Murata explained that the company had come to the conclusion that Japanese customers were extremely sensitive to variations in local tastes and fond of both newness and variety. “In Japan,” he told me, “consumers are easily bored. In soft drinks, for example, there are more than two hundred soft-drink brands and lots of new ones each week! A 7-Eleven displays fifty varieties with a turnover of seventy percent each year. The same holds true in many food categories.” To create leverage around this pattern, 7-Eleven Japan has developed a method of collecting information from store managers and
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