Urban Japanese mass communication, are consumers paying attention?

Emmanuel Chéron, Professor of Marketing, Sophia University, Faculty of Comparative Culture, International Business/Economics

Advertising Research Report, Nikkei Advertising Research Institute, No.179, April 2002, p. 7.

Consumer communication in densely populated urban Japan appears to be overwhelming to a Western observer. Transit advertising such as outside billboards and posters of all sizes inside public transports are omnipresent. Some examples are ad placements on the back of headrests in buses and taxis, as well as advertising on straps of ring-holders inside commuter trains or subways. A typical Japanese form of promotional material is also the ubiquitous small pack of tissues distributed on the streets around railway and subway stations. An additional promotion method, seldom observed in North America, is the use of loud speakers on small trucks circulating in local neighborhood areas to offer products and services to housewives. A kind of public relations new to the author is a packaged towel in a gift-wrapping offered by a construction company to households in the area of future road works.

Outside advertising and promotion clutter is doubled by a similar in-store battle for attention of customers. All formats of retailing, whether self-service or not, are using intense and sometimes noisy point-of-purchase (POP) sales promotion methods. An example is the use of tape recorders delivering a loud sales message for a product in a supermarket. Japanese advertising spots on television tend to be short and striking in order to attract attention at all cost. Aside from reflecting the local Japanese social, cultural, demographic, traditional and modern lifestyles, television advertising uses surprising images, humor and sounds to make an impression. In contrast to North America, Japanese television advertising often uses in the same message a mix of local tradition and locally adapted western modern culture. Many television advertising are for the very wide variety of soft drinks and Soya sauces available in Japan. The same television message tends to be repeated many times in a short period on commercial channels.

All forms of messages are so well coordinated in an Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC) that one may wonder to what extent this is above the saturation level. Is this high level of commercial communication reaching the appropriate target consumers? Communication managers should consider if they could avoid waste by better reaching the most receptive consumer segments. They could study to what extent different segments of market are negatively affected by communication overload. For example, it would be useful to understand the perception of the growing Japanese “silver market” to this high density and noise level of consumer advertising and promotion.