Monozukuri for Sustainable Brands in the 21st Century

The word Monozukuri has only been in use for almost 15 years. In 1998, the Japanese Prime Minister’s Office set up a "Monozukuri Kondankai", in order to reverse the trend of deindustrialization and hollowing out that Japan was experiencing after the end of the Japanese financial bubble by affirming Japan’s strengths in manufacturing. In general, monozukuri  is the "art, science and craft of making things." While monozukuri is used to describe technology and processes integrating sustainable development, production and procurement, it also includes intangible qualities such as unique craftsmanship and dedication to continuous improvement. In the Japanese tradition of Monozukuri, when an item or human effort is taken into use, there needs to be a benefit for the society as a result while, at the same time, the balance between production, resources and the society should be maintained. Monozukuri should therefore be an inspiration for most global organizations in the 21st century in their effort to create strong, innovative brands, which deliver compelling content through their media channels, especially then it comes to branding and brand storytelling.

Toyota and Nissan lead the way

Companies such as Toyota and Nissan have already tried to elevate their brands or the company’s core interests by creating unique content that exceeds infomercial-like self reverence.

Back in 2011, Toyota chairman Fujio Cho said that Toyota’s mission is to “preserve the Japanese Monozukuri". What does "monozukuri" mean here? It probably captures the Toyota perception of sustainability. According to Toyota monokuzuri, the person doing the making is de-emphasized and the attention is on the ‘thing’ being made. This subtle difference reflects the Japanese sense of responsibility for using ‘things’ in production and their deep respect for the world around them both animate and inanimate. In its application of Monozukuri to the production of automobiles, Toyota has pursued a sustainable method of making its cars ever more safe, environmentally friendly, reliable and comfortable and circulating this perception to its customers.

At Nissan, brand storytelling has been dubbed “kotozukuri,” complementing the Japanese manufacturers’ mantra of “monozukuri”. Brand agnostic stories, intentionally omitting reference to the parent firm or its competitors, or in Nissan’s case, look to raise the profile of the people, products, technologies and relationships as part of infotainment. 

 

Why? Actually, it's about Nissan's recognition that traditional media and consumer engagement face more challenges as well as expense amid a growing range of choice. Meanwhile, internal communications, often constituting corporate media or house TV units until now, have expanded from a parochial approach to include more content for mass distribution. The relationship with broadcasters and print media, who often have their own on-line presence, has evolved to include video embeds, undeniably showing return on investment versus the cost of similar paid media exposure. Use by the blogosphere or consumers also has powered the metrics of successful marketing, as “shares” and “likes” offer potential for viral exposure.

It seems that every organization may perceive Monozukuri in a different way. However, "Many names now describe the trend such as brand journalism, corporate narrative or 21st Century Kotozukuri, but all require more sophisticated storytelling and delivery, making ties to traditional agencies"  (Dan Sloan, Nissan Global Media Chief).

Back to storytelling

Storytelling is a well known and ancient art form. Persona-focused storytelling is essential to branding. When it comes to creating a powerful brand narrative, the persona – the articulated form of the brand’s character and personality – comes first, and all other elements unfold from there. A compelling brand starts with a strong, well-drawn, and quickly recognized persona, the essential connection between what a company says and what it does.

This brand persona creates a long-lasting emotional bond with the audience because it is instantly recognizable and memorable, it is something that people can relate to, and it is consistent. Nike, McDonald’s, FedEx are all examples of brands with personas that fit these criteria. In each case, there is a clear personality associated with the brand. These companies understand that it is their clear articulation of their brand persona and their discipline in placing that persona into stories that work with and help strengthen that brand persona is what makes the difference between strong and weak brand associations.

That long-lasting and implicit trust is what distinguishes the great brands from the rest of the pack. It will also protect the brand when it makes a misstep. Nike has a strong brand persona that is all about performance and winning. Their long-used tagline, ‘‘Just do it,’’ is instantly recognizable as is their logo, the swoosh. In 2006, Nike teamed up with skier Bode Miller, which seemed like a good idea at the time. After all, he had won two silver medals at the Olympics in 2002, four gold medals and a silver medal at the World Championship in 2003, and in 2005, he became the first American in 22 years to win the World Cup title. His performance trajectory was clear. If anything, it seemed that the difficulty would be in finding words to match his expected performance.

