Instant Skills in Japan

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Instant Skills in Japan

Introduction:

Instant Skills preference is a trend shows that people like to buy professional-quality things without professional operation. Try to think that, there is countless moment when people want to solve problem with professional skills they don’t have, they drop it but regret about it. What attract them is that while they enjoy the new professional-quality output ameliorate their lives, they needn’t to take extra time to learning how to use the new product. I focus on this kind of trend in Japan. It is a typical masculine society driven by competition, achievement and success. The intense social competition requires people working in an efficient way. And all these external influences like advanced technology, developed economies and special culture features lead to a set of different lifestyles in Japan, which can be satisfied in consumption with this trend. Then I justify the trend in consumer's perspective and raise some potential actions to enhance the development of instant skills products or applications.

Section I：Overview of Japanese macro environment

I.1Demographics

Japan has an estimated population of 126,919,659, with a growth rate of minus 0.16% (The World Fact Book, July 2015). And population pyramid is typical constrictive pyramid (see Exhibit 1), the population is generally older, the 65 years and over group even takes 26.59% of the whole population, as the country has long life expectancy, a low death rate, but also a low birth rate on average. And it is a typical pattern for a very developed country, which shows that Japan has a high level of education, and incentive to use birth control, good health care, and few negative environmental factors. Furthermore, the sex ratio at elder group (over 65 years old) is 0.77 male(s)/female, which shows that the elderly female population with less action force is significantly more than male.

I.2Economic

The GDP in Japan was worth 4601.46 billion US dollars in 2014 (Trading Economics, December 2015). Although it has a marked decline since 2012 (see Exhibit 2), the GDP value of Japan still represents 7.42 percent of the world economy. And the Per Capita GDP is still up to 37595 dollars which is one of the highest countries in the world. So that he Japanese are affluent consumers who set trends in the world. The attitudes and consumption behaviors of the Japanese people make this mature market significantly different from those of other countries.

I.3Technology

After World War II, Japan's science and technology has been the rapid development in just a few decades, because their strong capability at imitation and learning, they changed from a technological backwardness country to the world's scientific and technological country in such short time. It is the pioneer of the technology industry not only in Asia but also the whole world. Japan has already entered the digital period.

I.4culture

Here is the Geert Hofstede’s cultural dimensions show the Japanese cultural features by comparing with the most developed country US and the biggest developing country China(see Exhibit 3).