Hunting lions in Tokyo

“When you want to hunt a lion, don’t go the zoo, go to the jungle” (Kevin Roberts, Lovemarks). The best market research is the research you do by walking around in the market yourself. So I took a half-day off to visit some supermarkets and convenience stores in Tokyo. Noe, an interim at Saatchi Tokyo, was my guide to find the proper supermarkets and brands. If you don’t speak Japanese there is no other way. You hardly recognize a logo, most names are Japanese or translated into Japanese (see Ariel package in picture), and there are many (food) products that you just don’t know what it is. Or let's say that I didn’t know almost 1 out of 3 products. Noe had a good job in explaining me some of them. Apart from this ‘foreigner problem’, the supermarkets we visited were very clean, very well organized, the food looked very tasty, everything nicely packaged and presented, the store communication was (this time) efficient. I saw some nice little shopper marketing ideas.  The communication in these supermarkets was not too overwhelming, unlike a lot of the convenience stores that we visited (see picture).