We are a German-Japanese company offering our website in English, German and Japan. We have been testing the different markets over the last year. What we have learned so far is:
1. Japanese have an extreme affection for foreign products
2. There is considerably less competition for online services than in the USA
3. SEO is comparably easy
1. # The iPhone was predicted to fail miserably in Japan. Well as it turns out Japanese are buying them like crazy.
# Japan is one of the biggest markets for Twitter.
# When I talk to other people about Facebook, they have never tried it, but most have heard of it. It is perceived as "this cool new thing from the USA".
# When I listen to conversations between Japanese I often hear "It is from America" to impress the other person.
# More than 90% of all Japanese women poses a Louis Vuitton product http://www.entrepreneur.com/tradejournals/article/164421461....
2. As the Author pointed out, the desktop market is considerably smaller than the Ketai market. I believe this explains why Japanese websites are from comparably lower quality. Not just from a technology standpoint, but also from the content perspective. There are just not as much people fighting for customers, hence the standards are about 4-7 years behind what one sees in the US web-market.
3. Until now, we did not dedicate any serious efforts to SEO. So far, for every visitor Google sends us from the USA, we get 10 from Japan.
My explanation for this is again, low competition.
The hardest part is actually getting someone to write in Japanese. The language is really difficult and most Japanese don't think their commandment of the language is good enough to be published. (I guess this might serve as one of the explanations why there is not as much competition in the Japanese online market)
> The language is really difficult and most Japanese don't think their commandment of the language is good enough to be published.
The key to communicating is that it doesn't have to be perfect. Most Americans don't have a good enough command of English to write publishable material, but that doesn't stop them. In fact, in areas like politics, we glorify those who talk like an uneducated person by saying they "understand the common man" better.
I absolutely agree with you. Personally, I think mistakes are acceptable as long as the work is valuable.
I am not not a native English speaker and to make matters worse dyslexic, yet write.
For Japanese it is a "culture thing". Japan is a shame-based society and in their minds, mistakes have to be avoided at all costs. They rather do the save thing and avoid writing publicly altogether.
1. Japanese have an extreme affection for foreign products
2. There is considerably less competition for online services than in the USA
3. SEO is comparably easy
1. # The iPhone was predicted to fail miserably in Japan. Well as it turns out Japanese are buying them like crazy. # Japan is one of the biggest markets for Twitter. # When I talk to other people about Facebook, they have never tried it, but most have heard of it. It is perceived as "this cool new thing from the USA". # When I listen to conversations between Japanese I often hear "It is from America" to impress the other person. # More than 90% of all Japanese women poses a Louis Vuitton product http://www.entrepreneur.com/tradejournals/article/164421461....
2. As the Author pointed out, the desktop market is considerably smaller than the Ketai market. I believe this explains why Japanese websites are from comparably lower quality. Not just from a technology standpoint, but also from the content perspective. There are just not as much people fighting for customers, hence the standards are about 4-7 years behind what one sees in the US web-market.
3. Until now, we did not dedicate any serious efforts to SEO. So far, for every visitor Google sends us from the USA, we get 10 from Japan. My explanation for this is again, low competition.
The hardest part is actually getting someone to write in Japanese. The language is really difficult and most Japanese don't think their commandment of the language is good enough to be published. (I guess this might serve as one of the explanations why there is not as much competition in the Japanese online market)