Japanese Market Realities that Canadian Marketers Do Not Know

In fall 2018, I took International Marketing course at the Telfer School of Management, University of Ottawa. In that course, each marketing consulting team should pick one Canadian company and a country that they want to suggest the company to expand to. I was very surprised on the day of presentation. Four out of ten teams chose Japan in their consulting projects. In other words, among 193 countries in the world, 40% of the students in International Marketing class thought Japan was the attractive market to go on. 

As a marketer with Japanese background myself, yes I think Japan is very interesting market to do business. However, I should tell them why I think getting into Japanese market can be very tricky path to take. I guess one reason why many marketers are attracted by Japanese market is in its uniqueness. And this uniqueness is what marketers should understand before really getting into Japanese market.

Wow, look at those beautiful islands! No, it's not Japan. --- It is Galapagos Islands.

Strangely, some economists use the term "Galapagos" to describe Japanese economy and culture. 

Galapagos Market

The Galápagos Islands are part of the Republic of Ecuador in the Pacific Ocean located 906 km west of the continental Ecuador. The islands are famous for their large number of endemic species that were studied by Charles Darwin. The islands are very isolated and had not gotten affected a lot by the external world, so Galapagos animals evolved in its own ways, different from the animals in the rest of the world. Darwin stated that due to the differences in environment from one island to another, species adapted to make survival more viable in the local environment of each island.

Now you can guess what the term "Galapagos" means in the Japanese market context. Geographically, Japan is also an island that is surrounded by the ocean, and in addition there were political, historical, linguistic, and economic factors that affected the development of modern Japanese culture that made it different from other part of the world.  According to Wikipedia, Galápagos syndrome (ガラパゴス化 Garapagosu-ka, / Galápagos effect) is a term which refers to an isolated development branch of a globally available product.  A development of goods "in relative isolation from the rest of the world because of a focus on the local market" led to some aspects of Japanese market highly unique and sometimes confusing for the global business.

Here I will note some facts that International marketers would not know about Japanese market.

Digital Market

In Japan the term Galapagos syndrome got viral when people around the world started to adopt themselves to smartphones. Japanese people had hard time adopting themselves to smartphones because the cellphones in Japan had developed in very different ways from the rest of the world and people were very used to use those special functions. However, like people in other countries, they thought smartphones like iPhone are cool, and started to try adopt themselves to smartphones. That's when people started to use the word "Gara-kei" which means "Galapagos cellphones" to laugh at those who still use such "Japanese cellphones" that were developed only in Japan. 

Even today, there are some people still use "Galapagos cellphones," and surprisingly, some of them are Millennials. That is never the case in Canada. Blackberry would have still thrived as a cellphone company if they were in Japan...

Furthermore, Social Media platforms in Japan also evolved in slower pace and in different ways. In Canada, marketers do not see Twitter or Facebook as an attractive platform to target young people. When you talk to students for example, the most popular platform would be Instagram. However, in Japan, Twitter is still the most popular Social Media even for young people and it is very important to be active on Twitter to target any age of people. 

While there are so many high-tech, almost like science fiction kind of products exist in Japan, surprisingly, majority of Japanese consumers are slower than the global consumers in terms of adopting themselves to the new digital products.

These are just a few in many "Galapagos syndrome" that you can see in Japanese market and it is hard to get a sense of how to market in such context if you have never lived or done business in Japan. Therefore, if you really want to expand to Japanese market, the best way is to hire a marketer with a solid Japanese background. Japanese market is attractive yet a risky market to get into. Why not try Honami? :)