Selling to the niches

[Mulboyne]

Marketers target Japan's affluent sub-cultures
FT article - link to Straits Times Version
TOKYO - Twenty-four-old Yayoi is obsessed with stars. In a home-made video, she shows off her star candles, a star barrette and even an ear cleaner adorned with a star charm.
'Stars make me feel happy, because I feel as though their radiance is somehow transferred to me,' she says earnestly to the camera. And then: 'When it comes to stars, money is no object.'

Advertisers and marketers are waking up to the swathes of young people in Japan who belong to 'tribes' or sub-cultures and have a great deal of money to spend on items they feel help define their lifestyle.
...McCann-Erickson, the global advertising giant, has launched a specialist communications service called Tag Tokyo which targets the 18-to-28-year-old market. Tag Tokyo gathers data on young people using innovative tools that are unusual in Japan. Ms Yayoi, the star-infatuated woman, was videoed via a Tag tool called 'Everybody is Ken Burns', after the documentary film-maker. They hand video cameras to 'targets', who then make an uncensored video of his or her life.
...'Niche consumption patterns have emerged in the Japanese market,' says Ms Futaba Tanaka, a chief researcher at Hakuhodo, a leading Japanese advertising agency, and author of the book Live Marketing. 'A decade ago, young people coveted the same things. But now, the Japanese have more sophisticated patterns of collecting information, such as PCs and cell phones.'