Rakuten looking to get global and the discriminating Japanese consumer

This month I am attending a lot of send-off parties held by various investment banks, consulting firms and HR agencies for people going to business school abroad. The parties are an opportunity to hear the experience of Japanese students that went abroad to get their MBAs and eventually came back to Japan to work.

Some of the companies have made good impressions on me. Rakuten, operator of Japan's largest online shopping site for example, is making a big push at the moment to acquire foreign, or overseas trained talent in their quest to become more “Global”. Some of their recent overseas initiatives include bids to purchase Buy.com and France’s PriceMinister. Rakuten is also tied up with the Chinese search engine Baidu.com. They will be attending the Boston Career Forum (BCF), the largest career forum for Japanese/English bilinguals to help them find that talent. One attractive point the company has is all the company’s internal communications are in English.

One company that has really caught my attention is Unilever Japan. Unilever, as you may know, markets brands such as Lipton Tea, Dove, and AXE. Unilever Japan, like Rakuten, is making a big push to get “worldly” people working there and will start an MBA Summer Intern program for the first time in Summer 2011. At the seminar we were able to talk to people in Unilever’s Tokyo office from various backgrounds and their experiences at the firm. There are a lot of opportunities to work in the company’s offices all over the world. What was most interesting to me, however, was hearing about the difficulties breaking into the Japanese market. Japanese consumers are notoriously discriminating. It takes a lot of tinkering to get everything about a product right. The launch of AXE Body Spray, for example, was much later than the launch in every other countries. AXE’s racy ads needed to be toned down, the shape of its can needed to be changed, as well as the actual strength of the product. Here is an interview with one of the people I met at the seminar.

I must admit I wasn’t thinking too much about marketing before going to Unilever. After meeting with the people there and hearing what they had to say about their experience, it definitely sounds like a fun opportunity. We’ll see how the cards play out, but I do want to look into it.

I am signing a lease for my new apartment this morning and will be moving in the weekend of July 23. Just in time for the start of orientation on July 26. I will be living in downtown LA in the financial district. Going to try and go car-less in LA for the first semester at least. Hope it’s not too big of a deal.

Only 3 weekends left in Tokyo now. Not much to do at the moment outside of arranging for my things to get sent home and selling/giving things away. If you need anything for the house I might be able to set you up with something!