There was no shortage of words: in TV spots for the 2006 Winter Olympics, Miller was shown talking about performance, talking about his attitude, and talking some more. But there was not much ‘‘doing’’ – he fell short in all five medal attempts. Worse, he did not even seem concerned with winning, an attitude that did not match well with the Nike brand persona. This created a disconnect between the audience and the brand, since the fit between Bode and Nike clearly was not right. Monozukuri here, as a unique value proposition for the consumer, through storytelling, went wrong.

Brand my brain

Brain studies have shown dramatic effects of branding. In one famous study, researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to see how subjects’ brains responded when they were given Coke or Pepsi. Some of the subjects were given the soda without knowing which brand it was, and were asked to give their preference on taste alone. Others were given the soda and then an image of Coke or Pepsi was flashed at them before they took a sip.

The result? The blinded tasting resulted in no preference for one brand over the other in the group, some preferred Pepsi, others preferred Coke, but they did not know which was which, so the overall results were what you would expect in two chemically and physically similar drinks. The unblinded tasting was something else altogether. While there was no influence of brand knowledge for people who thought they were drinking Pepsi, there was a very strong brand influence when they were shown an image of Coke. Their belief that they were drinking Coke actually altered their experience to the point where some areas of the brain lit up only when they believed it was a Coke that they were drinking. Clearly, branding is a real, measurable effect. Coke lit up the hippocampus and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, areas of the brain related to memory, control of action, and self-image. Our brains love Coke even more than our taste buds do.

How is it connected to storytelling? Actually, a lot of it has to do with the fact that Coke has been telling a good story, using an exciting yet accessible brand persona that people easily relate to. Storytelling has been engaging listeners and readers for ages and Coke figured out how to make that work to their advantage. Researchers have shown that successful storytelling (as a correct Monozukuri version) strengthens the connections consumers have to brands to a great extent.

Conclusion

When it comes to brand development, a unique perception of Monozukuri for each organization may lead our audience in the brand story and its actions. Marketing strategists should always perceive and apply Monozukuri in the optimum way to genuinely connect with the audience and ultimately convert them into loyal customers.

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May i have your attention, please?

A long time ago, Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris conducted a famous experiment. The participants watched a video tape of an amateur basketball game and were asked to count the number of times one team took possession of the ball.  During the film clip, which lasted for a couple of minutes, a person in a gorilla suit strolled onto the center of the court, turned and faced the audience and did a little jig. The gorilla then slowly walked off. Actually, the subjects who were busy counting the ball passes did not notice the gorilla. However, people who were simply asked to view the tape without being asked to count the ball passes had no trouble noticing the gorilla. The effect was so striking that some of the participants who missed the gorilla refused to accept they were later looking at the same tape.

This research offers a lesson for anyone who competes for customers' attention. Just because you think something is important and remarkable, does not mean that others will see it that way.  At any given moment, our audience is preoccupied with something to the point that their brains filter out anything else that does not relate to their focus of attention.

Influence. Creating and changing perceptions. Influence and perception, projecting messages out and taking them in. Two sides of the same coin.

Emotions, then facts

But, how can we have the customers' attention? How can we influence and shape consumers' perceptions? Let's start from the very beginning. The majority of consumers actually buy on emotions and then justify their decisions with logic. We all know that our mood affects our decisions and behavior.  People who receive a small surprise gift and shortly after that are asked about their opinions on home appliances, for instance, are more likely to give a favorable opinion compared to those who did not receive a gift.  Why are emotions so powerful when it comes to our perceptions and actions?  

Both human and animal emotions begin in the subcortical circuits of the mammalian brain, which is the ancient part of the brain.  Through brain stimulation, researchers have been able to isolate seven emotional systems in animals so far: Rage, Lust, Fear, Care, Panic, Play and the Search for resources. Scientists may discover more in the future. Originating in the deep areas of the brain, deep feelings may be more than just an expression after all.  

However, facts should not be ignored. Human brain likes to figure out patterns and make predictions. All our human planning, reasoning, abstract thought and other complex executive functions happen in the cerebral cortex, which forms the largest part of the human brain and is situated above most other brain structures.  The prefrontal cortex, the brain region implicated in planning complex cognitive tasks, decision making, and moderating correct social behavior, is easily overwhelmed. We can process just about seven pieces of information in our conscious mind at any given moment. The brain likes to rationalize, but the more data we have to deal with, the harder it becomes to think clearly. Long live the Analysis Paralysis effect.

Thus, an emotional wrap during our real-world or even better online communication with the customers, is more than needed, including storytelling to build human connections, including pictures and videos for emotional appeal, showing vulnerability, avoiding defensive language, being authentic or even contrarian, celebrating other people's achievements and, last but not least, engaging in discussions and other activities. 

