Japanese consumer wants "because it's you"

BtoC eCommerce market in Japan is enormous. According to the survey form Ministry of Economy, the market size has got nearly doubled in the past 5 years. Market size became from $77 billion/year to $137 billion/year. *BtoC eCommerce includes goods, service, and digital contents

Any company in Japan (whether it's local or not local) is trying really hard to get customer satisfaction but how are they trying to meet customer needs? The best way to start learning about it is looking into Japanese consumer insight first.

Female app user who doesn't want to turn on GPS functionality

I was engaged in some work of consumer app and the app had GPS setting of course. Enabling it is basically must-use feature but one female user didn't want to do that.

I had occasion to talk to her and asked her the reason with curiosity. She said "What if that company track my location and do something bad! I don't turn this on for my security!"

Well, this kind of "what if" question always happens in the Japanese consumer business scene, but keep providing a solution with more creative way will be tomorrow's innovation. That's how Japanese company have been evolved.

Japanese consumer is very sensitive to personal information

There's very interesting survey from SAP, which shows about Japanese consumer insights. According to the survey, Japanese consumers are very sensitive to personal information compared to the other countries. For example;

• 52% of consumers are okay to provide their personal information in general
• 32% says okay to provide email
• 27% says okay to provide their interest data
• 15% says okay to provide real-time location data
• 11% says okay to provide a phone number

In return, they require these protections and benefit;

• 55% requires consumer's benefit protection
• 37% requires sharing the process of how company share information within the partnership company
• 25% requires that same campaign reward should be applied with both online and the real shop

Japanese consumer wants prompt reply and "quality reply"

One of the typical example is "How fast do people in Japan want a reply from customer service?".

• 83% within 24 hours
• 54% within 3 hours

More than half of them said within 3 hours!? It is a bit too much but I assume this is because smartphone is our major way to communicate today. Keeping the customer satisfied is not an easy task, but the reward will be huge.

One thing to add is that consumer is not stupid, so they understand the meaning of providing personal information.

• 47% requires relevancy in dealing with their question

They know their private information and purchase record etc is in your database, so they want you to understand what they are asking you. Don't make them angry like "I want to talk to your manager!"

Japanese consumer wants "because it's you"

Another thing to keep in mind is what makes consumer annoyed.

• 62% says aggressive sales phonecall
• 56% says aggressive sales email
• 56% says contents that don't interest them

Without knowing their interest, marketing will not go great. That means personalization (because it's you) will be the key to marketing success.

Key takeaways

Key takeaways for this article are;

• Personal information should be handled carefully
• Omnichannel strategy sounds promising for Japanese consumer marketing
• Personalization, relevancy is also needed for any communication

Hope the article is beneficial for you.

(Photo by Alex Knight on Unsplash)