Category: fmcg | 雜貨業務 | 소비재 | 食料品事業

FMCG or fast moving consumer goods sprang out of the mass industrialisation. Brands sprang up originally as a guarantee of quality. Later on as these brands needed to be promoted, we saw the foundation of the what we think of as modern marketing and advertising.

Today media and entertainment takes up an increasing amount of the household spend, as does housing, but FMCGs are a crucial part of their essential and disposable income spend.

They have nostalgia wrapped up in them, distinctive aromas, taste and packaging designs. From the smell of my Granny using so much Pledge on the TV that I was surprised it didn’t burst into flame to the taste of Cidona and texture of Boland’s Fig Roll biscuits in my mouth.

The sound of their advertising jingles was the soundtrack of my childhood. Digital advertising is largely rationale, it lacks the fluent devices that provide the centre to advertising and made FMCG advertising iconic. Fluent devices like the Peperami ‘Animal’, the M&M characters or the Cadbury Smash robots were embedded in deep marketing research. FMCG brands still sponsor the best research in marketing science.

I had the good fortune to work inhouse at Unilever and agency-side for their brands. I also managed to work on Coca-Cola and Colgate during my time in Hong Kong.

  • April 2025 newsletter

    April 2025 introduction – key to the door (21)

    Welcome to my April 2025 newsletter, this newsletter marks my 21st issue.

    21 marks a transition to full adulthood in various countries, hence ‘keys to the door’ in bingo slang. In Chinese numbers, symbolism is often down to phrases that numbers sound like. 21 sounds like “easily definitely fine” – indicating an auspicious association with the number.

    For some reason this month I have had Bill McClintock’s Motor City Woman on repeat. It’s a mash-up of The Spinners – I’ll be Around, Queensrÿche – Jet City Woman and Steely Dan – Do it Again. It’s a bit of an ear worm – you’re welcome.

    New reader?

    If this is the first newsletter, welcome! You can find my regular writings here and more about me here

    Strategic outcomes

    Things I’ve written.

    • Cleaned up copy of an interview I did as a juror for the PHNX Awards. More here.
    • From the challenges faced by Apple Intelligence to drone deliveries and designing in lightness.
    • I thought about how computing tends towards efficiency along the story arc of its history and its likely impact on our use of AI models.

    Books that I have read.

    Currently reading
    • The Leftover Woman by Jean Kwok. The book is a complex thriller. The story is straight forward, but the books covers complex, fraught issues with aplomb from misogyny, the male gaze to the white saviour complex.
    • The Tiger That Isn’t by Michael Blastland and Andrew Dilnot focused on the use of numbers in the media. But it’s also invaluable for strategists reading and interrogating pre-existing research. As a book is very easy-going and readable. I read it travelling back-and-forth to see the parents.
    • A Spy Alone was written by former MI6 officer Charles Beaumont. I was reminded of the dreary early 1970s of George Smiley’s Britain in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by the tone of the book. However A Spy Alone is alarmingly contemporary, with oblique references to UK infrastructure investments in the UK attached to a hostile foreign power, private sector intelligence, open source intelligence a la Bellingcat, nihilistic entrepreneurs and a thoroughly corrupted body politic. Beaumont’s story features a post cold-war spy ring in Oxford University echoing the cold war Cambridge spy ring. Beaumont touches on real contemporary issues through the classic thriller, in the same way that Mick Herron uses satire.

    Things I have been inspired by.

    Big brand advertising isn’t as digital as we think.

    Trends in TV 2025 by Thinkbox threw up some interesting data points and hypotheses.

    • Advertising is eating retail property. A good deal of search and social advertising gains is not from traditional advertising, but traditional retailing, in place of a real-world shop front. This is primarily carried out by small and medium-sized enterprises. I imagine a lot of this is Chinese direct-to-consumer businesses. 80% of Meta’s revenue is not from the six largest advertising holding companies.
    • Viewership across video platforms both online and offline have stabilised in the UK. (Separately I heard that ITV were getting the same viewership per programme, but it’s been attenuated with the rise of time-shifted content via the online viewership.

