Advertising and Signage Japanese advertising and signage are abundant, exciting, imaginative and colorful.
There are many parts of Europe and America where ideas about advertising are different from Japan. A Japanese traveler may notice the visually subdued level of advertising and signs in American and European cities.
For a Japanese doing business in Europe or America it is helpful to understand why advertising and signage are different overseas.
The business part of advertising is different in Japan from Europe and America. There is one giant advertising company in Japan, Dentsu with more than 85% of the market share, and one modest-sized advertising company, Hakuhoto. There are many smaller competitve agencies, but most large corporations use the largest agencies. This is unlike America and Europe where there are no advertising companies larger than 10% of the market. Many small firms have giant corporations as their clients.
In Japan major corporation advertising campaigns often have similar themes in the same year, such as an island theme or a Silk Road theme. In Japan this similarity is intentional, it generates a sense of corporate community. In America and Europe, similar themes do occur rarely, but not because of the advertising agency. Similarity occurs largely because a few major clients use the same market research firms.
The best explanation for these different business structures in advertising is that, socially, Europeans and their American descendants are more focused on individual success, with less focus on group success. This helps account for common American and European advertising themes, which emphasize individual status, individual achievement and the uniqueness of each buyer, rather than the value of group, family or team.
Dentsu, in Japan, benefits from fitting individual ad themes for different products into a large family of corporations and products. The family-like familiarity of the ads seems to feel good to Japanese consumers. Highly individualistic American and European advertising campaigns benefit by strongly differentiating themselves and their products. They aim to individualize their buyers, they aim to reach individual niches of buyers.
Why is the content of advertising and signage different between Japan, America and Europe?
The reason is mostly technical. Japanese were wearing brightly colored fabric a thousand years before Europeans. Japanese had silk and other easily-dyed, fine fibers while most Europeans were limited to leather and wool, very hard to dye in bright colors. The Japanese had bright colored banners for villages, clans, families, fire brigades and even temples. The Europeans had much less color and their churches and cathedrals were much more somber. Northern Europeans in particular, who have been Protestant for the past five hundred years, were even more somber than Southern Europeans. Northern European Protestant churches were gray and austere. Northern Europeans have been the major builders of modern industrial Europe and America and they carry their subdued color sense into business, advertising and signage.
There are some parallels between Japanese and Euro-American signing. This similarity accounts for the vivid, dynamic advertising that is found in commercial neighborhoods of Tokyo, like Shibuya and the much more subdued signage that is found around the Metropolitan Government Offices in western Shinjuku. High social status and serious government in Japan and Euro-America are associated with anti-commercialism and subdued, more subtle signage.
In Japan, there are far more neighborhoods with exuberant and bright commerce. In Europe, many city centers and towns have subdued signage because of centuries-old lack of color and the high social status that Europeans try to attach to buildings that are old and established. In America, social status is highly differentiated by neighborhood. Suburbs that were built to have high social status in the past century were designed with very subdued or no existent signage in commercial areas; they remain that way.
Japan's different history of advertising arises from a different history of fabrics and social organization. Understanding of these differences can be helpful in overseas business.
Michael Phillips Nov. 2001