Company Overview
Kinokuniya Dubai is a subsidiary of Books Kinokuniya, which is a leading Japanese bookstore chain (Kinokuniya UAE par. 1). The business is run by Kinokuniya Company Ltd, which has been in existence since its founding in 1927. The business originally began as charcoal selling enterprise before it was transformed in 1927 into a bookselling venture (Kinokuniya UAE par. 2).
Gradual business expansion has seen the company embark on an expansionist strategy that not only targets the local Japanese market but the global one as well. Dubai becomes the latest among major global cities to host a Kinokuniya bookstore (Kinokuniya UAE par. 2).
The company’s previous expansion plans and strategy had seen it open up global stores in the USA, Singapore, and Indonesia. It also boasts of a physical presence in Indonesia, Australia, Taiwan, as well as Malaysia and Thailand (Kinokuniya UAE par. 3).
Kinokuniya store in the United Arab Emirates is located in Dubai Mall, which is a globally renowned shopping destination (Kinokuniya UAE para 4).
The spacious book gallery in Dubai, taking up to 68,000 square feet of space, enables the bookstore to stock over half a million copies of books and several thousands of magazines. These reading materials are published in varied languages, including Arabic, English, Japanese, and German. Other contents are also published in Chinese, along with with French (Kinokuniya UAE par. 4).
Over the years, Kinokuniya has been adopting a new practice for its stores where services have been expanded further to add on the primary role of selling books.
Kinokuniya stores currently stock animation content owing to the increasing fame of Japanese movies and other television animations. The stores also host other events, including language learning workshops, comic art demonstrations, and book launches, among many others in its bid to sustain and enhance operations (Kinokuniya UAE par. 5).
SWOT Analysis
Strengths
Kinokuniya has a large database of ebooks that offers fresh, as well as relevant content. This helps the company, in turn, to attract many potential users and convert those visiting the site for the first time into customers. As these customers continue to experience the great services and offers, they help in making the website rank highly among the search engines.
The bookstore company has been in business for a long time. This has, in turn, enabled it to win many customers’ trust and faith. Thus, Kinokuniya enjoys almost a permanent clientele base that assures it of a steady flow of revenues and profits each year.
Weakness
Despite succeeding in global expansion and establishing bookstores in various cities and countries around the world, Kinokuniya is still strongly associated with its original Japanese culture. This makes readers from other countries other than Japan to feel detached from the firm.
Opportunities
The fast-paced advancements in the information technology sector offer a great chance for the company to reach a wider readership across the world. Handheld devices with the capability of browsing the internet and enabling users to read online books and materials make it possible for the bookstore to sell to a wider readership without necessarily building physical stores in given localities (Thongpapanl, Narongsak, and Abdul 3).
Threat
Many booksellers are integrating ICT in their operations and service delivery as a means of expanding their markets. This is increasing competition in the industry and is likely to affect Kinokuniya’s revenue performance.
Other book stores, such as Amazon, have gone ahead to invent their e-readers, the Amazon Kindle Fire, which enhance their overall market performance. This, therefore, calls for rival industry players, including Kinokuniya, to invest heavily in the area of technology development and advancement as a means of creating more value to the market (Thongpapanl, Narongsak, and Abdul 3).
Channels
Search Engine Optimization
Kinokuniya uses search engine optimization as a channel through which buyers access its available copies of books. The company uses the internet to promote its official website to increase visibility.
This form of search engine marketing adjusts the website content for purposes of achieving higher rankings about search engine results (Evans 21). As people visit these search engines for their reasons, they can spot advertisements about Kinokuniya and get the opportunity to learn more about its operations and available materials.
Social Media Marketing
Kinokuniya also uses social media to reach out to its potential market. Social media platforms have increasingly gained popularity, especially among the youthful populations in many societies owing to its potential of reaching a wider audience within a short period.
Social media platforms as such Facebook and Twitter are less costly to use because they only require users to sign up personal accounts and begin using them for interaction (Evans 21). Kinokuniya uses both Facebook and Twitter to interact directly with its buyers, while also using the channels to advertise its services because of the limited inconvenience and maximum benefits achieved by these platforms.
