The Ranking Ranqueen is Tops in Trends
Friday, March 09, 2007SUSIE GHARIB: Japan is known as the land of the rising sun. For businesses, it's also the land of the rising trend. Japanese merchandisers are at the cutting edge of trendiness. And as Lucy Craft reports from Tokyo, one chain of stores has become the last word on what's hot and what's not.
LUCY CRAFT, NIGHTLY BUSINESS REPORT CORRESPONDENT: Since time immemorial, it's been a given in the consumer products business. There are winners and there are losers. But at this store, only mega-hits make the shelf. The Ranking Ranqueen chain culls sales data from conventional stores, and assigns rank to the top 10 or three in each of several hundred categories. Shoehorned into Japan's busiest train stations, Ranking offers a snapshot of Japan's greatest product hits, says Kazuyuki Tada, spokesman for Tokyu corporation.
TRANSLATION OF: KAZUYUKI TODA, CHIEF PRODUCER, TOKYO CORPORATION: In just five minutes, you know what's in style.
CRAFT: The tiny floor space is misleading. A bewildering array of narrowly focused categories is on offer. The top five varieties of, not just chocolate, but strawberry-flavored chocolate, the best-selling four kinds of lip gloss or MP3 players or bath powder.
TODA: Our rankings don't come from companies. They are more like hearing advice, word-of-mouth. This has greater impact with consumers nowadays.
CRAFT: A few categories like the top 10 CDs or books would be familiar to shoppers in America. But the merchandise generally reflects the overriding preoccupations of Japan's young females, dieting, beauty, snacking, and a fastidious approach to personal grooming. The current reigning champ at Ranking, earwax removal picks. Mariko Fujiwara is a consumer analyst.
MARIKO FUJIWARA, RESEARCH DIR., HAKUHODO INSTITUTE OF LIFE AND LIVING: It is a store and it's a store where they are happy to sell. But it's a store that has to make news every week. And that's the reason the assortment or the scope of products that they gather there.
CRAFT: Consumer expert Roy Larke says a shop which sells only top ranked items is a natural for Japan.
ROY LARKE, EDITOR, JAPAN CONSUMING: Yes, Japanese consumers are very fussy, very quality-conscious, but they're also very susceptible to being manipulated if you like, by fairly clever, very narrowly focused marketing campaigns and marketing campaigns that change brands and change products very quickly on a very life style, cycle and emphasize, this is the product everybody else is using, so you should use it as well.
CRAFT: Confounding skeptics, the parent company says the chain is profitable, attracting nearly 9,000 customers per store on weekends. Larke says the concept is tailor-made for Japan's hierarchical society.
LARKE: Here, because it's so important to be part of the group, to be seen as within the group and to be knowledgeable of what is going on in society, it's much more relevant to go to the same places, to buy the same products.
CRAFT: So far, the one-stop hit shopping idea has done so well in Japan, the chain's owners plan to roughly double the number of outlets here, and possibly even expand overseas. Lucy Craft, NIGHTLY BUSINESS REPORT, Tokyo.