    World views

    WARC highlighted research done by Craft Human Intelligence for Channel 4 where they outlined six world views for young adults. While it was couched in terms of ‘gen-z’, I would love to see an ongoing inter-cohort longitudinal study to see how these world views change over time in young people. This would also provide an understanding of it it reflects wider population world views. BBH Labs past work looking at Group Cohesion Score of gen-Z – implies that this is unlikely to be just a generational change but might have a more longitudinal effect across generations to varying extents.

    Anyway back to he six world views outlined:

    • ‘Girl power’ feminists. 99% identified as female. About 21% of their cohort. “While they’re overwhelmingly progressive, their focus tends to be on personal goals rather than macro-level politics. They underindex heavily on engagement with UK politics and society.”
    • ‘Fight for your rights’. 12% of cohort, 60% female, educated and engaged with current affairs. “Although they consider themselves broadly happy, they believe the UK is deeply unfair – but believe that progress is both necessary and achievable.”
    • ‘Dice are loaded’ are 15% of their cohort. 68% female. “Feeling left behind, they perceive themselves to lack control over their future, and are worried about finances, employment, housing, mental health, or physical appearance.”
    • ‘Zero-sum’ thinkers comprise 18% of their cohort. Over-index at higher end of social-economic scale, gender balanced. “…they lean toward authoritarian and radical views on both sides of the political spectrum.”
    • ‘Boys can’t be boys’ are 14% of the cohort and 82% male. Supporters of traditional masculinity.
    • ‘Blank slates’. 20% of their cohort, all of them male. “They aren’t unintelligent or unambitious, but they pay little attention to matters beyond their own, immediate world. While some follow the news, their main focus is on just getting on with life”.

    More here and here.

    FMCG performance

    At the beginning of March, Unilever abruptly replaced its CEO. Hein Schumacher was out, and in the space of a week CFO Fernando Fernandez became CEO. That showed a deep internal dissatisfaction with Unilever’s performance that surprised shareholders AND the business media. Over the past decade Unilever has leaned hard into premium products and influencer marketing.

    “There are 19,000 zip codes in India. There are 5,764 municipalities in Brazil. I want one influencer in each of them,” Fernandez said. “That’s a significant change. It requires a machine of content creation, very different to the one we had in the past . . . ”

    Fernandez wants to lean even harder into influencer marketing. But I thought that there was a delta on this approach given his goal to have higher margin premium brands that are highly desirable.

    “Desirability at scale and marketing activity systems at scale will be the fundamental principles of our marketing strategy”

    Meanwhile Michael Farmer’s newsletter had some datapoints that were very apropos to the Unilever situation.

    “…for the fifty years from 1960 to 2010, the combined FMCG sales of P&G, Unilever, Nestle and Colgate-Palmolive grew at about an 8% compounded annual growth rate per year. The numbers associated with this long-term growth rate are staggering. P&G alone grew from about $1 billion (1960) to $79 billion in 2010. Throughout this period, P&G was the industry’s advocate for the power of advertising, becoming the largest advertiser in the US, with a focus on traditional advertising — digital / social advertising had hardly begun until 2010. Since 2010, with the advent of digital / social advertising, and massive increases in digital / social spend, P&G, Unilever, Nestle and Colgate-Palmolive have grown, collectively, at less than 1% per year, about half the growth rate of the US economy (2.1% per year). They are not the only major advertisers who have grown below GDP rates. At least 20 of the 50 largest advertisers in the US have grown below 2% per year for the past 15 years. Digital and social advertising, of course, have come to dominate the advertising scene since 2010, and it represents, today, about 2/3rds of all advertising spend.”

    Mr Fernandez has quite the Gordian knot to try and solve, one-way or another.

    Automated communications and AI influencers

    Thanks to Stephen Waddington‘s newsletter highlighted a meta-analysis of research papers on the role of automation and generative AI in communications. What’s interesting is the amount of questions that the paper flags, which are key to consideration of these technologies in marketing and advertising. More here.

