Dominic here.

June 23 was the final Waseda Marketing Forum of the academic year, which went off with a bang with World Wrestling Entertainments (WWE) VP of East Asia Marketing, Ed Wells. Before arriving at the WWE a year and a half ago, he worked at major entertainment companies like Fox, Viacom, Nickelodean, MTV, and Disney, and is the consummate entertainment marketer. WWE is his latest, and possibly most exciting assignment yet.

The WWE has come out of a gradual transition from what many remember as the World Wrestling Federation, and has become a fully integrated multimedia company with a market cap of nearly 900 million USD. Mr. Wells presented some pretty shocking facts about the WWE's success: they are publicly traded company on the NYSE, they broadcast in 145 countries in 30 languages, they are the United States' longest running weekly episodic show, they are the #1 program on their respective channels, and for the past three years they are the number two searched entity on Yahoo!, behind Britney Spears and beating out Barack Obama, even during an election season.

Mr. Well's presentation was entitled "Marketing to the masses in an increasingly diversified marketplace," but what he wanted to focus on was "marketing in the day of the incredible shrinking budget," a topic that was perhaps more relevant and universal for the audience. He listed three important factors for marketers to remember; creating an emotional connection, integrating and leading, knowing your assets, and knowing your limits.

Emotional Connection - As an entertainment company, their wrestling broadcasts contain distinctive characters and storylines. The success of a talent ( a wrestler ) is not solely judged by the wrestling ability, but also by their ability to connect with the audience. "You either make it pop, or you don't. If you don't you can expect to be phased out." The ability to emotionally connect with the audience is what makes the fans of the WWE so loyal in following their favorite stars through different mediums, and makes them so varied in age, race, and gender.

Integrating and Leading - As a multimedia entertainment company, Mr. Wells displayed the media assets through the form of a wheel, which listed mediums like television, magazines, pay per view, talent, internet, mobile, etc. Every one of these mediums is an entry point for their audience, but it is even more important to lead the audience to go around the wheel, following the WWE through different mediums. Leading them around the wheel has to be logical to the user. "Does it make sense in a multinational setting?"

Know your assets - In the day of slashed marketing budgets knowing what assets you can utilize is important. Agencies can be expensive. The WWE tries to keep as much of what do in-house, from production crews to marketing.

Know your limits- The caveat. There are people that can do things better than you, and it is essential that you utilize their expertise. In Japan, collaboration is an important tool to reach the market, as the WWE recently did with popular local artists to create t-shirts promoting their brand.

The WWE will have a tour in Tokyo at the Budokan on July 7th and 8th. Check out their website here, tickets are still available.

Michael here.

Shack here. We celebrated the second anniversary of Tokyo 2.0 Monday, with the biggest meetup in the history of the event. Some of the attendance was probably due to Geeks on a Plane, Dave McClure's traveling band of VC's and innovators.

There were some great presentations...

...a huge crowd...

...and excellent networking, in the small amount of downtime between presentations. I met some VC's from the bay area, had some conversations about the state of venture capital and angel investment in Asia, and caught up with buddies from the Tokyo tech world. The crowd was a little bigger and louder than optimal for deep conversation, but it was still a great time.

Dominic and I are on the steering committee for Tokyo 2.0, and we'll be working together on the July event. It's a great chance to learn something and start building a network here, so if you've got Monday, July 13th free, come on down to Super Deluxe at 6:30!

For more photos and thoughts from the event, head over to my personal blog, Shack in Japan.

 

We heard from Daniel that an Investment Competition was taking place inter Japanese Universities. Ken attented and noted down the following key points:

 

The idea is to form a team of 3 to 5 people (recommended to include a girl) to come up with a report on a company assigned for every team about the IR (Investor Relations) of the company. Last year, it was Kao(花王).

Each team has a mentor who gives some advice. The length of the time to talk to your mentor is limited to 6 hours. 

 

Schedule

June: They are going to decide which company we all need to write a report on.

July 27^th: Kick Off Meeting

Early August: Seminars on corporate ethics and ways to analyze the company

September 7^th: Analyst meeting

October 5^th: Deadline for the first draft

October 26^th: Deadline for the final draft

November 6^th: Results

November 27^th: Awarding ceremony and final result for Japan competition

 

You need really good Japanese proficiency to participate in this competition.  You are going to be talking to your mentor (Certified CFA) and write a report in Japanese.

