Recently in Market Study Category

IMJ Mobile has published a market study on Women's behavioral patterns & awareness levels in the Japanese mobile market.

Teenage girls prefer Twitter (63.1%), compared to mixi (54.1%) and Facebook (22.1%). They use Twitter to be up to date on celebrity gossip, to find new music and entertainment information, besides communicating with their friends.

Teenage girls use Twitter to find interesting topics, to kill time, and make new friends. Compared to overall usage reasons of finding information on hobbies (67%), killing time (58%) and searching for useful everyday ideas, teenagers seem to utilize Twitter as a socializing tool.

As for the overall mobile market, 10.5% of the women in their twenties own an iPhone and 5.4%, an Android. Smartphone is more popular amongst younger women as the percentage of Smartphone owners decrease in older generations of women.

Smartphone owners definitely spend more time surfing on the net, as 41% of Smartphone owners have answered to spend more than an hour a day net surfing on their phones, compared to 20.2% of the traditional mobile phone owners.

Docomo is releasing 9 new models of Smartphones this Spring/Summer. There are speculations on the release date of the new iPhone. The Smartphone market is heating up!

Lifemedia has conducted a survey on the usage of Facebook in Japan.
The study was conducted on people between the age of 10~69, 100 users per decade per gender (i.e. 100 male teenagers, 100 women in thirties, and so on.)

Of all the participants, 13.3% are signed up for facebook and 14.4% didn't know what facebook was.

22% of women in their twenties and 12% in their thirties are registered facebook users compared to 20% of men in their twenties and 8% in their thirties, seem to show that women are more proactive in participating in new media activities.

On the other hand, 41.1% of women, compared 29.4% of men, haven't signed up for a facebook account because they don't want to register under their real names.

In Japan, Facebook hasn't spread as fast as it did in other countries. The reasons why people sign up for a facebook account is to get in touch with / keep in touch with distanced friends and relatives. From the survey, it seems that people were unsure of the benefit for using facebook.

From the survey, it seems that people are already aware of facebook. It may just need good promotion schemes or reasons to seep in.

News site, Mycom Journal has published an article about the social media usage trend amongst Japanese Corporations.

The market study was conducted by NTT Resonant and Looops Communications and published on January 20th, 2011.

The survey was conducted on the personnel, in charge of Comapnies' Twitter accounts. Since the last survey, conducted in July, 2010, the usage of YouTube grew by 19.6% and Facebook by 9.6%.

The main aims of the social media usage are, 'branding' and 'PR'.

The companies which allocate more than 3,000,000 yen for Social Media budget grew from 31% to 50% of the total answers.

Large corporations are beginning to create social media guidelines. The main concerns amongst the social media personnel of the corporations are the lack of human resources and the hardship of measuring the effect of the social media.

NTT Resonant and Loops Communications, have conducted a market research on Corporations' Usage of Twitter.

Out of 315 effective study participant votes, more than 60% of them said they started using Twitter in 2010.

33.3% of the corporate users actively comment on consumers' tweets about their products, thus monitoring feedback of the customers and actively communicating with customers.

65.5% of the study participants answered that the access numbers to their official blogs increased since they started using Twitter. 47.6% of them said that new customers increased after they started using Twitter.

But, more than 40% of them answered that it is difficult to measure the effect of Twitter usage.

More than 90% of the study participants answered that their company is either keeping or increasing the Staff number & budget for their Twitter accounts.

When asked, which Social Media they are planning on utilizing actively, 74.6% of them said Twitter, followed by Blog at 59.7% and only 15.2% of them said Facebook.

It seems like Twitter is getting more popular in the Japanese corporate world. The current challeng is to set the right KPIs and guidelines for those who are new to the Twitter world.

iMi Research Bank has conducted a survey on the usage of twitter in Japan. The survey was conducted on Japanese men & women from teenagers to seniors. 1200 people participated in the survey.

