My motivation to take the International Marketing Class at DBS

When I was a student of Doshisha Business School (DBS) in 2005, I took several classes in English, which was about one-third of my all classes. I enjoyed one of the most was the International Marketing Class, which was provided by Professor Hiroshige Hayashi in English. I recall that this class had about eight classmates. I enjoyed this class very much because all classes were provided in English to learn theories and to exchange our knowledge based on our different experiences, through discussion, presentations and assignments; all were using English even if all students were Japanese. The English communication level of our teacher and students was quite high. I read the reports of my assignments for the first time in almost three years after I finished this class and I felt I should make some articles for this weblog from those reports of mine written based on my business experiences for my company which has been running for 17 years since 1991. 

My motivation to take this “International Marketing” class is to think about our company’s strategy in the future. We used to have online stores in yahoo.com, eBay auction and also Amazon.com in the US to sell Japanese animated cartoon items and Japanese traditional crafts to customers living overseas. It became very successful in a shot period, but after the boom of cartoons had finished, those stores were closed. Some day in the future, however, if I have a chance to do it again, I would like to succeed for a longer period using the knowledge and theory that I have learned through this class. Now I would like to introduce our experiences of both the internal marketing and the external marketing using the internet for online stores.

At first I would like to explain our domestic market for online stores. I had owned two real video game shops and five mobile phone shops before starting my current job of running an online store. I have been doing this Internet business for about 13 years. My company has two online stores since 1998 in Rakuten, which is the biggest online shopping mall in Japan. The main merchandise is “Name Brand Bags”such as Christian Dior, Gregory, Mz-Wallace, and LeSportsac, for one store and “Posters and Calendars” for the other. 

Meanwhile, we also started to sell our products using e-Bay auction, Amazon.com auction for marketing to sell to overseas. Then we made an online store in Yahoo.com in the US. The monthly cost of the US Yahoo was only 30.00 US dollars at that time. We can only use the US currency for the prices of our products, not Japanese yen, in the product pages. At first the type of selling was Business to Consumers (BtoC), but soon we changed the type of selling and to Business to Business (BtoB), so sales became bigger and reached 10 million yen in two months. Our first target market was the US, but sometimes orders came from different countries, such as Australia, the UK, some Asian countries. I found that the Internet was amazingly useful and cheap to sell to the overseas market because creating an online store was easy, if using an Application Service Provider (ASP), as it does not require special skills to set up and it is much lower in cost compared with real stores.

After finishing this International Marketing Class, I would like to understand completely what international marketing is. Then some day, when I start to build an online store for the international market again, I believe I could use the knowledge and theories which I have learned through this class.