Market research in Japan – understanding consumers’ frame of reference
The famed fastidiousness of Japanese consumers is written about so often, it is almost a cliché. But it simply is true. On the whole, Japanese consumers are voracious consumers of information: ever noticed those customer enquiry phone numbers on the back of most products? In basically every focus group I ever attended, there were one or more participants who called those – for water bottles and coffee packages to packed chicken meat; consumers who studied the back of the packaging of chicken meat so closely, they knew that the provider for Costco is the same as that of Seven-Eleven’s salad chicken. But what is the most interesting in doing market research and consumer insight research is to find out how all these observations help consumers construct a frame of reference with which any new product will have to engage with – i.e. how they define ‘quality’ in any given product or service, from chicken meat to coffee to travel websites. The level of sophistication of the averag...