Models Momo Eri and Tsubasa Masuwaka at the campaign launch

During the Nihon Bara-Iro Keikaku, or Japan Rose-Color Project, customers who buy a Quarter or Double Quarter Pounder Cheese get a pink badge and scratch-card, with the opportunity to win one of 50 free T-shirts. Early in the campaign, the T-shirts were also on sale at the McDonald’s on Center Gai, the upper floor of which was turned into a store reminiscent of a pink Graniph or UT. Some of the Ts were emblazened with tongue-in-cheek messages, such as “I Have Not Been Trading Stocks.”

In this way, behind the rosey color, the campaign makes a deeper pitch at consumers’ sensitivities. Members of the fan club can submit “Big Mouth” comments about the state of Japan today, including hopes, worries and messages of encouragement, such as from ‘Kenta’ in Oita Prefecture to people looking for jobs: “To change the current Japan, it does not take a person with good education, but with the spirit to challenge everything.” Or from ‘Chibisuke’ in Chiba to people who hate their overcrowded commutes: “Leave it to me! I’ll make the trains bigger. I already finished the designs.”

Singer Amuro Namie was chosen as the campaign model, reflecting the personal struggles she has overcome with the death of her mother, divorce and personal reinvention as an artist. The television commercial shows her fighting with herself in a video game, and tells viewers to “Keep Winning for Yourself” and “Laugh at Everything.”

For women, the only color worse on a man than pink is yellow

What color is it going to be today? More men are making colorful clothes choices at work and at play, but their choices may be misguided, according to the opposite sex.

Black remains the top-selling color for men across all categories, but colors previously seen as feminine, such as pink and violet, have gained popularity since 2004 as color becomes genderless, says the R25 freepaper.

For decades, men’s fashion in Japan changed little beyond some sort of combination of black, white and brown. In the 1960s, a decade characterized by national pride, the Olympics and an economic upturn, the preference was for the bold contrast of black and white. During the unease of the ’70s and the oil shock, a more muted brown was the go-to color. In the Bubbly ’80s, it was back to black and white. It wasn’t until the new millenium that men embraced color.

The color of the moment for men is… pink. A color long loved by women, pink is also the color of choice for guys. An R25 survey found men think women like them to wear pink. However, when women were asked what color they dislike on a man, pink came second, only just beaten out by yellow by the slimest of margins.

Colors men think women like them to wear: 1) pink 31.8%, 2) black 20.2%, 3) blue 18.6%, 4) gray 9.1%, 5) green 7%.

Colors women dislike men to wear: 1) yellow 31.3%, 2) pink 30.3%, 3) red 18.9%, 4) brown 7%, 5) green 6%.

The 108-room Quincy, which opened in February, operates under a flat-rate system where the room charge includes airport pickup, three meals a day, evening cocktails, Internet use, mini-bar, limited amounts of laundry and all local calls. This transparent approach is a clear pitch at businesspeople being squeezed by tighter travel budgets, but appeals to the broader traveler who no longer understand why they should be overcharged for essentials like Internet or non-luxurious extras like a canned drink.

Quoted net rates for early July are SG$228 a night (US$157), an all-inclusive price that is competative for the city-state and, for consumers, laudably easy to understand. By comparison, the same night at The Scarlet would cost SG$175, room only (SG$263 with breakfast and airport pickup). The Naumi is SG$260 including minibar but excluding breakfast or pickup.

This will be a tough year for Singapore’s hotels, with 4,500 new rooms due to come online, even as the number of visitors falls, according to Jones Lang LaSalle Hotels.

The change of economic mood means that consumers are less tolerant of murky pricing policies and hidden extra charges. They still believe they deserve to travel in style. But if they are going to spend their money, they want to know what they’re getting in return. The Quincy is one example of a business response.

Suntory has been giving away a series of eight mini-goods by product designer Amadana with its Boss Silky Black coffee. Targeting design-smart businessmen in their 30s, the all-black and metal products include a USB memory drive cover, a tape measure, a “multi case” the size of an iPhone, a pen holder, a money clip, a bookmark, a “cord reel” for keeping headphone cords neatly in a suit pocket and a memo stand.

Amadana is a brand of luxury household appliances that have a modernist design aesthetic that has grown from niche to mainstream in a short time. Its product lineup includes everything from coffee makers and music systems to paper shredders and mobile phone handsets.

A quick look online shows the collaboration has spawned more than 70,000 blog posts so far this month, with comments suggesting that consumers actively bought BOSS Silky Black in order to collect the Amadana products.

To find out how Five by Fifty helps its clients innovate in the beverage sector, contact us.

The new bottle holds 520ml of water, but weights just 12 grams when empty, or 40% less than other Coca-Cola PET bottles. The bottle, cap and even label weigh less. Over a year, that would reduce the amount of carbon dioxide produced in the manufacturing process by 3,000 tons, equivalent to the offset of a 950 hectare forest, according to the company.

