EA-TOKYO INTERVIEWS
ANDREW SILBERMAN & WILLIAM REED
AMTGROUP & GUERRILLA MARKETING GENIUS
On July 2nd, AMTGroup President and Chief Enthusiast, Andrew Silberman and William Reed, a Guerrilla Marketing Master Trainer, shared their insights on Guerrilla Marketing for Entrepreneurs in Japan.
Q: What Guerrilla Marketing tactics work in a purely Japanese market place?
Will: I question whether there is such a thing as a purely Japanese marketplace. There are purely Japanese language environments. Many of our clients are large foreign companies operating in Japan with almost exclusively Japanese staff, and want the training delivered in Japanese. The important thing in marketing is to convince the client that you are on their side.
Andrew: That you are one of them in spirit. Guerrilla Marketing is all about developing the competencies to prove to them that you are.
Will:That's it! Communicating in Japanese is the price of entry, of course, but simply translating your sales materials and website into Japanese is not enough.
All of the Guerrilla Marketing tactics work, but in any industry or market you have to find the right assortment of tactics to market effectively. A few techniques that we have found to be particularly effective in Japan include having a marketing plan and calendar, as well as giving free talks, getting testimonials, and particularly having flexibility. Japanese companies are very particular about customizing your solutions to their culture, their company, and their niche. All of these work together to reduce risk and give the client assurance that you can do what you say you can do. Fusion Marketing, particularly in cooperation with AMT Group, has been a very powerful tactic for us because you grow by multiplying resources instead of adding them one at a time. The important thing is to be strategically aware of all 100 of the Guerrilla Marketing Weapons and find the right assortment for you and your business. You then have to track the results and make adjustments as you learn what works best.
Japanese tend to be more risk averse than other cultures. The nail that sticks up gets hammered down. Companies generally prefer to take on and improve tested and proven approaches rather than to be the first one. At the same time, they are often quite open to incremental change, and quite eager to gather information. If you can introduce your service in safe stages, you have a much better chance of gaining allies on the inside that can get you where you want to go.
Andrew: AMT Group is a perfect example. We're a Japanese K.K., serving both multinational and Japanese companies, as well as government organizations of the U.S., Canada, and Japan. Over the past 12 months, re-focusing our marketing efforts on a 7-step plan with 'intentionality'-two Guerrilla Weapons-has been a major factor in propelling our success this year: 15 new corporate clients in Q1/Q2 2003, and corporate sales up over 50%.
With a seven step plan, author Jay Conrad Levinson says you may have 50 or more pages of documentation, but the focus is sifted down to seven sentences. The 7-step plan is where you answer a series of 7 questions:
1) What is your purpose of this marketing plan?
2) How will you achieve this purpose?
3) Who exactly is your target audience?
4) Which of the 100 Marketing Weapons will you use?
5) What is your niche?
6) What is your identity?
7) What is your marketing budget as a percentage of projected gross sales?
We've gone through those steps both for the company as a whole and for our key clients. It's an eye-opening process, and it turbo charged our business plan.
"Intentionality"; is one of the 16 Guerrilla Marketing Competencies. From the Jumpstart program, we learned to score ourselves on a 10 point scale on all of the competencies. For "intentionality"; you use the following sentence: "I see every contact with my customers and prospects as a marketing opportunity. My words, attitudes and actions are all intentional and based on my marketing goals." Over a 6-week time-frame, you can get a real feel for how "intentional" you are, and as your awareness increases, so does business!
Will: Guerrilla Marketing gives you lots of tools for establishing credibility, reducing risk, creating confidence, gaining permission, and customizing your service quite precisely to the customer's needs. It also gives you the staying power and confidence that your marketing efforts are working. In Japan it takes longer to gain traction, but once you do you start to gain momentum. Patience and persistence are essential Guerrilla virtues.
One of my clients is a large Japanese retailer of automotive accessories, with hundreds of stores in Japan and overseas. This company operates very much in a Japanese environment. My first exposure to the company was as an automotive journalist, and I established credibility by interviewing the president and other executives, giving them good PR in English that they could not have created on their own. This led to requests from their public relations department for translation work, and eventually production work on videos for their investor relations. They got to know me as a journalist, as a translator, and as an association representative over a 6-year period, making many friends along the way. I am now working with them in training their trainers in effective teaching and presentation skills. But it took an additional 2 years to develop that business, with lots of meetings to determine their needs. An important step was inviting their training directors to participate in a seminar that I did, so they could evaluate the content first-hand. Looking back, it was all incremental change, proving yourself at one stage before moving to the next, and gaining traction with credibility. I think these Guerrilla tactics are much the same anywhere. The challenge in Japan is doing all of this in Japanese. Guerrilla Marketing helps gives you the tools to navigate, and keeps you focused on the essential task of delivering real benefits to the customer.
For more information on Andrew Silberman and William Reed, please visit the links below.
www.amt-group.com
www.gmarketing-genius.com
www.b-smart.net
Japan Today Interview - Andrew Silberman
