Notes From The Tiger’s Cave

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If you had been a savvy Japanese greengrocer in the late summer of 2008 you might have thought to buy in two or three times as many boxes of bananas than usual, oh and double the price of your bananas at the same time!

Yes, we have no banana[zu]If you had been able to do that you would have made some mula from the banana fad that hit Japan over the autumn.Japan is a nation of food faddists, or fad dieters. Two or three years ago the big fad diet thing was nigari, which is basically concentrated sea water, which is used in the production of bean curd (tofu).

Last year it was something else equally unappetizing.

This year we have bananas - or rather, “yes, we have NO bananas”, because the greengrocers and supermarkets quickly sold out of bananas the morning after some fool of a Japanese singer appeared on television to talk about how much weight she’d lost by scoffing bananas for breakfast.

There was no end to no bananas - at least until about a month later when the fad (but not the fat?) began to dissipate.

What does all this have to offer the Internet marketer by way of a salutary lesson?I checked out the listings on Google.co.jp for the term “banana diet” in Japanese and checked their details in dnscoop.com.

The top three sites all show a marked spike in their Alexa rankings during the height of the banana mania.Here are the results for “banana diet” (in Japanese Hiragana script):

Website	Google	Alexa on November 25 2008	Domain
dietcorn.com/bananadiet/	1	297,680	June 16 2008
ichiban51.com/banana-diet/	2	394,520	November 08 2007
http://www.asabanana.net/	3	98,638	March 10 200

And here are the Alexa ranking graphs for each site, clearly showing the spike in the second half of september:

It will also be noted that the top two sites on Google have now dropped off the Alexa ranking graph (which only has data for the top 100,000 websites). The site which has managed to stay on the chart is the one that is named after the fad: http://asabanana.net. The advantageous domain name is probably what helped promote the website up above the other two at the height of the banana fad - the spike is much bigger for this website.To be honest, I had expected asabanana.net to be the newest site, but in fact it is the oldest site with the most reach across the Internet (probably 99.9 of its visitors being based in Japan).

Each site is monetized in a different way.

Dietcorn.com uses three different sort of Google Adsense ads. It is essentially a Google adsense site. There are three Google ads on every page of the site along with a good quantity of useful info about various healthy food products, but there is no easy site navigation; each page is essentially a stand-alone - in fact the only link back to the homepage is at the very bottom of the page jammed up against the copyright info!

Ichiban51.com links through to a series of health and banana-novelty products which can be purchased on rakuten.co.jp. The links are all via mini-graphics that form a small box at the top of the page. Again, there is no easy way to navigate the rest of the site.

Asabanana.net is monetized via Amazon.co.jp but also has an “omiyage” (souvenir) link. The “souvenirs” turn out to be New Year post cards featuring the website’s “cute” character. They can be freely printed off. From there you can click through to discover more about the artist, and this may well be the whole point of the website. It is by far the nicest of the three sites, and easy to navigate.

It seems, though, that all three sites have missed a golden (yellow?) opportunity to cash in on the brief, barmy, banana boom.What would you have done with any of these sites to turn a fad into a fortune?

David Hurley

Best Internet Marketing Strategies

Have you been working flat out trying to build an Internet based business and seen no sign of growth yet?

Have you thought about quitting in frustration?

Before you do, consider the bamboo groves of the orient, how the trees thereof devote most of their energy to developing their roots. You cannot speed up the process; a bamboo tree needs TIME to establish it’s roots. To the casual observer, nothing seems to be happening, but all the work is going on underground…

Then, in the spring, new shoots emerge and grow at a rate that is faster than any other tree or plant species. The new growth that occurs in each successive spring is larger in diameter than the previous year’s growth until the bamboo has reached maturity. This is due to the increase in the underground system of roots.

So you see, if you are working diligently on your Internet marketing business (or any other project) and seem to be getting nowhere, consider the merits of the bamboo, which first establishes itself underground and hardly grows at all during this period, then enters into a rapid growth cycle and expands from year to year…

This is the method I recommend for putting down roots and accelerating the growth of your Internet marketing business.

David Hurley
http://grasp-the-nettle.com

There is a street close to the centre of Hiroshima where there are two competing takurakuji booths that sell Japanese state lottery tickets with prizes amounting to several oku yen (ichi oku, or 1 oku = 100,000,000).

On weekends when the prize money has been racheted up you often see long queues of folk lining up to by tickets, while old geezers in blue uniforms bellow through megaphones to bring in more losers.

Losers! 

Harsh, but true, don’t you think? Would you spend a good part of a precious Saturday morning lining up to buy a few state lottery tickets? The odds on your winning the big prize are so poor, the likelihood so remote, that you really ought to be doing something better with your life.

But just suppose you did win… :mrgreen: What would you do?

Would you give up whatever it is you do for a living?

Why?

