Category: Japanese business blog

Chinese more loyal to Japanese electronics brands, less loyal to cars and food

49.8% of Chinese surveyed in October of last year said that they still liked Canon, despite the current anti Japanese protests, the highest rating of the 50 brands surveyed.

The survey (Japanese) was conducted by Nikkei BP Consulting in conjunction with Embrain Infobridge China, of 2380 people in major Chinese cities, via the internet.

11 brands scored higher than the 40.2% average – mostly electronics related:

  1. Canon
  2. Sony
  3. Nikon
  4. Casio
  5. Nintendo
  6. Panasonic
  7. Sharp
  8. Shiseido
  9. Citizen
  10. Olympus
  11. Toshiba

Those scoring substantially below average were mostly car or food brands, including Mild Seven (cigarettes), Subaru, a noodle restaurant chain, Fuji Film, Nissan, Mitsubishi Motors,Nissin Foods, Mazda, a beef restaurant chain, Honda, Toyota and Hitachi.

Car brands always seem to be the focus of this kind of political and trade friction – memories of the USA “Japan bashing” in the 1980s, which apparently has returned even in the USA now with the Trans Pacific Partnership free trade agreement negotiations.

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The monozukuri of customer service

I mentioned in my previous article that there seems to be a monozukuri (literally “making things”) of customer service in Japan. This may seem an odd way of putting it, as monozukuri is often used to mean that manufacturing, and not the service sector, is given the most importance in society. In this case I am using “monozukuri” to mean “craftsmanship” – a pride in using ones hands to create something of high quality.

I remember when I was a little girl living in Sendai, coming home from school one day to find that the builders who were repairing our strange old ijinkan (purpose built for foreigners) house, had made tiny origami cranes out of some of my stamp collection. I was quite cross that my stamps had been ruined but my parents were delighted that these rough handed men could create something so delicate and fiddly.

I had learnt origami at kindergarten in Japan although I was never very good at it, lacking the patience to be as precise in the folding as is necessary to get the best result. Nonetheless it has given me a great appreciation of the skill of the assistants wrapping my purchases in Japanese department stores – especially at this time of year, as I make such a terrible mess of wrapping Christmas presents!

I also learnt Japanese dance as a child. Along with origami and the many other arts widely taught in Japan such as tea ceremony and kendo, there was emphasis not only on the way the body moves but how objects are handled – learning to fold a kimono or open a fan – which I am sure influences the way customer service is so gracefully and skilfully delivered in Japan.

Equivalent skills are not widely taught in British schools, so not only is it rare in the UK for gift wrapping to be offered but when it is, it is done badly. Usually you have to ask, and sometimes there is a charge. The only shop I have been to recently where gift wrapping was free, and beautifully done, was Floris, a family owned traditional perfumers in Jermyn Street, London. The assistant was not one of the family, as far as I know, but seemed to have pride serving me well, and was very knowledgeable about the products on offer.

This pride in being knowledgeable about the products is true of another retail chain which is consistently praised for its good service – Majestic, the wine merchants. Majestic consciously emphasises customer service as being a key value of its brand, and supports this through plenty of training for its staff. It probably helps that the customers Majestic attracts are wine enthusiasts, and therefore more likely to appreciate the knowledge and service that Majestic offers.

Monozukuri needs to be two-way to work. Both the provider and the customer need to appreciate the craftsmanship and knowledge involved. British customers are not as well educated as Japanese customers in this appreciation and therefore British service providers do not feel much pride in what they do.

 

This article first appeared in the December 28th 2009 edition of The Nikkei Weekly

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What are companies for?

I mentioned in my previous article on customer service that there were multiple reasons for the differences in customer service between Japan and the UK and that these reasons could be traced back to different features in Japanese and British corporate cultures.

The first aspect I would like to look at is kigyou rinen (the mission of a company) and the historical beginnings of Japanese and British companies. As is well known, the Industrial Revolution started in the UK, but being first has not necessarily meant the UK got the best (London Underground rail would be one example). In fact we often ended up making lots of mistakes that others can then learn from.

An awareness of the social problems that arose from the Industrial Revolution in the UK is still strong in British people’s mentality. We tend to think of company owners as rich “fat cat” capitalists, ruining our green countryside with their “dark satanic mills” (from the famous British hymn, Jerusalem) and exploiting their workers, without any care as to their living conditions and health.

Japan’s later industrial revolution had its social problems too, but there were other strong forces, such as the urge to modernize Japan, and to be equal to Western nations in industrial and military power. The rinen or mission of Japanese companies that matured in the late 19th century reflect the idea that companies should be for the benefit of the nation, and this mission continued through to companies such as Matsushita, founded in the early 20th century, with “national service through industry” in its Seven Principles. Then after the Second World War, there was the amazing “Japanese Economic Miracle” where the whole nation worked so hard to bring Japan back to being a leading industrial nation. Again, companies founded around then, such as Honda, very much emphasised the happiness of its workers and the company’s social obligation.