    LinkedIn performance

    Social Insider has pulled together some benchmarking data on LinkedIn content performance. It helps guide what good looks like and the content types to optimise for on LinkedIn. Register and download here.

    Chart of the month. 

    The FT had some really interesting data points that hinted at a possible longitudinal crisis in various aspects of reasoning and problem solving. There has been few ongoing studies in this area, and it deserves more scrutiny.

    reasoning and problem solving

    In his article Have humans past peak brain power, FT data journalist John Burn-Murdoch makes the case about traits which would support intelligence and innovation from reading, to mathematical reasoning and problem solving have been on a downward trends. The timing of this decline seems to correlate with the rise of the social web.

    If true, over time this may work its way into marketing effectiveness. My best guess would be that rational messages are likely to be less effective in comparison to simple emotional messages with a single-minded intent over time. This should show up in both short term and long term performance. A more cynical view might be that the opportunity for bundling and other pricing complexities could facilitate greater profit margins over time.

    Things I have watched. 

    Akira Kurosawa’s Stray Dog is a film that I can watch several times over despite the film being over 75 years old now. Detective Murakami’s trek through the neighbourhoods of occupation-era Tokyo and all the actors performances are stunning. The storytelling is amazing and there are set pieces in here that are high points in cinema history. I don’t want to say too much more and spoil it for you, if you haven’t already seen it.

    Ghost in the Shell: Standalone Complex – Solid State Society – this is a follow on to the original GiTS manga and anime films touches directly on the challenges faced looking after Japan’s aging society. Central to the story is the apparent kidnapping over time of 20,000 children who can’t remember who their parents are. The plot is up to the usual high standard with government intrigue, technical and societal challenges.

    The Wire series one – I stopped and started watching The Wire. Films better suited my focus at the time. I finally started into series one this month. The ensemble cast are brilliant. The show is now 22 years old, yet it has aged surprisingly well. While technology works miracles, the slow methodical approach to building a case is always the same.

    How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr Foster – is a fantastic documentary covering the career of architect Sir Norman Foster. I remember watching it at the ICA when it originally came out and enjoyed watching it again on DVD. Foster brings a similar approach to architecture that Colin Chapman brought to his Lotus cars. When we are now thinking about efficiency and sustainability, their viewpoints feel very forward-thinking in nature.

    Useful tools.

    Fixing the iOS Mail app

    You know something is up when media outlets are writing to you with instructions on how they can remain visible in your inbox. The problem is due to Apple’s revamp of the iPhone’s Mail.app as part of its update to iOS 18.2.

    So how do you do this?

    Open Mail.app and you can see the categorised folders at the top of your screen, under the search bar.

    Find each tab where an a given email has been put. Open the latest edition. Tap the upper right hand corner. Select ‘Categorise Sender’. Choose ‘Primary’ to make sure future emails from this sender are in your main inbox view.

    That’s going to get old pretty soon. My alternative is to toggle between views as it makes sense. Apple’s inbox groupings are handy when you want to quickly find items you can delete quickly. Otherwise the single view makes sense.

    Fixing mail app

    Inspiration for strategists

    Questions are probably the most important tool for strategists. 100 questions offers inspiration so you can focus on the right ones to ask for a given time.

    The sales pitch.

    I have been worked on the interrogation process and building responses to a couple of client new business briefs for friends (Red Robin Ventures and Craft Associates) and am now working a new brand and creative strategy engagement as part of an internal creative agency at Google.

    now taking bookings

    If you’re thinking about strategy needs in Q4 (October onwards) – keep me in mind; or discussions on permanent roles. Contact me on YunoJuno and LinkedIn; get my email from Spamty to drop me a line.

    More on what I have done here.

    bit.ly_gedstrategy

    The End.

    Ok this is the end of my April 2025 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and onward into spring, and enjoy the May bank holidays.