 

Merits to participate in this competition

l         Get to know your mentor who actually works in the industry

l         Have a chance to cultivate your skills in financial analytical skill

l         If you win in Japan, you will get to go to Singapore to participate in Asian competition in May 2010.

 

[CFA Global Investment Research Challenge]

 

 

 

 

 

Matthew Skyrm from Sony Corporation's Business Strategy Division visited Waseda University on June 3rd to share his experiences of starting a company from his apartment in San Francisco 10 years ago (which eventually became Kick.com) to raising $7.2 million in venture capital to selling it to Sony. He has spent 15 years in various internet businesses and has had management positions in Sony, Yahoo!, and Kick.com. As the title of his presentation, "From a Geek to an Entrepreneur to a Salary Man" implies, Matthew went through various phases in his career and kindly agreed to share some of the most important lessons he learned from his wide-range of experiences.



The founding of Kick.com was simply driven by Matthew's desire to find a solution to a problem he faced with having music as a great part of his life. One day in the early 90s, when Matthew was listening to Red Hot Chili Peppers on one of the first mp3 players to ever exist, he wondered when the next Red Hot Chili Peppers album was going to be released. He liked this band so much that he didn't want to risk missing out any information regarding the release of the new album. Matthew, who lived in San Francisco at that time, also started to wonder what his brother back in the east coast was listening to. How convenient would it be for a computer to remember what kind of artists you listen to and give you information related to that artist's other songs and albums as well as provide information on what kind of music people in your network listen to? Matthew told his friends about this idea and rented out an apartment in San Francisco to start developing an application that reflected these ideas. This is how Matthew became the founder of Kick.com.

Kick.com's main product was the "Music Companion," a free application that provided users with information on album art, news, reviews, related artists and playlist suggestions based on an analysis of users' listening choices. Although this idea is very common today (you may notice that this application sounds a lot like I-tunes), no one had ever thought of such an application back then. Kick.com was considered to embrace the latest technology and gained popularity among its consmers and investors.

However, with the burst of the dotcom bubble, profits started to decline and the business was tearing apart. Matthew decided it was time to sell the company. He had two offers but chose the one that offered him more money. This way, he was fulfilling his fiduciary duties to his investors, although one of the conditions of the agreement was for him to step down as the CEO. However, the company that agreed to buy Kick.com suddenly decided not to at the last minute, leaving Matthew and his team devastated. This is when Matthew learned that there are no rules in business and that a deal is not done until the money is in your bank account. The truth is that people play tricks and sometimes you may have to be the person playing tricks on other people. Unable to do anything about the company's legal decision, Matthew called up the other company that had offered to buy Kick.com, which was his to-be employer, Sony. Sony agreed to buy Kick.com - but for half the price it had initially offered. Once again, Matthew felt that business is indeed unfair.

Through Sony's acquisition of Kick.com, Matthew became an employee of Sony. Sony wanted to get rid of Kick.com and the team had to obey to their new boss. After Kick.com was dissolved, a new application similar to Kick.com was created by another party and gained popularity. The rise of a similar business model made Matthew realize the importance of timing in business. Later, Matthew moved to Sony Japan where he introduced the same concept of Kick.com to the Japanese. The Japanese liked his idea and immediately put it to use by forming a tie-up with KDDI's LISMO. The song application was created as part of LISMO and was called "Utatomo." Utatomo currently has over a million users.

Matthew claims he should have quit Sony and started his own Utatomo in Japan. However, because of his past experiences with Kick.com, he wanted to stick to a stable job that could ensure a roof over his family. A message that Matthew wants to emphasize here is that fear should never drive your decision.

Although Matthew once left Japan to work at Yahoo! in California, he returned to Japan and is now currently the Chief of product planning at Sony's Business Strategy division. He recently directed the establishment of a video-storage site.

Matthew's presentation was full of lessons/guidance that can be useful in our career and lifetime, such as those highlighted above. However, I sensed that the greatest lesson from his presentation was the importance of finding something you are truly passionate about and working as hard as you can to achieve that goal. Matthew claims that he was lucky enough to have his hobby turned into his career, but perhaps this can be possible for everyone.

Overall, Matthew's presentation was a valuable experience that gave me insight on what the real business world is like, the hardships of creating and developing a company, and what it takes to become a true business leader.


"80 percent of success is just showing up" -- Woody Allen.

Dominic here.