Curiosity

Stimulation or boredom? Human brain is actually motivated by curiosity and the search for patterns. The brain makes sense of the world around by predicting certain outcomes, comparing these predictions to what actually happens and detecting prediction errors.  Based on this information, the brain adjusts the expectations, enabling us to learn from our past experiences. When the brain is busy searching for patterns and making predictions, it produces more dopamine, which is responsible for more pleasurable experience. The popular myth of dopamine is that the neurotransmitter equals pleasure, that it’s the hedonist chemical responsible for sex, drugs and rock n’ roll. The dopaminergic reality is actually much more complicated. 

Consider Wolfram Schultz. His experiments followed a simple protocol. He played a loud tone, waited for a few seconds, and then squirted a few drops of apple juice into the mouth of a monkey. While the experiment was unfolding, Schultz was probing the dopamine-rich areas of the monkey brain with a needle that monitored the electrical activity inside individual cells. At first the dopamine neurons did not fire until the juice was delivered; they were responding to the actual reward. However, once the animal learned that the tone preceded the arrival of juice, the same neurons began firing at the sound of the tone instead of the sweet reward. Eventually, if the tone kept on predicting the juice, the cells went silent. They stopped firing altogether. Schultz calls these cells “prediction neurons,” since they are more concerned with predicting rewards than actually receiving them.

Consumer behavior is not far from there; stimulating human interest and curiosity via engagement with the customers can accelerate the creation of dopamine who are already curious by nature and love unexpected surprises as long as they are pleasant. Social media marketing should involve gradually delivering interesting articles, contest, creative activities, open-ended questions, sharing something about the brand and satisfying customers' curiosity in general.

“We don’t see things as they are. We see things as we are”

Last but not least, a quotation from Anaïs Nin. Whatever seems real to customers may turn out to be a fabrication of their subconscious mind and the senses.  How they feel and think about the world influences how they actually see it. Their interactions can be, in fact, be shaped by the attributes of our environment. Using varied sensory language that caters for individual styles of communication (visual, auditory, kinesthetic, etcetera), using negative keywords or bizarre images in order to create different perceptions, inspiring and motivating customers (probably in a chaotic way) can take these customers' illusions and make them reality, our reality, via our engagement and communication with our customers.

Because, successful engagement brings satisfying customers and these customers can turn out to be the best business strategy of all.

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A Facebook for my Brand : Fan Pages and KPI's

Facebook fan pages can be regarded  as a virtual brand community. They are specialized, non geographically bound communities and they are based on a structured set of social relations among admirers of a brand. Therefore the theoretic explanations for a brand community are also suitable for explaining the fan page phenomenon. Social identity and  symbolic interactionism theories show that interaction with members of a reference group can lead to a strong feeling of belonging to this group (in this case the brand community) which in turn can lead to stronger buying behavior and positive brand attitude.

But how can we be sure that being a member of a facebook fan page has an impact on a brand admirer's buying behavior and brand attitude? Researchers from the University of Mannheim actually designed an experiment and assumed that members of the BMW fan page show stronger buying behavior and brand attitude than non-members and that within members, buying behavior and brand attitude are even stronger for active members than for passive ones.In order to carry out the experiment they conducted an online survey among 840 BMW admirers.

The BMW Fan Page Survey

Membership and interaction were expected to influence psychographic dependent variables (brand loyalty, brand commitment) and economic dependent variables (purchase intention, willingness to cross-buy and  positive word of mouth). Willingness to cross-buy was polled in three categories, which were lifestyle products (e.g. apparel), financial services (e.g. leasing or insurance offers) and original BMW spare parts. Purchase intention was polled in two categories, which were automobiles and BMW car repair services. In order to analyze the influence of membership and interaction, two separate experiments were carried out. In the first study, respondents were split into  members (n=210)  and  non-members (n=630) according to the membership of the German BMW fan page. The non-members became the control group and members became the experimental group.

Furthermore, members had to answer questions about their usage of the BMW fan page . Using these responses, a weighted interaction level was determined for each member. A cut-off value was then applied to the weighted interaction level to classify members of the BMW fan page either in passive or active members. While passive members don't or rarely interact with the fan page, active members display a higher level of interaction.

