Recently, I have had the opportunity to describe our new Japan market entry (JME) offering to a number of potential partners and clients in both writing and verbally. I’ve spoken to both agencies and brands about our service, which supports brands in entering the Japanese market and selling to straight to consumers directly. What’s become clear over time is that communicating the merits of this product in a succinct way to a non-expert audience is incredibly challenging. Many of the USPs are only apparent to an audience familiar with the area, like agencies or consultants, who are able to understand shorthand pros without additional context.

Unlike agencies who face these issues frequently, most brands do not have experience entering the Japanese market and therefore haven’t experienced the pain points that this service is meant to resolve. Until now my way of communicating about the JME service has not been pedagogical enough and lacked the context to help those without direct experience understand the benefit. As a result, pitches have usually been immediately positively received by agencies with plenty of experience while needing considerably more time with brands.

This is obviously not the fault of the audience, but an issue with the pitch. Finding a balance between giving enough context to make the service attractive to those without direct experience while not going overly long and losing brevity is the biggest challenge.

As an example of this, the ability to sell directly on Japanese marketplaces and sell directly to consumers without a distributor is one of the USPs of our proposal. Many of the brands we are talking to do not have experience working with a regional distributor and, in particular, not with a Japanese distributor. Unless you have experience with this and know the many issues that it can have such as signing away oversight, being stuck in multi-year deals and often a focus on, for example, retail over e-commerce etc., then you are not going to understand why having transparency, short term contracts and direct control are attractive.

Over the next week, I’m going to work on improving the JME pitch so that it performs as well with audiences that are less familiar with the Japanese market.

Sebastian Benedikz
Global Sales Executive
SOPHOLA, Inc