    Don’t forget to share if you found it useful, interesting or insightful.

    Get in touch if there is anything that you’d like to recommend for the newsletter.

  • Majorana 1 + more stuff

    Majorana 1

    Majorana 1 is a new processor that would be used in a quantum computer. Majorana 1 is an 8 qubit processor. This is a relatively modest processor, IBM’s Heron processor clocks in at 156 qubits. The reason why creator Microsoft was excited about Majorana 1 was about the underlying mechanism. This depends on a ‘topoconductor’ – a new type of material that provides better control and scalability. So Microsoft envisages with topoconductor million plus qubit systems that would fulfil the full potential promise of quantum computing.

    Majorana 1 is viewed as having potential to move current work on artificial intelligence further. Generative AI is essentially probabilistic in nature. There is an almost Bayesian relationship happening as an LLM guesses based on its training data to date. Quantum computing promises exploring multiple options all at once, which would aid probabilistic problem-solving.

    Thankfully, Microsoft’s video explanation of Majorana 1 provides a good primer on how quantum computing works and the role that a topoconductor plays.

    Majorana 1 is named after Italian physicist Ettore Majorana who theorised about the particle being used.

    Ben Miles has covered the skepticism around the science underpinning Majorana 1.

    40 billion enemies

    This Westinghouse film from the 1940s on refrigeration and the dangers of diseases made me wonder about what the film-makers would have thought about our current wellness crazes including RFK Jr’s prognostications on vaccines and pasteurisation.

    The diesel-punk aesthetic is strong in the vehicles portrayed at the start of the film from trains to propellor powered planes and a clean-looking semi-wagon design. And it has some great life hacks for getting the most out of your refrigerator, some of which I didn’t know and my Mum loved the tips.

    The Pisanos

    It isn’t often nowadays that you see ‘spec’ ads any more. This spec ad including the behind the scenes documentary afterwards were all created using Google Deep Mind Veo 2 to create all the characters and shots.

    There are still tell-tale elements that the video is based on generative AI. Part of the reason for the swift editing is the gradual breakdown due to the probabilistic nature of the generative AI process to do what is being asked for it.

    In the Mood for Love & 2046

    I had never seen many of these interviews that provide an oral history of In the Mood for Love & 2046 by Wong Kar wai. It goes into more depth on the creative process of films than I had seen previously. I also didn’t realise how much these films overlapped on the shooting schedule.

    There is no way in the AI augmented film industry that anything could happen like In the Mood for Love could happen now. As a bonus here is a 2024 Olay advert that featured Maggie Cheung.

  • Clutch Cargo + more things

    Clutch Cargo

    Clutch Cargo was an animated series first broadcast on American television in 1959. Clutch Cargo was created by Cambria Productions – who were a start-up animation studio. Cambria used a number of techniques to radically reduce the cost of producing the animated series.

    clutch cargo

    A key consideration was reducing the amount of movement that needed to be animated. There were some obvious visual motifs used to do this:

    • Characters were animated from waist height up for the majority of the films, this reduced the need to animate legs, walking or running.
    • Much of the movement was moving the camera around, towards or away from a static picture.
    • To show an explosion, they shook the camera, rather than animate the concussive effect of the blast.
    • Fire wasn’t animated, instead smoke would be put in front of the camera. Fake snow was sprinkled so that bad weather didn’t need to be drawn.
    • Cameraman Ted Gillette came up with the idea of Syncro-Vox. The voice actors head would be held steady, they would have a vivid lipstick applied and then say their lines. Gillette then put their mouths on top of the animated figures. Cambria made use of it in all their animations with the exception of The New Three Stooges – an animated series that allowed Moe Howard, Larry Fine and Joe DeRita to be voice actors after their movie contracts finished and they were affected by ill health.

