Saturday, April 16, 2005

MADE IN JAPAN

My friend did interesting analysis on Japanese companies. Especially, the following 2 parts, I thought it is interesting.

"1) User-Oriented and “Pay attention to details”: Although a lot of Chinese and Korean refused to buy Japanese products, no one can deny that Japanese made goods are very easy to use (気に入る). From the experience working in a Japanese company, I can strongly feel the“User-Oriented” spirit! When you start from the need of the user, the product is definitely designed in the way the user like and feels satisfied, in consequences."

"4) Not purely profit-focused: this point is merely my guess. Because I found that my analysis above are not convincing answers to my question. The reason I have such a guess is because I found a lot of things are designed for people to use rather than earning profit. E.g. I have seen No-need-to-touch sanitary bins in the toilet. The cost to produce such a thing is at least 100 times for the ordinary one. However, how big the market is? I doubt whether they did ROI calculation before mass production."


As for 1) user-oriented, I think it is fundamental of Japanese companies. There are so many good goods sold in Japan, if company never designed products from the customers' point of view, the company will go out of business soon. Japanese companies know that customers will buy product of good in use AND good in design, even if it is a bit more expensive than products of other companies.
As for 4), not all the companies are like that. However, some of companies, maybe smaller companies tend to be "not purely profit-focused". I think this is related to 1), Japanese companies often think about customers and users. This is maybe because of characteristics of Japanese people who always think about others, or maybe, they had to do like that because if they only think about their profit and give less service to their customers or treat the customers not very good... the customers will go away.

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