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Joao Paulo Rosman
Interview with Joao Paulo Rosman - October 2009
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| Joao Paulo Rosman is an American born in Boston who lives in Sao Paulo, Brazil. JP is a marketer with an eye on the Japanese media and marketing scene. JP fell in love with Japan ever since he spent a month and a half over there in December 2006. JP is planning to go back to study media convergence in Japan through a scholarship granted by MEXT.Stay tuned for more.. JP's blog takeme2Japan discusses media, marketing and culture. |  |
| Us: | Joao Paulo Rosman: |
| What trends of social/digital media do you observe in Japanese companies? What trends do you foresee in the near future? | Well, I wouldn’t call this a trend, but a continuity of business development. Japanese society uses Mobiles for a large array of motives, such as:
Social economical projects as U-Japan. Another point to observe is Cuteness. Cuteness, or Kawaii, is a big thing in Japanese Marketing and there Iconic Characters that are all over Japan in most advertising, with no gender or age restriction. |
| A recent report by Lightspeed Reseach has found that only 9% of Japanese consumers would improve their view of a company that befriended them via a social networking platform and 13% of them would improve their opinion of the brand if it had a blog to talk about the company and its products. Should Japanese businesses adopt social media applications in how they communicate and do business? | The thing is “Social Media is a Tool”, I’ve seen a lot of people saying “I want to invest in Social Media” and doing it the wrong way. A Social Media strategy demands hard work, consumes a lot of time and dedication, you got to track peoples, trends, relate to people and develop quality content. Content is very important, and I see that most businesses have a hard time delivering interesting content, material that their clients can relate. But when done right, the response are very positive, placing Client and Brand in a dialog is the best way to get insights for development of products, services and businesses, and the clients will, in an incredible speed, share experiences - good and/or bad. Also, Japanese people like to read, they like info on what they are consuming. The more the merrier, so if they find info on their social network systems I believe they will consider it as a valuable information source. So, yes, Japanese businesses should invest in social media applications. |
| As social networking sites tend to attract the attention of a younger crowd, do Japanese businesses perceive it as being more of a new toy than something serious? If so, can this perception be changed? | Well there is a huge variety of Social Networks blooming every day, and they attract different public profiles. We have cooking, business, otaku, sports, health, cars, fashion, you name it, and Japanese people are really into their hobbies, trying harder and harder to develop their skills. Social Networks offers a great opportunity to attend this demand of knowledge and barter experience. Hence, I believe that this perception that Social Networking is merely a “teen movement” very short sighted. In fact, people that are interpreting Facebook and My Space as models of social media are wrong, because that is just the tip of the iceberg. |
| In post-industrial societies, young people are growing up in what Henry Jenkins (2006) has dubbed “convergence culture”— an increasingly interactive and participatory media ecology where Internet communication ties together both old and new media forms. What implications will this have on Japanese companies in their methods of engaging Japanese consumers of today? | Transmedia Storytelling is a Blast and we have some really good examples on how they work to engage people with Brands. Take Lost for instance, the show has created a huge legion of fans that share spoilers and theories. The producers of Lost created bits of side stories on different media (videogames, websites, you tube videos etc.), that extend the power of the main narrative. So, when all is put together the fans really experience something unique. Japan is “the” land of media opportunities, with a strong mobile culture, manga that evolves to anime and video games. The convergence culture in Japan is an old culture, companies already use the power of icons, e.g. iconic characters, that travel between multiple media platforms, to aggregate values. People that identify themselves with the icons also identify themselves with related brands. |
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