    These choices meant that Clutch Cargo cost about 10 per cent of what it would have cost Disney to animate. The visual hacks to cut costs were also helped in the way the scripts were developed. Clutch Cargo avoided doing comedy, instead focusing on Tin-Tin-like adventures. ‘Physical’ comedy gags create a lot of movement to animate. By focusing on the storytelling of Clutch Cargo. The young audience weren’t bothered by the limited animation, as they were captivated into suspending their beliefs.

    Culture

    jwz: NEUROBLAST: Dispatch From The Cyberpunk City – Contemporary view of San Francisco through the lens of cyberpunk literature

    Energy

    ‘Hydrogen nanoreactors’ can create breakthrough in Green Hydrogen | EE News Europe

    FMCG

    Ozempic Could Crush the Junk Food Industry. But It Is Fighting Back. – The New York TimesLars Fruergaard Jorgensen, the chief executive of Novo Nordisk, which makes Ozempic and Wegovy, told Bloomberg that food-industry executives had been calling him. “They are scared about it,” he said. Around the same time, Walmart’s chief executive in the United States, John Furner, said that customers on GLP-1s were putting less food into their carts. Sales are down in sweet baked goods and snacks, and the industry is weathering a downturn. By one market-research firm’s estimate, food-and-drink innovation in 2024 reached an all-time nadir, with fewer new products coming to market than ever before.

    Ozempic users like Taylor aren’t just eating less. They’re eating differently. GLP-1 drugs seem not only to shrink appetite but to rewrite people’s desires. They attack what Amy Bentley, a food historian and professor at New York University, calls the industrial palate: the set of preferences created by our acclimatization, often starting with baby food, to the tastes and textures of artificial flavors and preservatives. Patients on GLP-1 drugs have reported losing interest in ultraprocessed foods, products that are made with ingredients you wouldn’t find in an ordinary kitchen: colorings, bleaching agents, artificial sweeteners and modified starches. Some users realize that many packaged snacks they once loved now taste repugnant.

    Gadget

    TIM Brasil unveils a wearable pin to combat phone theft at music festivals | Trendwatching – surprised mobile phone companies haven’t implemented something similar for London

    Marketing

    Madison Avenue has a Price Problem — Too Much Work for Meager Fees — Rather than a Cost Problem Requiring Chronic Downsizings – So why are cost reductions the go-to strategies for holding companies, who must surely know better? Downsizings stress and liquidate talent; they do nothing to improve the quality of agency services.

    IPG predicts 1-2% revenue drop for 2025, eyes savings of $250m ahead of Omnicom merger – interesting financial move as Omnicom deal closes.

    Apple resumes advertising on Elon Musk’s X after 15-month pause – 9to5Mac – the negative reaction to this that I have seen from Mac and iPhone users that I know is interesting. It’s the scales have dropped from their eyes about Apple’s performative progressive values. Yet the signs have been out there for years – in particular with regards anything that is even tangentially connected to China.

    Materials

    German startup achieves industrial-scale graphite recovery for lithium ion batteries | EE News Europe

    Media

    Zuckerberg’s rightward policy shift hits Meta staffers, targets Apple | CNBCemployees who might otherwise leave because of their disillusionment with policy changes are concerned about quitting now because of how they will be perceived by future employers given that Meta has said publicly that it’s weeding out “low performers.” Meta, like many of its tech peers, began downsizing in 2022 and has continued to trim around the edges. The company cut 21,000 jobs, or nearly a quarter of its workforce, in 2022 and 2023. Among those who lost their jobs were members of the civic integrity group, which was known to be outspoken in its criticism of Zuckerberg’s leadership.  Some big changes are now taking place that appear to directly follow the lead of Trump at the expense of company employees and users of the platforms, the people familiar with the matter said.

    Security

    Helsing ramps up drone factories across Europe | EE News Europe

    SCAR: Modernizing Satellite Communications at the Speed of War | Soldier Systems Daily Soldier Systems Daily

    Singapore

    Why Asia’s young women are going ‘boy sober’ and swiping left on romance | South China Morning Post – more Singaporean young women are opting out of traditional dating and marriage, prioritising career and personal freedom over societal expectations.

