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 average Japanese consumer is stunning and has
few parallels in the world and is derived from the sheer amount and level of
detail that consumers are willing to take in: for instance, one look at the
lowest of all low-end ready-to-drink coffee, Seven-Eleven’s Tetra Pak ice
coffee (link) is enough to understand the point: 1 litre of ice coffee
for 257 yen, but nonetheless it talks about the origin of the beans, the kind of
water used, the way it was dripped (‘flannel drip’), how it was packaged, and
the cool logistics chain. What all of this does, is help consumers build a
framework to evaluate any other product: if a coffee brand then does not talk
about the origin of the beans or how it was roasted and produced, consumers
will not believe its quality. And this is the same from burgers to luxury
handbags: from the cheapest, mass-produced items to stories of unique
craftsmanship, and by a myriad of magazines, TV shows and online product blogs,
Japanese consumers are offered – and consumer – unparalleled amounts of
information on what they buy.
After
all, in a country where conspicuous consumption is frowned upon, you need to be
armed with a lot of back-up knowledge to justify your purchasing decisions.
What
is most intriguing in this, of course, is how selective this information still
can be. Just look at MOS Burger, which when it comes to quality in restaurants,
is again and again mentioned by consumers as the gold standard when it comes to
explaining where products are from (they change display boards in their stores
on a weekly basis, showing where this week’s lettuce or tomato is coming from
in Japan, down to the farm level). It created the image of ‘MOS is telling consumers
where each product is coming from, down to the most granular level – MOS is a
completely transparent company where you know exactly what you get’. One way or
another, this is what you will hear from Japanese consumers about the MOS Burger chain and why they usually
think it is superior and of higher quality to any competitor. This is putting
huge competitive pressure on the likes of KFC, Freshness Burger, or McDonald’s
to also tell where their products are sourced from.
When
consumers then are told that for example several of MOS meat products are
sourced from Thailand consumers often react with surprise, since the tacit
assumption was when MOS is so open and detailed about its sourcing for so many
items, all of them will be similar. That the origin of their meat nuggets is
not mentioned on the display board, then, goes unnoticed. So MOS’s worked
perfectly: become regarded as the highest-quality burger chain in Japan by
giving consumers lots and lots of information that emphasise the strengths of
MOS, and weave all of them into one beautiful, coherent story – in this case,
of farm origin and transparency.
MOS
is a great learning for brands in Japan and a master lesson in how to construct
quality and trust communications: what is key for brands is how to best share
the most level of detail with consumers, all in one narrative that fits
together and makes sense.
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