If you look at the UK’s post-industrial companies and their corporate mission statements, you do not see much about contributing to society or the happiness of workers – until recently, when Corporate Social Responsibility became fashionable. Working class pride collapsed when traditional industries were demolished in the 1970s and 1980s, and people lost any faith in companies as caring employers thanks to the mass redundancies that happened around then. The service sector jobs that were meant to replace the jobs lost in mining, steel and engineering are seen as demeaning “Mc Jobs” and very insecure.

In Anglo Saxon capitalism, companies are meant to be shareholder oriented – profitability and returns to shareholders are the only goal. Unlike Japan’s stakeholder oriented companies, where the stakeholders are employees, customers and society, and shareholders come a low fourth in priority. Consequently, when a customer in the UK is facing a service sector employee, he is usually facing 150 years of class resentment, a loss of pride in manual labour and no sense that the company that person is working for has any care for their well being or duty to the customer or society as a whole. There are some exceptions to this, and I will investigate these in my next article.

This article originally appeared in Japanese in the Eikoku News Digest

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In defence of Monozukuri – letter in the Financial Times

Letter from Pernille Rudlin published in the Financial Times, May 28th.

Sir, Contrary to your leader writer (“Factory Flaw”, May 26) I believe Japan would be well advised to stick to monozukuri (“making things”). A healthy society needs a variety of jobs for its population to achieve self-fulfilment in work. We cannot all live by knowledge work alone.

It does seem that there is something rather unsatisfying to the human soul about living off the profits made from trading in complex financial instruments or house prices. Witness all those articles in the Financial Times over the past few months describing how now redundant City workers are flocking to cookery courses, sailing, starting their own vineyards and so on.

The leader writer’s view that manufacturing jobs only require “obedient high-school graduates” and that these jobs are not “professional, varied and lucrative” is not supported by the fact that so many manufacturers at the moment, Japanese and otherwise, are trying to negotiate wage cuts or reduce work time, rather than lay off their core staff.

It costs a lot of money to train key factory workers, as they are (thanks to Japanese management influence) required to be multi-skilled, computer literate, excellent problem solvers and understand complex logistical requirements. Manufacturers do not want to have to go through the expense of finding and training a fresh batch of people once the economy picks up.

It is true that these jobs are not as lucrative as those “triple the national average” salaries that politicians, journalists and bankers seem to feel they are entitled to. But given what is happening to the media, banking and politics at the moment, at least people in industry can feel glad that they have a job, and it is a job that society values.

Pernille Rudlin,
European Representative,
Japan Intercultural Consulting,
Surrey, UK

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In Japanese business, apologising for others can be sincere

A manager in charge of the customer call center serving North America, told me last week that she trains the call center operatives not to say ‘sorry’ when they respond to complaining customers. I assumed this was because in the US, saying ‘sorry’ would be seen as an admission of fault, compromising the company in any future law suit. It turns out this is not the only reason. “American customers don’t want to hear ‘sorry’,” she said. “They think it’s not sincere, and in any case, it is not the operative’s own fault, so why should they say sorry?” “What do American customers want, then?” I asked. “Resolution” she said, and added that operatives are also told to ‘acknowledge’ the complaint, and make some kind of empathetic statement, to show they realise that the customer has had a bad time.

This discussion of the American approach to customer complaints came up because I was describing in a training session what I thought was the right approach to dealing with mistakes in a Japanese context: say sorry, don’t make excuses (iiwake) and describe how this mistake is not going to happen in future (hansei, which literally means ‘reflection’). I was contrasting this with the British approach, which is to say sorry, but in a transparently insincere way, and then to go into lengthy or pointless explanations of why the error occurred, which usually sound like iiwake to my and most Japanese people’s ears. An infamous example is the pre-recorded announcement you hear all too often British railways; “We would like to apologise for the late running of this train, this was due to the lateness of the incoming train”.

Often British customer-facing staff won’t say sorry at all, for the same reason that the American customer service manager gave, which is that they feel that because the mistake was not their fault, or in their control, they do not need to apologise. This is very different to the sense of collective responsibility that customer-facing staff have in Japan. They will say sorry, very sincerely, even if it is not their own individual fault, because they feel that they are part of the company that made the mistake, so they do have responsibility and could have had some kind of control or influence on the outcome. They also wish to say sorry for the customer having had a bad experience.

A few weeks after I took over a sales role in a Japanese company, we lost some business from an important customer. It turned out that over the course of at least a year, we had been delivering raw materials to the customer out of sync with their production schedule, and at a price much higher than our competitors. Instead of blaming me, my team leader (who was also new to the job) went with me to the customer, and together we bowed deep several times, said “taihen moshiwake gozaimasen” (literally – “there is absolutely no excuse for this”), promised to lower our prices and deliver at more convenient times. The customer let us have 20% of the business back, on a trial basis.

This article by Pernille Rudlin originally appeared in the Nikkei Weekly.  This and other articles are available as an e-book “Omoiyari: 6 Steps to Getting it Right with Japanese Customers”

For more content like this, subscribe to the free Rudlin Consulting Newsletter. 最新の在欧日系企業の状況については無料の月刊Rudlin Consulting ニューズレターにご登録ください。

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