Consumer Products – Market Characteristics
| You can find descriptions of Japanese products or Japanese consumer behavior on social networking sites or blogs written by visitors. You may have encountered comments made regarding anything from the small food portions to the elaborate functionality of household consumer electronics.
Such seeming quirkiness aside, in reality, your products would most likely need to make some adjustments to the Japanese market. Even if the concept of the product is well accepted, improvements on specifications will be required mainly in terms of quality. For example, even if you designed fashionable clothes, the choice of zipper manufacturer not being YKK could easily discourage Japanese consumers. This type of problems regarding details happens so often. In addition, consumers, retailers, and distributors often show strong concerns about product safety of imported goods. For example, if you sell items, such as food or health care products that may affect consumer health, distributors or retailers will require you to do tests in Japan even though you have already done the same tests in your home country. They are extremely cautious and expect perfect quality. These kinds of customer needs drive up the prices of goods in Japan. In other words, if you prove the quality of your products, it can be sold at a high price. This can be interpreted that the entry barriers of this market are very high, but the profit can also be large. |
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