Probably because you are not following your passion… Here’s a quote from a fine blog post I just read, by Alister Cameron:

“If Bill Cosby won the state lottery, would he retire from show business? Would Barbra Streisand quit singing? Would Shaq O’Neil quit playing basketball? Not even if he won the biggest lottery in the world. And almost nothing could have kept George Forman out of the boxing ring.”

The blog is actually about goal setting, and why people who are following their passion don’t need to place so much emphasis on setting goals because their passion leads them on to achieve great things almost, as it were, on autopilot…

They certainly don’t need to spend their Saturday mornings lining up to buy lottery tickets - and neither do you, if you follow your passion!

Read the rest of Alister Cameron’s blog post.

David Hurley

http://grasp-the-nettle.com

“Prestige
is the shadow of money and power. Where these are, there
it is.”

-
C. Wright Mills

Notes From Asia: Getting to the Bottom of Japanese Selling Strategies

By Michael Masterson

America is usually given credit for being the ultimate consumer society, but compared to the Japanese we are miserable plodders.

AdsSpy: 6 sites by this AdSense ID

If you don’t believe me, ride the escalator into the basement of any good-sized, top-quality Tokyo department store. I remember the first time I was in Japan, when I accidentally did that. My astonishment at what I found was so great I couldn’t process it. I am talking about the Japanese gourmet supermarket - a commercial phenomenon that no amount of food shopping (from Istanbul to France to New York) can properly prepare you for.

The first thing you notice is how perfect everything is: the polished floors, chrome-plated display cabinets, hand-painted signs, and hi-tech lighting are first rate. It’s the kind of atmosphere you would expect if you were shopping for $600 shoes at Gucci or a $6,000 watch at Cartier.

The employees are immaculately clean and beautifully dressed. And the food… the food. I promise you, you won’t believe your eyes.

I took Daniel, Allie, and K to one of these markets yesterday - and I was just as excited by the experience as I was the first time. We raved about how fresh all the produce was, how beautifully cut and arranged all the vegetables were, how pristinely packaged and well-presented the cakes and pastries were.

The sheer variety is awesome. I counted 32 bins of gourmet coffee, 98 varieties of tea, 22 types of Kobe beef, two dozen types of aged cheese, 16 types of French bread, and hundreds and hundreds of mouth-watering desserts.

But the most amazing thing is the pricing. Throughout this massive market, there are things selling for prices you just wouldn’t believe. For example:

• beef at $120 a pound

• French pastries at $180 a dozen

• German sponge cake at $21 a slice

• melons for $150

This is not tulipmania. In Japan, these are routine, everyday prices for top-quality produce.

Japanese marketers have succeeded in doing what might seem impossible to a Westerner: selling ordinary food products as high-priced, prestige items.

Western consumers are used to the idea that wristwatches can vary in price from $10 to $100,000, but they would have a hard time applying the same understanding to bell peppers and turnips.

It’s hard to imagine, yet it’s being done. The upper-middle-class Japanese consumer is not only willing to pay $800 for a Louis Vuitton wallet and $150,000 for a BMW 760 and $600 for a pair of Gucci loafers, he’s also happy to dish out $36 for a piece of the world’s best apple pie. (Yes, they sell gourmet apple pie!)

As I said at the beginning of this article, when it comes to being consumers, we don’t hold a candle to the Japanese.

Of course, the Japanese pay cash for their luxuries. We pay with credit.

But that’s another story.

My point today is that if you understand the psychology of marketing, you can sell anything at a much higher price than you might think. It’s all about what we refer to in the AWAI Copywriting Program as “deeper benefits.”

Affluent customers will spend more for a product or service - even if it’s only slightly better than a similar product or service - just to own the best. This is not because they need the quality. No one needs a Rolls Royce to get from Point A to Point B. You could drive a Toyota Camry and, rest assured, it will get you there safely, comfortably, and reliably.

But people are willing to shell out exorbitant amounts of money because they want the prestige that comes with being the owner of that Rolls Royce.

When I came into the investment-newsletter business about 25 years ago, the most expensive stock market advisory cost $195. About five years after I started, I came up with an idea that notched the mark up to $695. Ten years after that, the first $995 service was launched. And today, there are dozens of services selling for between $1,000 and $5,000.

The same thing has happened in the self-improvement and home-study industry. The top prices for these programs used to range from $300 to $600. In the early 1990s, the $1,000 mark was broken - and thereafter, it seemed, the benchmark was raised about $1,000 a year. Today, I know of at least a half-dozen programs that sell for in excess of $10,000.

Bottom line: It doesn’t really matter what you are selling - watches, stock advice, or melons. If you understand that (a) people buy things for emotional reasons and (b) the more money someone has the more he needs to spend it, you’ll be able to create high-margin, high-profit products at all times in any business.

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This article appears courtesy of Early To Rise, an e-zine dedicated to making money, improving your health and quality of life. For a complimentary subscription, visit http://www.earlytorise.com.