Apple and Starbucks have been working in the Chinese market, Google and Facebook have practically not started working there yet. Considering this, it might be difficult or impossible to find your way into the Chinese market. So, taking out China, Japan becomes practically the second largest market after the US.

Excessive concentration in Tokyo

If you are a B2B company, you have to physically visit your potential customers because the Japanese prefer to conduct business in person. Tokyo, the capital of Japan, is a convenient and fascinating city for companies because almost all the offices are located in the Tokyo metropolitan area. If you can conquer Tokyo, you can practically enter the Japanese market with ease. Fortunately, there are many co-working spaces, such as WeWork, in Tokyo and many global startups have taken advantage of them.

High loyalty

As explained earlier, many Japanese people attach themselves to a brand. In other words, if you can work hard and gain the trust of new customers, the Japanese could be the most loyal customers for your brand.
According to Shopify's State of Commerce report, Japanese users tend to repeatedly purchase items if the merchant has a good relationship with them. These statistics show how loyal and critical Japanese customers are to a business.

I want to conclude by saying that it is very important to try to enter the Japanese market, because all companies would need to have their own principles of brand loyalty and attachment. If all companies were able to do this, they would certainly be able to have a more loyal and constant audience over time and thus stay on the wave more. It is important to understand and appreciate the customs and traditions of a place before targeting its brand, it is important to create trust with one's customers.
All this is what the Japanese believe in and what any global company should learn to do. Never lose sight of the Japanese market, because it is the one that will give you the satisfaction you need. Maybe some barriers exist, but the market is worth it with its size, focus and loyalty.

A startup has to be constant, loyal, and a good connoisseur of the habits and customs of the people it is addressing. It is not difficult to create a good branding in Japan, as soon as you have managed to overcome the language barrier, you just need to have this kind of strength and don't forget that we are talking about, practically, the second largest market in the world after the United States.

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by SaiKaiAngel

Business Focus: the psychology of customer relations

The "Business Focus" column on Japan Italy Bridge continues and today we are talking about problem solving, communication and customer relations, also in Japan. 

Problem solving: the psychology of customer relations, also in Japan

Understand who is in front of you. This is a lesson that I have been given personally and that I always try to carry on. What does it mean to really understand who you are dealing with? Surely it is the basis of every activity, both personal and professional, and if it were easy, everyone would succeed effortlessly in their work. It is not easy.

Only a few people manage to stand out from the masses and from the noise that, especially nowadays, is heard all too often. In the midst of the noise a voice, an attractive and loyal voice. The voice of someone who is willing to listen, but very carefully, to the needs of others. To build an audience you need this, along with a lot of intelligence to understand human behaviour.

photo credits: artplusmarketing.com

Attracting and keeping attention.

Let's talk for example, to make it more understandable, about the podcaster. The good podcaster not only has to attract his audience but also has to do his best to keep the listener's attention without shouting too much and without having voice drops that can lead to inattention.

Dreams must be created, needs must be met. Determination. Passion. Constancy. Consistency. One must never show anything that is contrary to the above factors.

Understand your own psychology

Before understanding others, you absolutely must understand yourself. In order to build an audience, one must first understand what we ourselves are inclined to do.
Are we able to communicate in the right way? Our job is to be among people, to attract customers, to care about our customers.

Are we not able to communicate well? Being in the "backstage" and in the "background", do you think it is bad or demoralising? No, it is not. Because most likely, the people on stage are only good at that and they should also learn how to build the show because the artist in question would not be able to do anything without a staff that creates the show from scratch.

In short, before you make yourself likeable by making an effort, the study to be done is very heavy and long and know that people notice your fake smile.
Don't risk what you are not! Whether or not you are able to understand others and therefore yourself, don’t go into what you are not suited to. Of course, you can always learn, but it takes a lot of time. It takes time to understand yourself and to understand others.

Let's take another example: my passion.

Having a passion and doing everything to pursue it is certainly very important, but to do it and do it well, you need to have the ability. Skills either come naturally or are learned over time. One thing I personally don't agree with is pursuing a passion without counting the rest, with your eyes closed. Often, unfortunately, this leads to not achieving the dream and in the worst cases, to the complete ruin of the path towards that dream. The opportunity can be misplaced, to cut a long story short.

Passion only follows commitment. To have passion you need commitment. Instead of following your passion, pay attention to what you find engaging.
Make yourself unique and don't do it just to attract someone or something, stay unique.

photo credits: theabp.org.uk

Build something unique and move forward by being unique.
Make it clear that you are willing to be a staple for your customer, make it clear that you are willing to solve their problem.

SBe their problem solver.

So what is problem solving? Let's look at this essential part of building an effective audience.

As we have already said, giving confidence and ensuring your presence at all times is essential. You should NEVER get the customer to say or just think "I can get by without this person". That way customers are lost. One must be able to become essential in solving a problem.
In our case, the problem might be the construction of an event or the constancy of staying alive socially. We want to be problem solvers, so we need to have the ability to:

• Recognise a problem
• Define a problem
• Determine the cause of the problem
• Establish priorities
• Select possible solutions
• Deciding on a solution
• Solve the problem

photo credits: 1985fm.com

To be effective as a problem solver, you need to train these skills above all:

• Intuition
• Common sense
• Lateral thinking
• Sensitivity
• Lucidity (be careful because this often clashes with the previous one)
• Understanding of limits
• Understanding of capabilities
• Decision making
• Constancy
• Consistency

It's not easy and some people are born with problem solving skills, but even if we don't have anyone in the team who can be a problem solver, we have two paths to take:

1. Look for problem solving
2. Become a problem solver ourselves

Of course, the road is not easy, because mind you, I did not say: Improvise Problem solving! It is not only very difficult but also not very productive.
And the client realises this most of the time.

