How online giants lose ground in Japan to physical retail stores
- Japanese customers love the more personal experience and greater customer service found in bricks-and-mortar stores
- Global online retail sites such as Net-a-Porter have yet to find much success in Japan
When HMV opened a new store dedicated to music on vinyl in Tokyo’s hip Shibuya district in 2014, eyebrows inched higher. In a nation where consumers – particularly those in their 20s and 30s – cannot usually wait to get their hands on the latest hi-tech gizmo and the mobile phone has long been ubiquitous, conventional wisdom dictates that the store would be gone again in short order.
Instead, it has thrived and was joined in March by an entire floor of the 10-storey Tower Records shop in Shinjuku being turned over to vinyl.
For Japanese music lovers, it would appear that the process of physically browsing the stacks for an album or CD and then purchasing a tangible product is as important as the pleasure derived from listening to that music.
They point out that Japan’s fashion industry is subject to the same consumer whims, including at the luxury end of the spectrum.
“In Japan, since the 1970s, the best brands have all made a serious and generally successful effort to move beyond selling through department stores and now also sell through their own boutiques,” says Roy Larke, senior lecturer in marketing at the University of Waikoto in New Zealand, and an expert on retailing and consumer behaviour in Japan.