Japan Market

1. Japanese Consumer Culture

1.1. background

I think that you have heard of Japanese Consumer Mindset, that is different from Western and U.S.’s one. Egalitarian vs Individualistic, In-group oriented vs Out-group oriented, Risk averse vs Risk taker, High context culture vs Low context culture, Mono-cultural vs Heterogeneous.
Japanese consumers have high expectation for quality, and Many Japanese consumer consider that high quality is responsibility of producers.

It is not a particular attitude that consumers expects high quality for the products they purchases or hope to purchase. However, Japanese consumers’ expectation would look different from Western and U.S.’s one. I think that stems from the difference between Japanese perspective to self-responsibility and Western and U.S.’s perspective to self-responsibility.

1.2. Consumer Behavior

When a consumer bought a product with a full disclose about it, the consumer would have to take the risk to use it by himself/herself. However, many Japanese customer expects the company’s prompt corresponding to his/her fault even when used wrongly. The company wins excellent reputation over Japan Market, if a company supported the customer’s fault. On the other hand, if a company dealt with the trouble as the customer’s matter, the company would have bad reputation especially through a internet recently.

This is true to the case of selling a product at a real shop along a street.

2. Kind and Quick Support Desk

Japanese consumers have high expectation for kind and quick support as a part of quality of the purchased product. If you buy an something expensive or any designer good, kind and quick support would be provided, because the expensive price includes the support service.

However, in Japan, if you buy a cheap T-shirt on a UNIQLO shop, you could get such quick and kind service. As a result, most Japanese think that kind and quick support desk is usual and must-provided service for any kind of products and services.

3. Long Life Products

One of beautiful and polite life styles for Japanese is “SHI-SSO”, that means simple and plain, and cost as less as possible. According to this fashion to life style, kids are taught to keep their goods used for long time, and to treat them carefully not to be broken. I suppose this affects consumer behaviors, and that many Japanese think good products go on for long time. Off course, digital devices get old and not to work well soon because of technological innovation. Even if so, Many Japanese prefer to long life goods.

4. Not Unique, But Extreme

These points do not meet only to Japanese Market, but meet to most markets. However, I suppose Japanese consumer expects more than others. That might have generated high quality products made in Japan.