Isetan Mitsukoshi Holdings Ltd

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1.1 INTRODUCTION

Isetan of Japan Sdn. Bhd. is a subsidiary of Isetan Mitsukoshi Holdings Ltd. where the parent organization is located at Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo Japan. It has been operating in Malaysia since the past 25 years. Isetan of Japan Sdn. Bhd. operates as a retail merchandise department store. The Company provides general lines of apparel for women, men and children, as well as cosmetics, footwear, other home furnishings also food market. Apart from that, they also provide services such as coffee cafe, member club, hamper packaging, courier, alteration, and gift wrapping services.

Isetan of Japan Sdn Bhd or also known as Isetan Kuala Lumpur carries out two types of marketing activities that is above the line (ATL) and below the line (BTL). According to Kiran (2011), ATL is an advertising technique applied to promote brands by reaching the target consumers via television, radio advertising, magazines and newspaper, web and internet banner ads. BTL is the activities that are carried out at an outlet level as well as direct marketing. It involved doing sales promotions, distributing brochure and flyers, roadshows, joining exhibitions and so forth. Some of the ATL marketing activities carried out by Isetan Kuala Lumpur include appearing on Vivi Malaysia magazine, a fashion magazine that mainly focused on advertising Japanese fashion style and wear. Their key message through the advertisement was to highlight the event hosted by Isetan with the collaboration of Vivi Malaysia magazine named "Love Japan Fashion Show". The event mainly is to create awareness among the Malaysian customers on the uniqueness of Japanese styles that can be worn by them as a daily fashion style.

On the other hand, BTL marketing activities happening at Isetan includes sending short message service (SMS) by using permission-based text messaging in spreading the promotional messages to their members. Whenever there are promotion events such as mega sales, members sales or discount sales, Isetan will send a SMS to their customers to inform and remind them on the latest promotion’s details. According to Isetan, their company’s vision must be aligned with their headquarter where they aspire "to become the indispensable department store for each individual customer throughout his or her life by continually creating high quality, new lifestyles and being of use to our customers in the many different aspects of their lives". Thus, they look at marketing activities as a vital aspect of their organization and it’s a must to align their activities in the need of achieving their objectives.

Making the right decisions is not always easy. Marketing managers ought to question  what kind of design to create for new products, what is the best prices to offer to the customers, where to market the products, and need to consider on budgeting for the purpose of creating the best marketing communication such as advertising, sales promotion and so forth. Therefore, the writers will further discuss about Isetan’s marketing activities and then provide some suggestions or recommendations on how to improve their marketing activities.