Finding a purpose

The purpose must be personal and the lessons we are given must only be a help. Never take something someone else says as gold! As much as a person can be an important teacher, he/she must remain a guide, help in difficult times and be able to balance his/her psychology with yours. Yes, because what may work for someone can be completely useless for someone else.
And the client realises this.

Never listen to prejudices.

Although many times they may tell the truth, even more times they are bad advisors. We may be faced with a client who we don't "like" on the skin. How many times have I heard these phrases... these feelings, even though they are not to be thrown away completely, must not become predominant. let's make sure that the prejudice can remain as such (i.e. a judgement by feeling) and let's make it fragile, so fragile that it is then supplanted by judgement.

Build a very large network

Having a very large network of contacts is a very important help. In that way, among the many names, some may become clients, clients to be followed with constancy and over time so that prejudice is only a feeling that will then give way to judgement.
Then afterwards if you like you can also say "I told you so, I felt it!" it's ok if you like, but it's not required.

Be what you are, but hey I am not talking about being what you are despite everything. You have to be who you are but with a job behind you, you have to create a real awareness of who you are and then also have the honesty to understand the limitations of it, before someone else notices. Get help from those who have a greater capacity, and I'm talking about both backstage and frontman. Don't try to be something you're not, because if you really want to be something you have to put a lot of effort into it.

Be convincing

This, psychologically, leads to convincing yourself first. Don't try to convince someone else of something you don't believe!
They notice, trust me.
Work to convince yourself of something and then convince others. You will probably piss off quite a few people, but it will mainly be your competitors. The customer, the person you are problem solving for, will be by your side and will see you.

Be reliable

You have to be something known, something reliable. You must not run away at the first obstacle and you must be able to make yourself known. People tend very much to get involved with what is already known and fear the unknown. If you notice, we ourselves are attracted by what is known. We are usually more inclined to listen carefully to a song we already know, whose story we already know, than to a new one. Very often someone says to us, "Listen to it, it's beautiful, trust me!"

And the “trust me!” is the problem, because our mind is selfish and always tends not to trust, so then we will never listen to the song with the attention it has been asked for until it becomes part of our mind. Until we like it. This makes us realise how important trustworthiness is, how much we have to study and work to be, if not on a par with the mind of the client, as close as possible.

Just don't lose the essence of what made you fall in love, always think about that.

Modelling yourself for public perception

Always be yourself, it is said, do everything not to please others, but only please yourself. In this way, I would say you can even shut down and live in your own desert island without anyone bothering you. But if you want to deal with others, it is very important not only to have a good perception and knowledge of yourself but also to do everything to improve yourself so that you become an essential and indispensable part of the client. You have to be yourself, but with good work behind you. Because in a job with clients, it is essential to be able to relate to them and work to stay with them over time. Whether you like it or not, everything you create shapes people's perception and opinion of you. Unless you really like the desert island, at which point you can do without working while eating coconuts.

When you approach other people and want to work with other people, you have no other option but to live up to other people's expectations. Unfortunately, the belief that "we are us and we don't have to move a finger to be appreciated by others" is too common to be supplanted, but I hope with all my heart that sooner or later everyone's mind will open up to the possibility that we are not all the same and that the first ones we really need to work on are ourselves. Then we can think about approaching others and making good connections at work.

Being able to be problem solving also means being critical

Have the ability to understand where we are wrong and move forward by fixing the problem. We need to be our own problem solvers! Being critical also means having the ability to deal with criticism: finding the right explanation for unconstructive criticism and accepting constructive criticism. If they are called 'constructive criticism' it means that they are able to build something. You can spend your time feeding and paying attention to trolls and or you can spend your time creating something good and maybe only listen to what is constructive, the choice is yours. What you really need to avoid is the presumption, which, mind you, is quite different from confidence.
Conceit makes us blind, confidence makes us gain even more sight.

photo credits: economist.com

Open your minds

And here comes my moment, OUR moment. Closed-mindedness does not help anyone, not even at work. It closes not only our mind but also avenues and possibilities. We often don't approach someone else out of fear and lack of knowledge. Prejudices, stereotypes, all this closes us in the desert island and does not make us look beyond.

Looking beyond

We decided to work with Japan, but not without a lot of study and effort. We have shaped our knowledge and skills in order to get closer to these people. We have studied and are still studying the language in order to get closer to them, we want to understand them more and more so that we can become a real Problem Solver for them, which can remain so over time, which can be a support in times of difficulty that should not be there because we know how to avoid them from the beginning.

The difference in language, culture, habits... we have said that all this is frightening. But we have to fall in love with this language, this culture, these customs, everything that has been said so far. If there is no way of shaping your own mind and falling in love with all these things yourself, I would say there is no point in trying. If you realise that you are in love with it, then start working and begin to understand what the Japanese in question needs. Very often we have come across what we never expected: incredible similarities. Japan and Italy look very much alike, but these things are only perceptible to the eye of someone who wants to be an expert, someone who wants to improve, someone who wants to approach. As I have said before, we have to fall in love first, then make others fall in love and, in this case, our client.

You cannot please everyone, but strive to please those who deserve it, those you want to walk alongside both professionally and privately. Most likely you will be not only their problem solver but also and above all yours.

The beauty of a website, of a social, of everything that is communication is important and it is the work of the backstage. But it is nothing without the work of the frontman, the same can be said of the backstage. A well-staffed team is one that has both back and front stage, never forget that and, at the end of the day, the psychology of building an audience is not that different from psychology in general. If it applied to everything we live, maybe things would be better for everyone.

Fall in love, but really fall in love. Oh well, there are always coconuts...

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by SaiKaiAngel