More than 90% of the people has heard of twitter. This might have something to do with a recently aired prime time TV drama series.

About 18.5% of the people has an Twitter account.

More than 70% of them started tweeting this year.

More than 60% of them rarely ever tweets.

Most users have less than 10 follows and followers.

More than 50% of the users tweets on PC only.

Most people follow their friends and/or celebrities. Some people meet on Twitter. It might be too early to determine how Twitter will grow in the Japanese culture.

ishare inc. has conducted a market research on the awareness level of Japanese font URLs in the local market.

The study was conducted on 510 men and women in twenties to forties.

• 63.1% of the respondents are aware of the existence of Japanese font URLs.
• 68.5% of the male respondents are aware of the existence of Japanese font URLs.
• 56.1% of the female respondents are aware of the existence of Japanese font URLs.
• 66.1% of the respondents in their twenties are aware of the existence of Japanese font URLs.
• 58.0% of the respondents in their forties are aware of the existence of Japanese font URLs.
• 69.0% of the respondents have made mistakes manually typing URLs.
• 46.1% of the respondents feel positive about being able to type in URLs in Japanese.

More statistics on the original article.

[Thoughts]
For average Japanese internet users, it might be difficult for them to remember or type in URLs in other languages.  Seeing this result, it might be a good idea to acquire an easy to remember local language URL, when localizing a website.

Web Marketing Guide published a market study report on Users Reactions toward the Internet Advertisements.

The study was conducted on Male and Female between the ages of 16 to 69 years old.

• younger age groups, especially 16~19 and 20~29 groups answered to have experienced more aversion toward internet ads.
• People tend to dislike seeing ads they are not interested in and ads with overly exaggerated expressions.
• Women are more sensitive to ads with overly exaggerated expressions.
• Women are less open to share their personal data for behavioral targeting.

Web marketing magazine, Webmarketing Guide and Internet Market Research company, Media Interactive have conducted a survey on Effective Internet Marketing Tactics.

This study was conducted on 500 male and female internet users between 10~59 years of age.

More than 60% of the people answered that they have benefited from advertisements.
Of those people, 88.7% of them have benefited from advertisements on the internet, followed by television at 86.8%.

When asked, which forms of advertisements have motivated them to perform online shopping, 70.2% of the users with online shopping experience have answered, Mail Magazine, followed by Banner Ads at 57.1%.

Internet market research company, Borders and web marketing guide have released a study on uses of PC SEs and Mobile SEs.

Survey was conducted on 2046 men & women from teenager to people in the fifties.

More than 70% of the people use PC search engines but rarely use mobile search engines.

Only 0.6% of the people uses mobile for their main tool for search.

After the preliminary survey, they have conducted further study on 431 men and women from teenagers to people in the fifties.  They were selected from PC & Mobile Search users of the original survey. 

Out of these people, 92.3% of them use Yahoo! for their PC search, followed by Google at 74.9%.

As for Mobile search, 81.4% of them use Yahoo! Mobile, followed by Google Mobile at 49.0%.

[Thoughts]
From the study, you can see that mobile search is still not very popular in Japan and Yahoo! is still the front runner of the game here.

Internet research company, ishare has released a market research called 90% of Men are influenced by Word of Mouth?.  It is a study on the use of E-Commerce sites for Men and Women between 20~49 years old. 

From the total of 607 people who participated on this study, 52.9% of them have ever used an E-Commerce site.
Of all the people with E-Commerce experience, about 30% of them use an E-Commerce site at least once a month.
89.7% of them check the product specs before their purchase.  The percentage goes up for men at 93.9% and for people in 30s at 93.8%.
Most people search online for the product name (95.1%).
90% of men and people in 30s said their decision is influenced by the user reviews (word-of-mouth).

[Thoughts]
Data shows that when people are looking for a product information, they don't search for company names or type in URLs.  Sounds like a game time for SEO and PPC!  It could help a manufacture reach its prospective customers.  A good news for SEM people! or so I'd like to think...