Invasion Marketing: How the Japanese Target, Track, and Conquer New Markets

Japanese products, primarily clones of American innovation, grab marketshare. Nintendo stole the TV game market from Atari; the Honda Accord displaced the Ford Taurus. Johansson, international business professor at Georgetown University, and Nonaka, a Japanese management scholar, claim that, while Japanese marketers may not be professionals by U.S. standards, these ""amateurs"" mount a formidable challenge. In contrasting the marketing style of Japanese and U.S. companies, the authors make the analogy with Zen practice, rather than rational analysis. One of their many charts depicting the Zen/rationality distinction shows Western marketers using focus groups and opinion polls, while the Japanese take an intuitive approach, with virtually no research and little if any intentional strategy. The Japanese, the authors say, score by concentrating on the consumer's needs and desires. Unlike their Western counterparts, these marketers are portrayed as tending toward egolessness and un-self-consciousness about their function, dedicated to pleasing customers, who are raised to godlike status. They seek short-term growth, moving slowly, intuitively and incrementally into the long term. Johansson and Nonaka do an impressive job of relating the inner aspects of the Japanese way of marketing to its outer practices. Their approach is scholarly, not popular; their argument is rigorous, though expressed in prose that's less than fluent. Above all, their insights seem sound, worthy of note by Western marketers at any level. $35,000 ad/promo. (July)