    Software

    The End of Programming as We Know It – O’Reilly

    Web-of-no-web

    Nissan to ship driverless cars in 2027 | EE News Europe

  • DeepSeek & more things

    DeepSeek

    I decided to pull together some of the better resources I could find on DeepSeek. It distracted and disrupted my writing calendar as I was researching a post what will be called Intelligence per Watt, once i have it published.

    John Yun’s take on DeepSeek is well researched and thoughtful rather than a hot take trying to explain why the sky fell in on Nvidia’s share price.

    ChinaTalk have put together a large amount of expert opinions on DeepSeek.

    DeepSeek FAQ – Stratechery by Ben Thompson

    With DeepSeek, China innovates and the US imitates | FT

    DeepSeek displaces ChatGPT as the App Store’s top app | TechCrunch

    Advances by China’s DeepSeek sow doubts about AI spending | FT

    DeepSeek cost tough for Nvidia but great for corporate world | Axios

    Consumer Behaviour

    Going gaga over Labubu – by BBH Culture Studio – Bleats – Chinese toymaker POPMART is the Bearbrick of the 2020s

    We Asked 12 Young Men Across America How They Feel About Trump, Masculinity, and Money. | Esquire

    Everyone’s done with dating apps | Doomscrollers

    FMCG

    Health

    Rapid trials prompt deals rush for Chinese ‘super me-too’ drugs | FT

    More than one in 10 women are taking weight-loss jabs, survey finds | The Telegraph – Concerns around those who are a healthy weight obtaining injections privately, as well as distribution of fake pens

    Study: 67% Of Gen Zs Want To Take Charge Of Their Health But Face Gaps In Communication | Provoke Media – Despite being known as the digitally native generation, Gen Z is skeptical of online health information and even telehealth appointments. In fact, eight in 10 Gen Zs say they’ve encountered false or misleading health information online and more than 60% say prioritizing in-person visits over virtual ones is important to feeling respected by healthcare providers.

    Innovation

    Have America’s industrial giants forgotten what they are for? | FT – Critics say fragmented ownership, weak culture and a fixation on financial results have harmed innovation. The ghost of Jack Welch and Chicago School of Economics continues. But all this isn’t a new idea Judy Estrin’s book Closing The Innovation Gap laid all this out back in 2008.

    Legal

    “Torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn’t feel right”: Meta emails unsealed – Ars Technica

    Luxury

    Louis Vuitton APAC strategy: Inside the luxury brand’s Asian success | Jing Daily“Given the economic downturn and competitive luxury market in China, Louis Vuitton has been seen adjusting its strategy to appeal to more diverse audiences, i.e. launching more affordable bag styles, participating in pricing games (points collecting, coupons refund), and launching cross-over marketing activities,” says Yu.

    This year alone, the house has hosted its exclusive four-hands dinner at its Michelin-starred restaurant, The Hall, alongside Chengdu’s Latin American Michelin one-star restaurant, Mono; launched ultra-limited-edition diamond bracelets and a serpent-inspired timepiece for the Year of the Snake; rolled out its highly anticipated Murakami collaboration; and unveiled a new men’s store at Shanghai’s IFC Mall.

    “[Louis Vuitton’s] strategy is rooted in consistency,” says Xuan Wang, activation director and partner at Tong Global and luxury PR veteran. “It has embraced a more localized approach — granting its Chinese team greater creative autonomy — while not losing the essence of the brand.”

    Breitling to add a third watch brand? | Professional Watches – I am not sure that this is going to work out that well.

    Marketing

    How Beats navigates being at the forefront of culture, not culture wars | The Drum

    Materials

    Interesting video on carbon fibre fabrication and how it has evolved over time, from an artisanal process to mass manufacturing.