For Japanese consumers, used to measuring their environmental impact in terms of the volume of waste they produce (always carefully separated into burnables, non-burnables and recyclables), the bottle creates a new disposal ritual to reinforce the “green” brand proposition (see video below). It can easily be twisted by hand to make it thin and easy to throw away, a “1-2-3″  action Coca-Cola Japan encourages consumer to follow in its marketing campaign:  1. buy (!), 2. drink, 3. remove-label-twist-and-discard.

Of course, the ritual still ends with discarding (a non-biodegradable object). However, the manufacturer has undeniable tapped into consumers willingness to take small steps toward “greening” their daily lives, but without making major sacrifices (Part Time Greens).

Not only that, Coca-Cola Japan is betting consumers are willing to pay a premium to be (or be seen as) green: ILOHAS retails in vending machines for 130 yen for a 520ml bottle, an 18% premium to other brands like Crystal Geyser. (As a launch campaign, the water retailed in convenience stores for 105 yen.)

To find out how Five by Fifty helps its clients innovate in the beverage sector, contact us.

Your message here? (AP Photo via The Daily Beast)

Without wanting to minimize the seriousness of the health issues at hand, the reality is that people around the world are considering how to protect themselves. The prospect of having to wear a face mask if Swine Flu continues to spread may be no big deal in Japan and Asian countries that experienced SARS in 2003. However, for consumers elsewhere unused to such things, the face mask poses a serious fashion dilemma.

The result is the mask becoming a canvas for personal expression. Individuals in affected areas who want to be victims of neither health nor fashion have begun to get creative and decorate their masks, as this photo gallery from The Daily Beast shows.

Mint Designs' cheeky chimp face mask

Some manufacturers like Kimberly Clark already put out limited numbers of colorful masks decorated with Disney cartoon characters for children. Japanese brand Mint Designs has fashioned a cheeky monkey-style mask, and artist Yoriko Yoshida was recently inspired to create a set of beautiful, witty and sometimes faintly morbid face mask illustrations.

Mt. Fuji face mask by Yoriko Yoshida

What’s next? The face mask covers the most important area of the body for communication, and the natural target of the eyes of others. So if face masks do become de rigueur in some places for a while (and it’s far too early to say that they will), the blank white space will become a unique marketing opportunity for the right brand with the right design and the right message.

Contact us to find out more.

Lyota Yagi, VINYL, 2006 (Copyright: Lyota Yagi/Mujin-to Production)

An exhibition at Tokyo’s Hara Museum of Contemporary Art will document the works of several Japanese artists who came of age in the late 1990s and early 2000s, an era of economic stagnation in Japan, offering a glimpse inside the creative minds of a recession-ready generation.

The exhibition, curated by art critic Midori Matsui, will feature some 30 drawings, paintings and video works by 14 “Micropop” artists. Matsui coined the word “Micropop” to describe the mindset of a new generation of Japanese artists who, the museum says, “rearrange fragments of information and knowledge to give new meaning to the outmoded and banal.”

According to the museum, the exhibition, Winter Garden, “reflects a harsh environment of economic recession and political instability in which artists use cheap materials and simple methods to break down existing structures and uncover the beauty that lies dormant within everyday things. [It explores] a world characterized by increasing uniformity spurred by globalization and individuals faced with the need to find meaning in their own lives.”

Makiko Kudo, "might fly at night" (Copyright: Makiko Kudo/Tomio Koyama Gallery)

Winter Garden: The Exploration of the Micropop Imagination in Contemporary Japanese Art is at the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art May 23-June 20, 2009. See www.haramuseum.or.jp for details.

Oxford Circus, after it receives the Shibuya Treatment

London’s city planners are borrowing a very simple principle of Japanese pedestrian management – the “scramble” – to try and replicate Tokyo’s Shibuya Crossing in the West End. It will be a sociological as well as logistical innovation for the European city.

London has started consultations on a major regeneration of Oxford Circus, the juncture of Oxford St. and Regent St., according to the Evening Standard. The scheme would stop all traffic at the crossing for 30 seconds at a time to allow pedestrians to cross diagonally as well as perpendicularly, cutting in front of each other in all directions.

In Shibuya, the phenomenon of thousands of people intersecting uninterrupted by traffic is a major tourist attraction in its own right. It’s one of dozens of such diagonal pedestrian crossings in Tokyo and other major cites that streamline consumer paths between key retail areas and transport links. Thousand gather at these intersections as they wait to cross, providing marketers with a captive audience for advertising hoardings and outdoor TVs replaying commercials.

“The parallels between Shibuya and the West End are stark: [both are] important fashion and entertainment areas,” said Danny Chalkley, Westminster Council’s cabinet member for environment and transport.

However, the new crossing will also be a sociological test of citizens’ expectations of personal space. It remains to be seen how frayed Londoners will cope with the multi-directional onslaught of barging pedestrians, something tolerant Tokyoites are well used to.

If approved, work will be complete by spring 2011, in time for the 2012 Olympics.

Oxford Circus today

Shibuya Crossing