要点In short
- Three patterns account for most failed entries: the machine-translated site, the lone Japanese hire, and the full handover to a local agency.
- Each has a different symptom and an identical cause — skipping the foundation step.
- Japanese agencies are designed for domestic companies that already have trust, not for a foreign entrant starting from zero.
- The fix isn't a better vendor. It's filling the checklist in order so later effort has something to stand on.
目次Contents
After enough entries, the failures rhyme. Three patterns account for most of them — and all three share a single root cause.
Pattern 1 — The machine-translated website
Add a machine-translated /ja section, start ads immediately. Unnatural Japanese and missing trust signals mean visitors bounce; the ad budget dissolves against a page that was never built to convert Japanese buyers.
Pattern 2 — “We'll just hire one Japanese salesperson”
Skip the Japanese web presence entirely and hand everything to a single hire. But they have nowhere to send prospects — no site, no materials. “Send me more details” has no answer. One person is handed strategy, marketing, sales, and translation at once, and nothing scales.
Pattern 3 — Full handover to a Japanese agency
“You handle Japan.” But Japanese agencies are built for domestic companies that already have trust. They aren't designed for the foreign entrant's real problem — building trust from zero — and they'll run ads on a foundation that doesn't exist yet.
The one root cause
Every pattern is the same mistake wearing a different costume: skipping a step. Pouring water into a bucket full of holes.
The fix isn't a better agency or a stronger hire. It's filling the checklist in the right order — foundation first, then presence, then growth — so that every later effort has something solid to stand on.
Sources
- 01JIN MARKETING field research — common failure patterns
- 02Eurotechnology.com, Vodafone Japan divestment (Mar 2006)
- 03Japan Times / TechCrunch, Groupon Japan osechi incident (Jan 2011)
Takato Minemura — Founder, JIN MARKETING
Takato Minemura is the founder of JIN MARKETING and runs WINDE, a development company in Japan. Educated at university in the United States, he spent years working alongside businesses abroad, where the same request kept arriving from the founders he worked with — we want to bring this to Japan, how does it actually work there? Answering that question repeatedly showed him something he had not expected: what he had treated as ordinary common sense about marketing was in fact specific to this market, and the companies committing the most money to an entry were the ones least aware of it. He works on both sides of an entry, the strategy and the code that implements it, which is why the research here comes out of projects rather than desk study. More about the author