We attract customers who will help us solve social issues together.

Hello everyone. I am Hayashi, the representative of Monosus.
This is the first anniversary of the Open Marketing series.
This year too, I would like to think about future marketing together with you all.

In the previous post,

• For thousands of years, humans have been accustomed to face-to-face transactions involving small production and consumption.
• The concept of marketing has expanded in just the last 100 years or so due to the spread of mass production and mass consumption.
• Mass production and industrialization have created information asymmetry, and companies have used marketing to fill this gap and sell their products and services.
• On the other hand, the spread of the Internet and social networking sites has enabled consumers to connect with each other, allowing companies' marketing activities to be instantly evaluated, verified, and shared.
• As a result, we may see a polarization between ultra-global brands that can withstand evaluation and verification from around the world via the Internet, and local businesses that develop while forming communities, even if only pseudo-communities, where people can see each other's faces.

I told him that.

Open Marketing is a concept that can be applied to both global brands and local businesses.
I think this idea is more compatible with the latter.

From now on, we would like to explore together with you what is needed to put Open Marketing into practice in your company.

The mindset needed for open marketing

When practicing Open Marketing, it is important to remember that
Open Marketing is not a methodology, but more of a way of thinking or stance.
I believe that this can be implemented in almost all products and services.
Unfortunately, I think it would be difficult for all companies to adopt this system.

So, what kind of companies can adopt this?
I believe that the ideas at the core of this company (team) are as follows:

• For social issues that will make the world (community) better,
• Explain the necessity and propose solutions.
• We aim to achieve this together with our customers.

Being a company (team).

By implementing the Open Marketing approach, companies like these can:
I believe this will speed up the process of resolving problems.

To make the world (community) better,
We aim to solve social issues.

When developing products and services,
The terms market-in and product-out are used.

Market-in is a market -based approach that provides products and services to areas where a market already exists.
While the market is already emerging, it is expected that sales will be generated soon,
Since there are existing players, you will be forced to throw yourself into a battle for market share.

Product-out is a concept that is implemented regardless of whether the market is already established or not.
Offer the products and services you want to provide
It's a product-first approach.
It's difficult, but if you can catch the trend, you can create new demand,
It may be possible to create a market.

In response to these issues, Open Marketing:
It is not based on the market or the product,
I believe it is important to have a social issue in mind.

Instead of coming up with a business idea based on what you want to do or what you can do,
This is an approach that involves coming up with business ideas based on issues facing society or communities and questions about existing systems.

Even if it is a small social issue, I think it is important that we ourselves feel and believe that solving it will benefit the world (or the community) in some small way.

Explain the need for a solution and propose solutions.

It's actually not that difficult to identify social issues.
There are bound to be plenty of questions and things that you feel need resolving as you go about your daily life.
Among the challenges facing modern society, such as global environmental issues and an aging population with a declining birthrate, there are probably too many to list just by counting the issues that we ourselves need to solve.

Also, while doing business, I think you can see the issues facing your industry as social issues.
For example, in the web production industry to which we belong, long working hours are a widespread issue throughout the industry, and there is also a multi-tiered subcontracting structure similar to that in the construction industry.
There are a lot of problems to deal with.

However, discovering these issues and
There is an entirely different weight to talking about the significance of the solution in the first person, proposing a solution, and getting involved yourself.

In other words, it means committing yourself to solving the problem.
As we all know, a person cannot be committed to several things at once.

Investing your and your team's valuable man-hours and resources,
Deciding and committing to solving a certain social issue is
Because it requires a lot of determination.

Aiming to solve the problem together with the customer

The market-in and product-out ideas mentioned earlier are
The starting point of the idea is "how to generate money."
This is a natural thing for a company to do,
Without profits, it is impossible to sustain business activities.
It is impossible to protect the livelihoods of our members.

However, starting from these
This tends to turn the relationship between companies and customers into an adversarial one.
It becomes a relative relationship of "doing" and "being done" - asserting one's own merits, attracting customers, selling to them, and retaining them.

I believe that it may be difficult to truly solve social issues with relationships based on mutual interests, known as "give and take."

In order to build a collaborative relationship with customers, rather than an adversarial one, it is important to adopt a stance of working together with customers to solve their problems .

Regarding what we consider to be a social issue,
Commit yourself to the problem, present the need for a solution, and present a solution.
By sharing with others who feel the same way, you can encourage them to become customers.
We will solve social issues by exchanging money for goods and services.
To achieve this, activities are being carried out to gather allies (customers).
I think it can also be rephrased as open marketing.

By becoming our customers, we invite them to join us in our activities to solve social issues.

I'll leave it here for now.

From the next few days, we will be holding a workshop that Monosus started together with Kamiyama Town in Tokushima Prefecture.
I would like to explore the Food Hub Project 's challenges from the perspective of open marketing.