I'm afraid in a personal matter, but I'd like to listen to your advice.
My wife works for a Muikamachi-based small mail-order house.
This company sells super premium Uonuma Koshihikari and some high-quality organic vegetables to Japanese wealthy and Japanase premium restaurants as of now. However, long stagnant economy makes their business stuck in severe slump. In order to expand their busines, they decided to find a way out for Chinese market and to sell premium rice to Chinese wealthy through website. My wife is one of the members who are in charge of this project but feels difficult to promote. Now they started to examine to use ADWORDS of Baidu,the biggest Chinese search engine.(Google withdrew from China!!)
What do you think are the problems that Chinese wealthies want to solve, and the value of products or services that could satisfy their needs?
If you have any ideas, please advice me.
Thank you so much!
3 comments:
Dear Jun-san,
Here's some information about your wife's marketing plan.
www.taobao.com is a big shopping website in China (just like ebay in US and yahoo auction in Japan)
There are a lot of rice sold there (including koshihikari). You can find more info about competition there.
One of the popular word is "organic rice".
I think the biggest value chinese customers value is the authenticity of the product. In China there are a lot of fake products and some koshihikari rice grew in China. Therefore if your wife's company can prove its authenticity and origin from Japan, it will add value to customer.
I think chinese customers value health, well-being, and status. If the Koshihikari rice from Japan brings them good health and security, it will add value to them.
Hi,
Yesterday I saw an advertisement on Japanese channel about Koshihakari rice. It costs 9500 yen = 1100 USD for 10 kgs of rice. 1 kg of Koshihakari = 11 USD. Is it expensive or too expensive for Chinese? How possible the sale for Chinese market with this price?
I just can think from the cost perspective, other things I am not clear but I can understand something from Jamie`s comments.
Thanks,
Thank you for your comments.
Actually, cost gap between chinese local rice and Premium Koshihikari is incrediblly wide,almost 20 times!
Chinese local rice $0.5/kg
Premium Koshihikari $10/kg
But as we learn in class, my wife's company tries to penetrate niche market like wealthy Chinese. As Jamie san mentioned, it is true that there are too many fakes and poor qualities, so that value propisition should be authenticity and some trivia such as how Koshihikari is special. Some chinese friend also pointed out that analog viral marketing(words of mouth or kuchikomi) is very helpful. Thank you!
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