Nathan Hoernig

Marketing in Japan can come with a unique set of challenges. What do you find are the most important cultural factors to be aware of when doing business in Japan?

Just like any market in the world, the key to marketing is solving the right problem for your audience. Many people talk about marketing in Japan as if it’s a black and white problem—you navigate the culture, or you don’t. However, we have to understand that the problem you fix, having the product that does that, and then assigning an appropriate price is the first step. Humans are still humans in any culture.

We find that many brands come into the market blaming culture for their underperformance, but sometimes the offer itself hasn’t been made with humans in mind. Presuming you have a great pain-resolving product in place, the next step is to break down and understand the key pillars of culture, identify how to address those points in your messaging, nurturing, and channel strategy, and then iterate and test. As an example, my amazing team of marketers at Humble Bunny were able to extract 172 unique elements of Japan, which we then tied back into 8 focal points. This clarity is what has allowed us to identify where to optimize the strategies of our Clients, focus on the right areas, and then improve their overall performance.

Being an innovator comes with a certain degree of risk, how do you balance testing new things with profitability and client expectations?

Ultimately, no one can fault you for trying. I try to run an organization focused around “seeing people” and “accepting them”—especially when they’re trying to make an impact for the betterment of the team and industry. As a human being myself, I also aim to surround myself with colleagues, partners, and Clients who carry the same mindset. If I can’t try something new, I’m not living. And if I’m not trying something new, I can’t expect to find the “key” to building a novel innovation for my Clients, my business, nor my team culture. Being in digital marketing also requires some sense of risk because we’re always doing something new–a new platform, new product, etc.

In late 2022, I spent a long time doing a re-discovery of myself. It’s when I coined the concept of True+th Architect. It was the realization that I was happiest and at my best when I was building something unconventional, and doing it with honesty and integrity. Going through that exercise, discovering my own persona, and then asserting and saying “I’m happy with myself” has also given me the confidence to shed negativity.

I still get emotional, but I can find comfort and clarity in my emotions much more quickly. This has been very freeing to me. The key here is that I don’t allow myself to effect this individualistically. it’s how I use my energy to serve others, which in turn is how I find myself living content, happy, and unfettered. I hope to surround myself with people who see HOW I’m trying my best to support them. If they don’t, that’s completely okay.

Creativity is often found in collaboration, how does your team approach brainstorming when you need to find an innovative solution to a problem?

A few years back, to boost our strategic and creative output, as well as to support the quality of our work, we added an original and unique structure to creative collaboration, and it’s one of our proudest culture innovations at Humble Bunny. We created a 4-grid graph. Upon this graph, team members are free to plot their projects or places of concern. The grids are prioritized allowing us to focus on the most urgent items. From the grid, we execute something called a “Hands in Session”.

Everyone on the team is required to attend a minimum of 2 of these sessions each month. The individual who plotted on the grid coordinates the meeting using a well-structured template, and we come up with great ideas. Internally, our rule is that all ideas are worth talking on. Sometimes the “worst” ideas are the ones that carry the best opportunity. In fact, when we developed LocaRISE, the Japan marketing industry’s first ever formula for overcoming Japan-culture marketing performance, We featured one of these sessions. This is where our “172” came from in question 1 above. No individual can come up with that many points themselves. We’re fortunate to have a great process, and an even better team!

How do you evaluate trade-offs between short term ROI versus long term brand image?

Long-term brand image is everything. As a momentum-driven leader, I’m much more interested in long-term results than I am short-term. I believe that well-executed brands are the businesses that last. Therefore, we’re very resistant to short-term tactics.

Of course, like all businesses, we do have our drops in revenue. To handle this in the past has almost ALWAYS created a self-reflective environment. In 2017, we saw a large downturn in conversion: we changed our product. In 2023, we also saw a flash downturn: we rebuilt our brand identity, and productized the analysis and creative localization side of our work that was begging to be more structured and public-facing.

This was LocaRISE. We’re mid-launch for the formalized version right now so expect to see that more in the coming months. Building these things of course means that we’re losing money, but these phases of our work tend to always lead to a better future as they force us to make meaningful changes and improve our offer.

What are the main challenges you think face marketers in the next couple of years, and how do you hope to counter them?

The last 20 years have given us the renaissance of the internet. This created digital marketing and as it was in its infancy, also introduced channels and strategies that were more or less incomplete in how they worked. A great example is Google and it’s search algorithms just evolving over-and-over, feeling things out, as it become a better and better product. Because these algorithms are becoming more intelligent (by way of machine-learning and AI), us measly humans do not need to hold the technical or research skills that we once needed in the past.

AI and machines can now navigate technical interfaces, and research and recover anything we need–as long as it exists on the web. As a result, performance is becoming harder to “hack”. I believe that as a result, businesses will be challenged to, very simply, be better businesses. It’s for this reason that the most important aspects of digital marketing, we believe, will be very simply a return to the basic fundamentals: have a great product and a great brand that looks to have a positive impact on people, and answers a real pain point. From here, the skillset will wrap primarily to strategy, creative ideation, and developing the content and cadence to get your business visible and desirable to potential customers.

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