Sunday, April 27, 2008

Blog Post #1 for Business Communication

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By tissue marketing, i am hereby referring to the usage of tissue package as a medium of advertisements. I am sure the locals are so used to the rampant handing out of tissue packages wherever they go that it might not occur to them as something bizarre to the foreigners. I, for one, may not have gone to many countries, so what I say may not be totally accurate. However, tissue marketing was not at all common back in our homeland. Rather, it was usually left to be sold by homeless people for $0.20/packet (or 15Yen) around busy areas as a form of income. Herein, I will talk about who such marketing techniques would work on and some thoughts on its development.
So who are these target consumers? From the pictures, you can see cafes, handphones, courses, etc being advertised. Of course it would try to target the locals. However, after speaking to some Japanese friends, they either think the tissues are boring (see lower right-hadn corner of the picture), troublesome or are just plain marketing gimmicks, and would seldom take the tissues from the distributors. To us (foreign students), we would gladly take them because tissues are something you might have to use everyday in different circumstances. Still, the advertisements are in Japanese, and if it does reach out to the foreigners instead, I am not sure if all of us would bother to read - or even able to read - what is written there, especially if the contents are text-loaded. Perhaps it would be better to just put pictures there (like in the lower left-hand corner of the attached picture), or just the company's name (see eyecity) for easy reading.
In addition, have also noticed odd sizes of the tissue packets (the large squarish ones), and how it is sometimes distributed together with another leaflet or poster (since we can't just take the tissue, we are forced to take both). Dustbins are not readily available everywhere, so I can understand why it would be a pain to take the leaflet/magazine and having to hold on to them till we reach home, and wait for a particular day to send the trash out. In Singapore, Singaporeans are happy to take the leaflets from the distributors, because we can always trash it in a bin just within 5metres of the distributor. Maybe that is why tissues aren't really needed to make people take the advertisement papers. And why selling tissues would remain an ideal income source for certain people.

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