Blog

Each year the Marketing class of the DOSHISHA Business School in Kyoto completes case studies complementary to the classes. CHINRIU HONTEN provided an international case study.

Since starting the NIHON ICHIBAN in 2012 CHINRIU focused on growing our line-up to respond to the needs of our customers. Revenues as well as average order amount increased year by year. Other than SEO (search engine optimization) we never marketed the shop in a systematic and structured way. Although we have some presence on social networks, we did not regularly publish contents. We believe that with a more professional approach to marketing, we should be able to significantly increase the revenue of our online business.

As three companies were providing case studies, the marketing class spit into 9 groups that would choose a case study to work on. The three groups that chose to work on the NIHON ICHIBAN case study were given the following material:

• Opening presentation
• Results of a customer survey
• Results of a competitor analysis
• Concept for the next generation online store

We received presentations and report from three groups of MBA students. Each group had a slightly different angle, but all delivered insights and very useful ideas how to improve the NIHON ICHIBAN marketing.

Many findings and recommendations have been implemented during the 2023 renewal of the NIHON ICHIBAN webstore. We are very grateful for this experience and thank all students and professor Sugai and his team for giving us this opportunity.