    Media

    Apple asks court to halt Google search monopoly case | The Verge

    Online

    The Death of Social Media – by Jonathan Stringfield

    Social media is dead – Boundless Magazine

    Retailing

    Japan’s Costco Resale Shops Struggle to Distinguish Themselves – Unseen Japan

    Technology

    Antiqua et nova. Note on the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence (28 January 2025) – the Holy See on generative AI

    Reckitt: Don’t use AI to increase efficiency at the expense of recruiting junior talent

    Kaspersky finds hardware backdoor in 5 generations of Apple silicon – Robby Pedrica’s Tech Blog

    Tools

    AI prompts for communication and PR | Gemini for Workspace | Google Demini – useful for strategists as well

    Web-of-no-web

    The mainstreaming of AI glasses starts today | Machine Society

    endless.downward.spiral – is this the beginning of the end of What3Words? – Terence Eden’s Blog

    Meta’s CTO said the metaverse could be a ‘legendary misadventure’ if the company doesn’t boost sales, leaked memo shows – probably not that likely.

  • 1000 Yen Ramen wall

    Increased Japanese inflation is crushing restaurants due to the 1000 Yen Ramen wall. Ramen traditionally has been a working class food in Japan. It’s hearty, nourishing and flavoursome. Some ramen restaurants have even been listed in Michelin restaurant guides.

    Ramen from Bone Daddies

    The 1000 Yen note is the smallest denomination of note in Japanese country, rather like the 5 pound note in the UK or the 5 euro note in the EU. It’s about worth about £5.20 at the time of writing.

    Japan 1000 Yen Note 3706b

    Japan went through decades of deflation that flattened prices and made workers poorer. So being able to get a cheap nutritious meal during lunch time at work or after work was invaluable. It also meant that a bowl of ramen had cost 1000 Yen for a long time.

    Post-COVID supply chain driven inflation pushed the price above 1000 Yen. That’s when things get strange from a marketing perspective. Consumers who were used to paying 1000 Yen for their ramen couldn’t or wouldn’t pay more. Which is when ramen restaurants hit what the owners describe as the 1000 Yen ramen wall.

    In marketing terms this wall is known as a marketing pricing dead zone. Dead zones revolve around three key factors:

    • Customer segmentation: Understanding customer segments and their price sensitivity is key to avoid pricing dead zones. In this case the price sensitivity seems to be unusually rigid.
    • Perception of value: A key consideration in a dead zone is how customers perceive the value of a product at a specific price point. If a product is priced too cheap, customers can assume it’s inferior quality. If a price too high the customers feel they aren’t getting enough value for money. What’s interesting about ramen is that customers aren’t willing to budge on quality or perceived value.
    • Market competition: The presence of competitors with well-positioned prices within a category can create dead zones.  Ramen restaurants tend to be small businesses rather than chains, so they don’t have a lot of market power. They do have competition in terms of substitution for that 1000 Yen note – onigiri, instant noodles and sandwiches from the local combini (convenience store).

    What’s fascinating about this situation is that ramen restaurants or an outsider haven’t managed to innovate around the wall. Instead the poor substitute of a sandwich or onigiri from a refrigerator is their option.

    It’s more than business being lost, ramen restaurants are neighbourhood staples and an intangible part of Japan’s culinary culture. To give a UK specific example, without the humble ramen shop we wouldn’t have had the Wagamama chain of restaurants.

    More Japan related content can be found here.

    More information

    Try the Michelin-star ramen that’s only 1,000 yen in an unassuming location in central Tokyo | Stars and Stripes

    ‘Ramen fast pass’ starves lineups, feeds the busy first at popular Tokyo shop – The Mainichi

    Record number of Japan ramen eateries went bankrupt in 2024 | Kyodo News

    Japan election 2024: How ramen prices have become a top issue for voters – Firstpost

    Japan Runs on Vending Machines. It’s About to Break Millions of Them. – The New York Times

    Japanese ramen shops must raise prices, or shut, to cope with inflation – The Washington Post

    Record Number of Ramen Shops Go Bankrupt in Japan in 2024 – Unseen Japan

    Japan runs on vending machines. It’s about to break millions of them. – The Japan Times