skip to main |
skip to sidebar
Accessing wealthy clients and marketing to rich people in Japan represents a major challenge. In a shrinking market, knowing how to deal with affluent consumers who often form the solid base for a brand, can become an essential asset.
In order to understand how rich people spend, it is important to understand brand images. Japan Access will conduct a study which is the first to take a detailed look on the way HNWIs in Japan perceive luxury brands, hotel brands, high-class travel agencies and concierge services.
The specificity of the survey is summarized in the following points:
- We are accessing a network of 7,000 HNWIs which was built up over a course of 8 years through personal interaction by a Japanese HNWI specialist. The relationship of trust that our Japanese business partner has with those rich Japanese enables the execution of the survey.
- The length of the survey would normally make it impossible to make HNWIs answer it (it takes longer than 1 hour to fill out). In our case, the HNWIs have agreed to support our study and invest their time to provide us with detailed information on their consumer behavior.
- Sensitive data (assets, income, real estate ownership), that was accumulated over the course of 8 years, will be connected to the information we will gather through the survey. The results will be anonymised in order to protect the privacy of the respondents.
- The survey includes hand-written essays, hand-written statements on brand perceptions, and a personality analysis.
- We are able to interview and survey the same individuals again, making it possible to construct longitudinal studies.
We selected 500 individuals from the 7,000 HNWIs resulting in the demographics shown in the figure HNWI_SURVEY SAMPLE.
Instead of constructing the questions based solely on our own expertise, we welcome the input of industry experts.
Through a cooperation of the industry with our researchers, it would be possible to create a win-win situation. Parties who are highly interested in questioning Japanese HNWIs will be able to influence the questionnaire to fit their specific needs. We would be able to get a clearer picture of what questions are of high value and relevance to the industry.
The following table provides more details on the categories of the questionnaire and which specific questions we are planning to include.
This is an online version of my working paper dealing with luxury marketing in Japan. It is updated regularily with comments being more than welcome. I will try to answer every comment and incorporate feedback as fast as possible. The online version includes interactive elements and comments not included in the print version. The actual PDF-file can be accessed here: Luxury Marketing in Japan.pdf (right-click to save file on hard disk).
Recent update: 13/09/2008 After several Interviews with Yamada Yu, Ypsilon Group, Masubuchi Tatsuya, Root and Partners, and meetings with Paul Goldsmith, Esprit Corp. and Kazuo Makino, Porsche Japan, parts of the paper were updated. The section on HNWI marketing in Japan (section 3.3) was enlarged.
After several meetings during my recent stay in Tokyo I realized that among all the companies that try to give solutions for HNWIs, the main question boils down to how to create and organize events that have many HNWIs and influential people on their guest list. As mentioned before (in section 3.4 of my paper) the quality of such events is directly dependent on the quality of its attending guests. How do you get them to come to your party? How do you make them feel comfortable and not part of a marketing campaign?
Several introduced companies (section 3.3) have HNWI databases. The question is now what kind of relationship does the service company have with them? It can range from anonomys address lists (credit card companies), over customer databases that give legitimization to establishing contact (AdComm), to HNWIs that are themselves customers of the service company (as in the case of the private concierge services of the Ypsilon Group). But what about personal contact? What better legitimizing value for inviting someone could there be than to know them directly, having met several times, maybe even done business with them? Following the argumentation by Stanley (1997: Networking with the affluent) direct contact and acquiring up to date information on HNWIs demands personal contact. There is simply no other way to get reliable data. Asking affluents for their incomes does not produce accurate results, doing business with them over several years does. As HNWIs tend to value their privacy and only trust sources that are not directly motivated by business alone, what is needed is an intermediary, an agent, someone who can convincingly claim independence and objectivity. Such a person (or an agency) could invite HNWIs, preselect them and act in the interest of both the affluents and the companies who want to do business with them.
I talked to a CEO yesterday who is offering exactly such a service. A customer database of 6500 HNWIs and ultra-HNWIs, all of them selected in a careful process over the course of 7 years. All of them can be contacted directly without making them feel uncomfortable. I will meet with him next week again and further check the reliability of the data given to me.
Accessing wealthy clients and marketing to rich people in Japan represents a major challenge. In a shrinking market, knowing how to deal with affluent consumers who often form the solid base for a brand, can become an essential asset.