Myspace  entered the Japanese market 2 and a half year sago in November 2006, and has been moderately successful. However over the past years, it is possible to see how Myspace Japan has begun to shrink from when it first entered (with great initial investment from LA Headquarters) to now. I had the chance to visit them at their beautiful Shiodome office just after they arrived in Japan; they were aggressive and eager to take on the reigning Japanese champion of Mixi. 2.5 years later, they've downsized into a smaller office removed from the offshoots Shibuya, due to what they claim as `A move to integrate ourselves away from the manufactures in Shiodome to the hustle of Shibuya`, an interesting claim to make as they had once shared a building with media giants like Yahoo! Japan and Softbank.



So, MySpace held an event last night event, entitled `コミュニティを創造するコンテンツーー注目アーティストと世界最大SNSのコラボ` to underscore how MySpace has been successful at attracting and maintaining musicians and their fans on their SNS. What was indicative of MySpaces evolution was how they continuously labeled themselves, orally and on print media, as an `Entrainment SNS`.  The artists they featured, both painters, were Yorke and Akira Osawa, who they claimed to be the types of creative professionals using MySpace with great success.

MySpace Promotion Director Mr. Saitou outlined the three promotion channels MySpace is using. 1) A magazine called MySpace From JP which essentially repackages online content coupled with interviews to print form, and it has achieved very moderate success according to his own account. 2) MySpace Cafes, where they have arrangements with 100 or so cafes in Japan that carry their logo, though the effectiveness of this type of promotion is harder to assess and 3) a radio program hosted by JWave called RadioxSpider.






Shack and I both had the impression however, that MySpace has some serious problems that it doesn't appear to recognize:

• Though MySpace has seen some rewards from their large investments in building communities around artists, it has left the individual user alienated as they try to navigate between different communities which are not their own. Further, MySpace has over commercialized their website to the extent that the degree of freedom to self express, which is more than most other SNSes with more relaxed HTML/CSS input, has been crushed by raging advertisements and in your face promotions of artists.
• Mr. Saitou made one of the most horrifying comments of the night by essentially defining Web 2.0 as "the ability to get products delivered to your door really fast, like Amazon." Shack and I were in bewilderment that he worked at one of the biggest social media companies in the world without understanding the basic tenants of the industry he was a part of. 
• The artists did not add much value to the event, at times they would make a statement that hurt MySpaces imagine. An example was: "MySpace doesn't really effect my sales." They had a moderate attitude about the event and MySpace, which turned off much of the audience, as sleeping audience members could be spotted at any given moment.
• The entire event held its focus more on where MySpace had come from, and hardly any talk of where it was going. A complacent attitude could be felt as statements like "I couldn't imagine something like MySpace 10 years ago" were repeated consistently. What happened to the MySpace of 2002 which was fighting vigorously like a web company should? I wonder if its organizational expansion and take over by News Corp has made it resemble a weighty, lethargic traditional media giant.
  

In all, the event did not reflect positively on MySpace. Users are increasingly turning away from MySpace for being messy, over-commercialized, and inattentive of users.

You can read a more positive review of the event from XShibuya, the hosts of the event. 

Shack here. This Blog Sits at the (Intersection of Anthropology and Economics) is one of my new favorite dailies; I feel like I'll be reading these archives for the next few days. The author, one Grant McCracken, on a recent PepsiCo branding debacle:

You've heard about the PepsiCo debacle? It will be a case study and a cautionary tale for many years to come.

In the apt words of Stuart Elliott,

It took 24 years, but PepsiCo now has its own version of New Coke.

The basic details: Sometime in 2008, PepsiCo Americas CEO Massimo d'Amore decided to rebrand the Pepsi, Gatorade, Tropicana and Mountain Dew.

It's epic error. It represents perhaps the largest and most cavilier destruction of brand value we will ever see.

I want to concentrate on Tropicana. A new Tropicana package was launched in January (package on right) to replace a package of long standing (on left). This was then withdrawn in late February. But not before sales had fallen 20%. Consumers were furious.

So what was PepsiCo thinking? Here's Peter Arnell, the man D'Amore asked to do the Tropicana package design.

*The objective was very, very clearly laid out. We needed to rejuvenate, reengineer, rethink, reparticipate in popular culture. *

On balance, this sounds like a laudatory end. Of course a brand should be in touch with popular culture.

