Persona Marketing

We learned about “Persona” in the last lecture. When I heard of it in the class, I remembered one success story of a Japanese national department store.

The department store is Isetan Shinjuku Honten. Do you know Isetan? It is one of the largest department store chains in Japan, and its store in Shinjuku is the world’s largest department store; its annual sales are up to 235 billion yen. However, back in 2002, Isetan Shinjuku settled for 3^rd position even in Japanese market. But after the renovation of its men’s annex in 2003, it began to grow steadily to the top of the world.

In fact, when they renovate the annex, they tried to change the way of customer targeting. They imagined 4 or 5 concrete men and thought what they wanted or what were their problems, while they segmented customers by grade (income), tastes, and life-stage (age) before that. As a result, they found that they should change their selling space drastically. For example, they stopped sorting items by brands and started displaying them by uses because they found their target customers tended to choose things not by brands but by designs or tastes.

These reforms showed a remarkable achievement. The total sales of the men’s annex increased by more than 20% from the previous year, and all of its rivals started improving their men’s selling place. Also, Isetan began to revise their customer targeting strategy in the other section.

This is the very famous success story among the people involved in Japanese retailing business, and I heard from it from Isetan’s people including some of the top executives. They are really proud of this achievement.

However, customers are not always the same. For example, Isetan Osaka, which opened in 2011 with much fanfare, has been caught up in a long slump even though they researched and analyzed the market and targeted customers carefully before opening. Of course it’s easy to say “there are no birds in the last year’s nest”. But Isetan’s marketing teams are groups of so stupid people? I don’t think so. Instead,　I think it shows how difficult “creating values” and “targeting customers” are in the real business world.