Influence of Membership

In order to analyze the influence of membership on the dependent variables,  the nonmembers and members of the Facebook fan page were compared with each other. Non-members (n=215) were recruited in BMW internet forums to make sure they are admirers of the brand. In order to be able to analyze variances of members and non-members, the groups need to be about the same size (max factor 1.5). That is why a sample of n=315 was randomly drawn out of the total number of the BMW fan page members (n=630).

Then the data was analyzed using a multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) in order to examine differences between the responses of the two groups. The mean values were calculated and compared between the groups to evaluate whether membership and interaction do have an influence on the dependant variables. The F-Values of MANOVA indicate that there are differences between the groups. These values ranged from F = 23,608 to 89,195 woth significant values of p=0.00, allowing to proceed with the interpretation of MANOVA.


A comparison of the mean values of the two groups proved that there are significant differences between non-members and members  of the BMW fan page for all 10 dependent variables. Specifically, membership has a strong positive influence on the affective variables brand  trust, brand  loyalty, brand commitment and positive word of mouth (∆ between +0.646 and +0.733, average ∆ = +0.675). Its influence on the conative variables brand satisfaction, purchase intention (for both product and repair services), and willingness to cross-buy (for lifestyle products, financial services and spare parts) is also strong (∆ between +0.395 and +0.985, average ∆ =  +0.682). The highest difference of mean values exists for  purchase intention (∆ =  0.985)  and willingness to cross-buy (∆ = 0.923).

Influence of Interaction

Having analyzed the influence of membership, the next step was to look more closely at the members of the BMW fan page, with the objective of determining whether the level of interaction on Facebook fan sites has any impact on the dependent variables. For this purpose, the four types of interaction with the fan page (writing posts, clicking the “Like” button, uploading photos or videos and sharing photos or videos with other users) were weighted to determine the level of interaction. Based on this level, members of the BMW fan page with a low level were then classified as passive and with a high level of interaction as active members.

The two groups were also analyzed using a MANOVA. Unlike the first pass, the second one did not deliver significant F-values for all 10 constructs. While most of the constructs had values between F = 4,815 to 23,668, purchase intention (for both product and repair services) and brand satisfaction failed to deliver satisfying p-values (p = 0.065, 0.758 and 0.425).


The comparison of the mean values of the two groups makes it clear that the significance of the MANOVA F-tests stem from the differences between the groups. Specifically, interaction has a positive influence on the affective constructs brand trust, brand loyalty,  brand commitment and positive word of mouth (∆ between +0.160 and +0.316, average ∆ = +0.233). Its influence on the conative variable willingness to cross-buy (for lifestyle products, financial services and spare parts) is  also positive (∆ between +0.164 and +0.379, average  ∆ =  +0.248). An influence on brand satisfaction and purchase intention (for both product and repair Services) was not observable as can be seen from the p-values. Highest mean value differences were seen in willingness to cross-buy for lifestyle products (∆ = 0,379) and brand loyalty (∆ = 0,316).

These two KPI's

The results show that being a member of a Facebook fan page has a strong influence on both affective and conative variables. Non-members show lower brand attitude and buying intention than members do. Membership as a key performance indicator can thus be used to assess intended buying behavior (conative component) and emotional affinity of customers to the brand (affective component).

Interaction has an influence on the affective dependent variables as well as partly on willingness to cross-buy. But while membership has an influence on all dependent variables, an influence of interaction on purchase intention and brand satisfaction was not observable. Interaction lacks a significant influence on the conative dependent variables. It can be assumed that interacting with a Facebook fan page does not influence such variables like purchase intention and brand satisfaction since there are other factors playing a more important role in buying a car or being satisfied with it. In the case of brand satisfaction, it is likely that whether a  customer is satisfied with the brand or not depends on the  performance  of the  brand  and not necessarily by how he interacts with the fan page. If the brand performs above the customer's expectation then brand satisfaction will follow. Interaction as a key performance indicator can thus only be used to assess emotional closeness to the brand BMW but not intended buying behavior of members.

The findings of this survey also show that membership and interaction do have a strong influence on brand admirers. The number of members of a fan page and the level of their interaction can therefore be considered as key performance indicators which actually have an economic value for the company using them. The findings also have implications for companies wanting to use a fan page on Facebook. Companies need to implement and monitor these two KPIs in order to evaluate whether their efforts on Facebook are successful or not. This means that companies need to follow these two KPIs closely when conducting a marketing campaign on Facebook in order to evaluate whether said campaign was successful or not. Companies should also focus on acquiring new members for their fan pages since it has been shown that membership has an impact on brand attitude and buying behavior.

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