But let's look at what Peter Arnell, acting as Pepsi's unofficial Chief Culture Officer, thinks this means. His first act of office, apparently, was to embark upon what BusinessWeek calls a "five-week world tour of trendy design houses."

This is where he went searching for culture? In design houses? Dude. A CCO is not just responsible for culture as defined by designers. He or she is also responsible for all the rest of American culture. And he won't find this exhaustively represented in design houses. Indeed, the rest of American culture is, I would argue, sometimes systematically excluded from the design houses.

(full excellent article here)

I find that a lot of design-house "design" has artistic merit, but takes a few generations to turn into something with both aesthetic and mass appeal. Regular consumers don't want to be challenged by their brands, they want to be comforted and affirmed. H&M, Apple, and Ikea get this: they wrap little seeds of high design in intuition and accessibility. It's cool to be cool, but if your market doesn't "get" it, you've failed.

(This is a cross-post from my personal blog)

Shack here. A BarCamp is a day of intentionally free-flowing, intense, themed presentations and discussion, but Wikipedia probably does a better job explaining the ideas behind it than I do. I met up with 94 other internet otaku, nerds, teachers, bloggers, and podcasters to talk about where the Web came from, what it is, and where it's headed. 

Highlights from the event:

Fumi's talk on Japanese geek culture

Mitcho presenting Ubiquity (didn't actually make the talk, but saw the slideshare presentation)

Karamoon on Security

The above are a small sampling of what was going on. Check out our space in Vimeo for videos of the talks, or Slideshare for the presentations.

I led a talk on "The Transient Web." We talked about the implications of relying on third-party services to host embedded content, and the deceptive permanence of the web institutions we take for granted. What happens when Flickr or YouTube don't have the money to run their servers any more? Suddenly all the blogs linking or embedding that content, and all the blogs that link to them, are dead trails of broken hypertext. What happens when TinyURL goes down, and no one knows where all the shortened URLs in our tweets are supposed
to point?
I guess we could maintain our own backups of all our content, keep it on the same server as our blogs, and do regular exports, but the economist in me says that's inefficient, and I'm just too damn lazy. Is there a way we can collectively work on web permanence, or are we expecting everything we create to rot away into a network of dead links and broken scripts? We didn't really reach a conclusion, but it was still a good discussion to have.

Barcamp was about spontaneity, about leaving marketing at the door,
about sharing and learning. It had its ups and downs, but I think it
generally went off really well, and was a good base for future Japan
barcamps. Big ups to Karamoon, Jim, lhupa, and all the other staff for
putting the event together, as well as all our sponsors. Unsubsidized,
I'm sure an all-day conference with food would be outside my student
budget.

Oh, and my pictures:

Want to get involved in the next BarCamp? Run over to the already-formed planning site for BarCamp Tokyo Fall 2009.

Leading marketing research company The NPD Group, Inc. has found three areas of the US apparel market that seem to be growing despite the decrease in consumer spending and decline in total apparel sales - the jeans, tights, and dresses businesses.

Jeans
The dollar volume sales for total jeans increased 2.3% for the 3 months ending with February 2009, while the total apparel sales declined 6.3% for that same period. Premium jeans sales also increased 17% during the year 2008. "That is the time period that was the most challenging in terms of consumer spending, so any growth during that time is significant. With the newfound focus on fit by some of the commodity brands coupled with women's never ending quest for the perfect pair of jeans, the passion for denim is alive and well" said Marshal Cohen, chief industry analyst of the NPD Group. Cohen also suspects that the increase in demand for outerwear had been delayed for a year or so, creating a greater need for it during the past year.

Tights
The dollar volume sales for tights increased 11% for the 3 months ending with February 2009 and the annual 2008 hosiery sales rose about 3%. This increase in sales is due to the consumers' change in perception of hosiery - they have finally begun to realize that leggings/stockings/tights are important and inexpensive fashion items after great efforts by the hosiery industry to attract consumers to its products.

Dresses
Sales of women's dresses were also up 11% for the 3 months ending with February 2009 and grew 12% in the year 2008. The popularity of dresses is due to the fact that a consumer can buy a "complete outfit" by purchasing one dress. Dresses have also been embraced by numerous magazines and celebrities, helping drive its growth. With the warmer weather approaching, sales of dresses are likely to continue increasing.

Despite the overall decline in apparel sales, these three pockets of growth give the apparel industry some hope that fashion will lead it back on track.