Designing clear and influential marketing messages become even more difficult when reaching your Japanese consumers. A crucial yet commonly overlooked aspect of any successful Japanese marketing strategy is culture. Believe it or not, culture plays a huge role in Japanese people’s purchasing motivations. When selling your product or service to potential consumers in Japan, there are many underlying components within the Japanese culture that you MUST address. One of these cultural components include Japanese people’s cognitive styles — in other words, how people in Japan prefer to process information. This article will focus on analytic vs. holistic cognitive styles, and how to best appeal to your Japanese consumers with a marketing approach that aligns with their preferred way of thinking.
This Blog Will Cover…
- Why Cognitive Styles Matter in Marketing
- The Basics of Analytic vs. Holistic Cognitive Styles
- #1 : More Content
- #2 : Media Choice
- #3 : Layout Structure
- Your Next Steps
Why do Cognitive Styles Even Matter in Marketing?
[humble_caption text=”Japanese people want the big picture — have your marketing message speak from a panoramic perspective”]
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Unique perspectives and outlooks are created by differing cognitive styles of thinking, which then lead to cultures having distinct sets of styles and preferences. Although differences between thinking processes are not obvious. After all, most of us are probably not even aware of our own preferences for processing information. It is just something that happens naturally in our minds.
So in order to truly understand and communicate with your Japanese market, you must first understand yourself, along with your native background, culture, and cognitive influences. From there, you must reflect on how your perspectives compare to those of your Japanese consumers and then find the underlying reasons why they’re either similar or different. Once you’ve done this, you can then successfully market to your Japanese audience and clearly communicate and connect with them.
[humble_quote author=”Alain Ducasse”]”It is impossible to remain indifferent to Japanese culture. It is a different civilisation where all you have learnt must be forgotten. It is a great intellectual challenge and a gorgeous sensual experience.”[/humble_quote]
The Basics of Analytic vs. Holistic Cognitive Styles
[humble_caption text=”In Shibuya, ads are strategically designed and displayed to provide an holistic image of the city as a whole”]
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cognitive styles: holistic vs. analytic
Many people from Japan (and other East Asian countries) have a more “holistic” cognitive mindset as opposed to people from America (and other parts of North America and Europe) who prefer a more “analytic” style of thinking. In other words, Japanese people best process information by focusing on the relationships between different components and the overall context of those components. In contrast, people from the United States, for example, best process information by focusing on each individual component that lies separately from the surrounding context.
A study conducted by researchers in Canada had Japanese and European Canadian students analyze a video of an underwater scene. When they were asked to write down what they remembered, Japanese students tend to focus more on background details and primarily wrote down the surrounding contextual elements they picked out from the video.
Another study had each Japanese and European American student analyze a series of paired photographs with nearly identical scenes. After viewing each pair, they were then asked to identify the differences between the two photographs. When a single object changed (e.g. a blue plane changed into a helicopter), European American students were faster to detect those changes. In contrast, the Japanese students were quicker to see when the relationships between objects were altered (e.g. a plane in the photograph moved closer to another plane).
The holistic tendencies of Japanese people extend beyond their visual perceptions and to how they think about and explain the daily world around them. To further illustrate, Japanese people are more likely to group objects based on overall global similarity, rather than narrowly categorizing them on a single shared characteristic. When trying to understand the behaviors of other people, Japanese are more inclined to think about the surrounding contextual factors that might have influenced their behaviors, as opposed to only focusing on their personality characteristics. To Japanese people, the idea of “relationships” can be seen in the way they pair different objects together. For example, when presented with three separate photographs of a monkey, banana, and cow, Japanese people are more likely to pair the monkey and banana together, visualizing the idea that monkeys eat bananas. On the other hand, analytic thinkers (like many Western people) are more likely to pair the monkey and cow together, based on their common category as “animals/mammals”.
Now you should have a deeper understanding of analytic and cognitive styles of thinking and how people prefer to process information differently. Below are 3 major tips you can apply this knowledge to when creating a Japanese marketing strategy.
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#1 : Provide more valuable content for your Japanese consumers
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more content means better context
Have you provided your product or service with enough context for your Japanese consumers to tie into different aspects of their lives?
Going off of the two studies we mentioned in the previous section, we can conclude that Japanese people prefer to view the “big picture” as opposed to focusing on the individual elements which make up that picture. Their holistic style of thinking is the reason why Japanese people seemingly have higher expectations for any product or service they are willing to purchase. In order to meet these expectations, it is essential to showcase the entirety of your product and/or service when marketing to your potential Japanese consumers.
There’s no single correct approach that best suite all companies; however, here are two tips to keep in mind while composing a high-context and holistic marketing message for your Japanese audience. Here are two tips on how to expand your content
TIP #1 : Your Japanese marketing strategy must be highly detail-oriented.
Doing so will not only showcase the high quality of your product or service, but also the quality of your company. For example, if you were to market a wallet, you should showcase details about the different elements that make up the wallet. Some examples can be the materials used, why they were chosen, where the materials are from, the manufacturing process, who and how many manufacturers there are, where the facilities are located, the unique qualities of the wallet, etc. It’s a lot… I know. But your Japanese consumers will take each of these components into account prior to making the purchase or not.
