There's
been endless yakking about cultural differences between Japanese and
US keitai users. Which features appeal to which culture? Is wireless
Internet important for Americans? Those Japanese will pay for data,
won't they? Yada yada yada... This week, Tokyo's Wireless Watch Japan
Video Newsmagazine gets to the heart of the matter with a visit to Cellular
Plaza Mims, a unique cell phone shop serving large numbers of true-blue
Americans right here in Japan.
We've
heard comments ad nauseam about the differences between Americans, Europeans,
and Japanese when it comes to choosing cell phones. While we have long
disbelieved the odious stereotypes -- like "Japanese want to pay
for Internet access" and "American thumbs are too big for
those tiny i-mode keypads" -- we have to admit, we weren't sure
what to believe ourselves.
Our
request for an expedition to Seattle, NYC, and London to conduct a
little comparative field research was, sadly, quashed by our evil,
penny-pinching finance department (lead videocam guru Larry claims I
shouldn't have listed "Claridge's" as our London hotel on
the travel
petty cash application...).
So
we were forced to confine our field research to domestic climes, and
choose instead to visit a cell phone shop located just outside the front
gate of Yokota US Air Force Base. The clientele is decidedly skewed
towards Americans, who arrive for their three- or four-year Japan tour
with family members in tow and packing along many (all?) of the same
cultural assumptions about keitais that hold sway back home. We figured
that the fluently bilingual sales staff at Cellular Plaza Mims would
have some interesting observations on the differences between what their
US customers ask for versus what attracts the Japanese. Well, we struck
pay dirt, and if Mims' customer base is any example, this programme
offers interesting insights into how Internet-capable cell phones will
fare in the US.
To
see the video click here or on photo above :
Keitai
Sales: How Japanese and American Wireless Customers Differ
To
be fair, our slightly tongue-in-cheek look at client cultural differences
fails to take into account the deep and abiding structural differences
between the US and Japanese markets, so viewers can make up their
own mind as to the results. Maybe Japanese prefer i-mode-enabled handsets
because that's what the market offers them, whereas Americas prefer
low-cost, simpler models because that's what the likes of
Verizon, Sprint, and AT&T Wireless think they want.
But
let's dispel one wide (mis)presumption right off the bat: the
Internet penetration rate in Japan was **not** much lower than elsewhere
when i-mode took off in the spring of 1999 (see link below). In fact,
it
was about the same as in Germany, where SMS was just getting started.
So, no, the success of i-mode in Japan wasn't due to any lack of PC
Net
access (and note that the mobile Web continues to be successful despite
ubiquitous DSL access at some of the world's cheapest rates). The mobile
webs here were and continue to be successful because of great content,
a
simple, convenient billing model, and very cool handsets.
