Episode 25: WEBSITE
This is my portfolio site:
Episode 24: The HUB
In the early summer of 2012, The HUB will finally arrive at Tokyo. This hub in Tokyo will be called “HUB Tokyo.“
What is the HUB?
HUB is the co-working space that started in London, and now there are 26 hubs around the world. By sharing the office, people can build up diverse connections, share ideas with different people. The goal of hub is offering this environment is that creativities can share their thoughts to stimulate each other.
If you want to use the hub, you need to resister yourself. The significant difference from other sharing office is that you are allowed to use wherever HUB offices around the world. We live in the era of globalization. This environment that you can interact with diverse and international creative strategists will be huge befit to people who are looking at the global business and marketing.
Naohumi Tsuchiya who is a president of Goodpath Inc. started the HUB Tokyo project. To set up the HUB in Tokyo, he needed to get the recommendation from the other HUBs. He went to the HUB SF, then met up with the founder of the HUB, Michael. Tsuchiya emphasized the necessity of the HUB in Tokyo. Tokyo is the place where a lot of mad creators exist. Tokyo is one of the capitals of the world business. It was rather wired that Tokyo did not have any plan about having the HUB.
Thanks to Tsuchiya, Michael agreed on placing the HUB in Tokyo. Yes, “Thinkers doers, + makers of things.” I am really proud of him that he actually took action and did it.
The dream of the founder, Michael is that to connect with people all over the world to create ‘the better world.’ He made the HUB space to provide the global platform to bring and collaborate world’s ideas together to make things happen. I am really excited about the arrival of the HUB to Tokyo, because this has completely different perspective towards cultivating creativity from existing Japanese workspace.
When the earthquake hit Japan last year, honestly I was very upset and sad about self-serving characteristic of Japanese. Even though thousands of people in the north lost houses, suffered from Tsunami and radiation, people who did not get hurt first did was a lot of hoarding. Instead of helping casualties or sharing their possessions they decided to stock up stuff just for their benefits.
Is this something to do with Japanese cultural background? I really cannot explain this is cultural problem, or psychological problem. Yet, the one thing I can say is that Japanese are ultimately self-serving thinkers. If you keep acting like this, don’t you think nobody will support you when you really need help?
What we need to do to the society is not like when Russia and the U.S. were secretly competing against each other, share the information and ideas more frankly and openly. Don’t afraid of your idea will get stolen, or your idea will be judged. By presenting and sharing your ideas, you will definitely have the chance that you can improve them more.
Japanese are really good at sampling ideas behind the curtain. They have a good judge of finding the real stuff from others. If you explain this typical Japanese characteristic positively, we could say that they have strong observation skills. However if we explain this characteristic in a simplistic form, it is just shifty and stingy. They don’t share good ideas, and hide them, but fully check out others’ stuff. What if this is the true “Samurai-spirit?“
Today, what Japanese businesses and world’s businesses need to do to survive in the global market is that they need to switch their analog mind to more frankly open mind. Rather than being conservative about your valuable idea, you get to prepare yourself from any circumstances. Show, share and collaborate your ideas with people. This is how we should be to survive in the global market.
Needless to say, Japanese creators and creative strategists have amazingly funky taste. Their creativities are recognized by all over the world. They definitely got the creative skill to be able to lead the world. This HUB Tokyo project will be the trigger to pull shy Japanese creative professionals out of their comfortable shells.
I believe that what we can do to the global industries now, is sharing, showing and collaborating our ideas and creativities to the others without zero hesitation.
Episode 23: Sharing
We all live in the era of sharing.
We literary share everything throughout multiple media: photos, videos, musics, documents, information and so on. People are really concerned about how to protect privacy, although simultaneously the amount of sharing is growing rapidly.
Why?
I think people generally love sharing things with others. Human beings are the creatures that need to have groups. People feel relief and comfortable by being together to talk, agree, and being responded. Those interaction between people make them feel that they are recognized by others. That’s the main reason why social net working grew so quickly.