TIP #2 : Your Japanese marketing message must empathize your customers’ lifestyle and show how your product or service aligns with their daily routine.
Asides from the details about the product or service itself, your Japanese consumers must be able to visualize themselves using it and understand why they need it in their lives. To achieve this, you should be able to market how your product or service can apply to a range of different scenarios. Going back to our wallet example, you should also include details about where, when, and how your target consumer can utilize your wallet. Say your targeting a 21-23 year old Japanese male living in Tokyo. One way to market to him is by showing how your wallet fits into both his professional and casual routines: his week-day work routine in the office and his weekend routine of relaxing on the beach. You can even market how this wallet is the perfect gift for one’s spouse for any special occasion (i.e. Birthday, Valentine’s Day, Christmas, you name it). These are only two of many examples that can be used to showcase the versatility of your offering to your target Japanese consumers.
Make sure to include specifics about the entirety of your product or service AND how your offering ties into the daily lives of your Japanese consumers. They will appreciate this deeper focus in detail, and be more inclined to make the purchase–as well as convert into your loyal and returning customers.
#2 Choose visuals that best appeal to holistic-thinking Japanese
[humble_caption text=”Provide Japanese users with even more context with your image choices”]
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HOlistic visual preferences
Images with a differing ratio of foreground to context are easier to comprehend for holistic thinkers, like many of your target consumers in Japan.The difference between analytic and holistic visual interpretations can even be seen with individual aesthetic choices like the selection of a Facebook profile photo. A study conducted by Chih-Mao Huang and Denise Park in 2012 compared the face-to-frame ratio in over 500 Facebook profiles from Taiwanese and American users. The results showed that American profile pictures placed more priority on the focal face over the background. In contrast, East Asians primarily chose profile pictures with plenty of space devoted to the context surrounding the person.
what visuals work best
When composing your Japanese marketing strategy, you should use images that maximize surrounding background and provide lots of contextual information. This will heighten your communication with your Japanese consumers by allowing them to visualize the overall picture of your product or service service as well as your company. Let’s consider an example. Perhaps you would like to include an image of your office that portrays the values and atmosphere of your company. Analytic users may prefer a narrow shot that focuses on a few prominently featured individuals, like the below left image illustrates. However, holistic users might prefer the image on the right: a wide shot that gives a broader sense of the office environment.
[humble_caption text=”Different photographs can illustrate the same message to analytic and holistic perspectives”]
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To suit the visual preferences of your Japanese consumers, reconsider which images to display within your marketing message. Choosing more zoomed out images that provide lots of contextual information will improve the quality of communication with your target Japanese consumers and lead them to prioritize your company and offering above your competition.
#3 Tie your content together with an appropriate choice in design and layout
[humble_caption text=”The detailed structure and design contribute to the sacred and grandeur image of the famed Fushimi Inari-Taisha“]
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Analytic vs. holistic layout preferences
When marketing to your Japanese audience, organizing all the content and context you’ve compiled may seem very difficult. Especially in comparison to the clear and concise content design that is viewed best to captivate Western audiences. From a more analytic perspective, including all these different components within a single marketing message may seem “cluttered” and even confusing. However, we must acknowledge and adopt the way Japanese prefer to process information by communicating with them through a more holistic approach. Like we’ve mentioned earlier, there’s no single correct design or layout that best adheres to all companies and their consumers. However, through our years of experience we’ve learned that Japanese people react better with marketing messages that convey a comprehensive meaning they can tie into their personal values and beliefs.
your layout should create a “complete” image
From a marketing standpoint, this generally means that Japanese people prefer to have freedom to interpret the information you give them; therefore, a structured and concise content marketing strategy will not suffice here in Japan. Instead, focus on a strategy that displays all of your meaningful details in a way that allows your Japanese consumers to seamlessly piece them together. And from there, they can easily develop an all-inclusive and positive impression of your product/service and company.
When composing your Japanese marketing strategy, remember to make all your compiled details highly accessible to your Japanese consumers by displaying them in a way that appeals to their holistic style of thinking. Asides from your content format, the color, texture and style you choose to display your information on can greatly add to the general impression your holistic Japanese audience forms when analyzing your marketing message.
Again, we can’t tell you what format and design is best for your company and target consumers (right now). The best thing you can do is test different ones and find which strategy produces the best results. We provide services that will help you create and test different marketing strategies that work best for your company and Japanese consumers.
Your Next Steps
From here on, keep these tips in mind when composing your marketing strategy:
- Expand your content and provide enough context
- Choose visuals with a differing ratio of foreground to context
- Choose layouts that easily piece together content — creating a complete image
Each company and target market is very different and requires a lot of exploration and assessments. There’s no outlined approach we can provide everyone that will guarantee success in the Japanese market. However, we can help you through the tedious process of testing and creating a marketing strategy that will gain you a solid position within the complex Japanese market. Our team of local creatives and strategists combine our experiences and extensive research to create an astute strategy that explicitly caters to your company and your target market here in Japan.
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