More Japanese firms are using online social networks to promote their products and services
Two dispatches from the outer reaches of Japanese corporate advertising – first from Ajinomoto. Last year in a bid to shift more of that boring old kitchen staple, mayonnaise, the food and seasoning giant hit on the idea of asking customers to make video clips of meals being cooked up using their product. The results were posted on the video-sharing website Nico-Nico Douga (www.nicovideo.jp/) proving a viral hit and hiking sales 5%.
Kobe-based UCC coffee meanwhile tried another marketing trick last autumn on Twitter, programming software to automatically post responses to tweets about beverages. The result? A furious backlash from customers and a note on its Twitter account promising never to repeat the mistake (www.ucc.co.jp/gcs/twitter.html).
Japan’s companies want to be part of the country’s burgeoning love affair with social network services, but the results aren’t always pretty. Like pensioners stumbling into a disco, many simply look clumsy and desperate as they fumble around for the right steps. As one blogger noted after the UCC debacle, the Japanese verb for tweeting – tsubuyaku, meaning to mutter or murmur to yourself – “seems oddly appropriate”.
“Japanese firms are far behind European companies in the process of shifting advertising investments into the digital field,” said Yu Taniguchi, an editor at Senden Kaigi, the country’s most authoritative advertising publication. “There is a similar current in the usage of social media.”
Still, corporate Japan faces the same question as everywhere else: What to do when a large slice of your potential customer base appears to be abandoning traditional channels of communication? Japan’s five main TV networks and most newspapers last year reported plunging revenues, as the recession worsened and the steady migration of viewers and readers online increased. Newspapers in particular face trouble because their readership is ageing, fast.
Internet advertising, meanwhile, almost doubled last year and is expected to expand from more than ¥600bn in 2009 to about ¥900bn in 2014, according to the Nomura Research Institute. That accounts for slightly more than 12% of the total advertising expenditure in Japan.
Much of the internet, of course, cannibalises existing media content, but not all. Consider the runaway leader in Japan’s social network market, Mixi, which claims 15m users and 9.2m unique visitors a month. A huge network of self-generating micro-communities, Mixi is just six years old but attracts more eyeballs than the big TV networks and newspapers – and 70% of those eyeballs are reportedly in their twenties or younger. “Mixi is just too huge to ignore,” says Guillaume Hansali, CEO of web development and consultancy firm Wizcorp.
Firms have taken note. Starbucks reportedly pays a substantial sum to advertise on Mixi, which now generates roughly 85% of its income from such sources. Nearest rival GREE, a clubby invite-only mix of photo uploads, videos and blogs with 3m users, pales in comparison, and global social media behemoth Facebook, with 1.39m unique visitors a month according to NetRatings Japan, is barely in the running.
Analysts have been surprised, however, by the startling success of another foreign upstart, Twitter. One estimate is that after a slow start, about 4.5m people here now use the micro-blogging service, and that 14% of the 50m daily tweets are Japanese.
Senden Kaigi estimates that nearly a quarter of all companies here now have a Twitter account, and 18.7% of CEOs tweet. Japan, in other words, is twittering itself silly.
One reason is that the San Francisco-based service is both free and far easier to use than other social networks, points out Hideo Yamazaki, senior researcher at the Nomura Research Institute. “Mixi is more conservative than Facebook or Twitter because it is by invitation only. It’s more difficult for companies to negotiate.”
Not surprisingly then, corporate Japan is jumping on the Twitter bandwagon, sometimes with quirky campaigns. Convenience store chain Lawson, for example, this year began trying to replace its traditional email newsletter with tweets supposedly from one of its lowly staff, Akiko-chan. Her job was to twit to her 10,000 or so followers about a Fuji TV show called Tokyo Little Lovers, which features a Lawson character.
Suntory Beer, meanwhile, has taken advantage of a national pastime: drinking while chatting about the idiot box. Its site, www.horoyoi.com/ (roughly meaning “to be tipsy”), has been trying to build up a Twitter community around people who like to chat about their favourite TV programme.
Does all this micro advertising point the way to the future? A 2009 report by Morgan Stanley Europe found that teenagers are consuming more media, but in entirely different ways, and are almost certainly not prepared to pay for it. “They resent intrusive advertising on billboards, TV and the internet,” it concluded.
Yamazaki has identified a new generation of Japanese, born after 1996, who are comfortable with social networking and trust information filtered through virtual communities more than the old-fashioned media. He says astute companies are taking note, retooling marketing strategies to be less identifiably advertising and appear part of the “flow” (nori) of communication.
That doesn’t mean these companies have forgotten traditional marketing, insists Wizcorp’s Hansali. “The internet is not replacing TV; it’s complementing it. A TV commercial lasts 30 seconds to one minute. The internet will keep the buzz going. Also, TV is one-way advertising – the viewer is basically hypnotised.”
The Ajinomoto campaign points to the truth of that observation. As Hansali says: “It’s hard to create a buzz around food.” So why not target a group not known for its cooking skills – single men in their twenties – who are much more likely to congregate around online fare like Nico-Nico Douga than are housewives, the overwhelming buyers of mayonnaise? Online videos of their culinary creations attracted 300,000 hits – and that all-important “buzz”.
But some observers remain unconvinced. “You’re seeing a lot of companies playing with Twitter, but it doesn’t really amount to anything,” says Steve Nagata, Tokyo-based tech specialist with Longfeld Consulting Services. Traditional media will continue to rule for some time yet, he believes. “The Yomiuri newspaper sells ten times more than The New York Times. That’s not going to fall for a very long time. Big companies will still have to use that platform.”