Considering this human nature, I think branding definitely should focus on some form of sharing. The products of brand, or brand itself can be the device of sharing things in our daily life. If you are wearing the same brand’s shoes, you can start conversation like “oh I really like this company, where did you get?” and you will have the sense of comfortableness because now you know the person has at least one similar taste.
In addition, brand and its products can create the opportunity to share the moment with others. Toyota Prius V is the great example. It emphasizes the Prius V is new type of the family car, and in its website , it introduces multiple applications of driving Prius V. Prius V did cool campaign, because they focus on the sharing between human and nature, and among families. More and more families are loosing strong bonds among them, but Prius V can be the perfect platform to reconnect families together by sharing times, experiences, and memories together.
Sharing the moment can build strong emotional connections with consumers, because they love talking about what happened in the past. New branding strategy better to focus on how to make the product as a device to share the emotions among people.
Episode 22: Look at people with the nano scale
In my chemistry class, Professor Julie introduced this super interesting scale-measure website. This visualization is imply fun. It is really hard for us to be told “well, the size of nano is 10-9 meter.” I have no idea how small nano is.
This website allows us to explore the sense of size by comparing not the number but the actual existing objects’ sizes.
A lot of huge corporations are doing market research to scale out demographic trend: what do people like, what people are interested in, what people have never done, and so on.
But I think that this standardizing-demography-data method won’t be last that long. It is because a lot of new devices allow us to do so diverse things. No longer people have the same idea and interest. Individual like to explore different stuff. The stuff can be similar, but it cannot be the same.
If you keep seeing demography with your reading glasses, but not with a microscope, you will miss what actually people are like. You won’t be able to find out what people are actually seeking in their lives. We need to see people with a nano perspective.
No more categorization of demography. People’s interests are so diverse and mixed up, there is no way to define trends as one trend.
Instead of trying to include the entire demography, it is more efficient to focus on one niche demography.
People have diverse interests, but their interests can be multiple or easy-to-be-changes. So once you start targeting to one specific demographic group, some outside field demography will pick it, and they spread it out.
Let’s take advantage of people’s social network connection. This connection is way more strong than we imagine.
Episode 21: Japanese unique branding.
Since I do not own TV in here, it was pretty hard for me to figure out the difference between American typical TV commercials and Japanese one.
However, there is one thing that is significantly different between them.
“Mascot”
About half of Japanese TV commercials create their own mascot. Interestingly most of them are based on actual animals, and they are talking in the TV.
I thought that making mascot as a branding strategy is just Japanese thing, but to think about the college in here, it is not true. Each collage has their own mascots that are based on creatures: ducks, beavers, huskies, dragons …etc
Unlikely to the college in the U.S., Japanese collages do not have their own mascots. I assume that this is why people are allowed to be use mascots more on the media.
Having a mascot in the brand can give the audience strong impact. Of course the product itself does differentiate the brand itself from the others, but mascot-driven branding can be stuck in your head more. Those mascots in Japanese TV commercials have specific characteristics, they are just not giving you cute and adorable impacts.
Companies sell those mascots’ stuffed dolls, picture story books, school supplies and other types of products in the store to be recognizable among consumers.
Sometimes having mascot can give you childish and non-professional impression. However at the same time, it can gives more friendly and happy characteristic of the brand.
I personally like watching those mascot-driven advertising, because when they make series of commercials ( like old spice commercial) it gives me the sense of comprehensiveness, and also makes me feel like watching a cartoon.
These are examples of Japanese mascot-driven TV ads, enjoy!
English language school, NOVA’s TV commercial
English language school, NOVA’s TV commercial
NOVA USAGI ‘s (Nova rabbit) Nintendo DS gamesoft
NOVA USAGI’s alarm clock
Soft-drink brand, QOO’s TV commercial. Apple juice ver
Soft-drink brand, Qoo’s TV commercial. Orange juice ver
Qoo’s pencil
Qoo’s kitchen timer