Mobile Marketing
Kinokuniya has introduced a smartphone application that allows users to understand more about its service delivery to the market. Individual customers can download the apps to their Android or iPhone devices from where they can understand fast-hand information about the book store, including the latest copies announced, release dates, prices, even availability.
E-Marketing Program
Affiliate Marketing
Kinokuniya has adopted affiliate marketing as a means of enabling it to attain its set objectives. The company’s official website helps in sponsoring of the Affiliate Marketing program, which has, in turn, registered significant success.
The company has entered into an agreement that links the numerous websites to Kinokuniya’s website through the combined use of the official website and other business associates, mainly independent retailers, as well as third-party sellers (Smith 25),. The agreement works in a way that permits the third-party associates to use Kinokuniya’s website in listing their products and creating links that allow visitors to teach the products.
The associates earn a percentage fee for every visitor to Kinokuniya website, who is, in turn, redirected through their web links (Smith 25). Additionally, they earn extra commissions in instances where website visitors end up purchasing a commodity. In particular, the associates play a critical role in drawing more traffic, with a significant portion of the visitors ending up transformed into buyers.
The system works by relying on the referrals that mainly follow the keyword bidding together with other paid searches. Further, Kinokuniya has introduced a new store structure that allows the associates to embed or entrench a subset of Kinokuniya books or magazines within. The set up also links the bookstore’s products from different sites.
Kinokuniya has succeeded to romp in close to a million associates as a result of this program. This large number of associates has enhanced the revenue performance of the bookstore, with about two-fifths of the total revenue resulting from the affiliate marketing program.
The firm has embarked on an ambitious plan that would eventually enable further expansion of the affiliate program given that the program is beneficial to Kinokuniya. As more affiliates come on board, the firm is assured of raising its revenue and profits higher than is the situation currently.
The Customer’s Opinions
The Kinokuniya official online marketing site also helps in performing relevant customer services, in addition to selling products. Each product, for instance, is available to customers who are, in turn, encouraged to perform consumer reviews.
The customers are allowed to choose a hierarchical scale of 1-5 stars while making their consumer reviews. Because the Kinokuniya online sale website has enabled the creation of a large community that comprises of signed users only, they are allowed access to such ratings done by others with a view of commenting on the same. The firm undertakes corrective measures based on the summary of opinions and comments collected from customers.
Email Marketing
Kinokuniya has targeted using email marketing as a perfect means of luring many other users through the use of free email given that its main business objective involves the maximization of profits. The bookstore has adopted permission marketing practice to seek permission from customers to be sending online correspondences to them. Customers who agree to the program end up receiving periodic e-mails targeting to promote the products.
This kind of program is important in the sense that it often finds an audience with volunteers, who in turn pay more attention to the message being delivered (Hosea 47). These volunteers can easily transform into actual buyers of once they are informed for a significant period.
It is critical to note that Kinokuniya has since obtained a large following as a result of adopting the program. The emails also work towards enhancing customer service as they also focus on answering concerns and complaints from the customers.
The individually targeted audience can relate personally with the response given by the firm because of the personal nature of emails. Kinokuniya is making significant investments with its emailing program as a way of enhancing its ability to correspond directly with its expanding clientele base.
Customer Service
Kinokuniya’s online selling website is designed to optimize customer service in all instances. The website design targets to achieve quick customer access such that individuals may take limited time to locate the products they seek to purchase.
Kinokuniya is continuously enhancing the capability of its website to improve on the interface experience and general customer relations. The customer service uses numerous means of company-client access to achieve its objective.
For instance, all Kinokuniya customers can send their e-mail correspondences to the bookstore and request more information or clarification concerning their purchases or other related issues. The company does not use automated responses in all instances when responding to customers.
Instead, it has employed workers whose specific roles entail reading through customer messages and giving perfect feedback to the clients. To further enhance customer service, Kinokuniya workers also use phone contacts to reach out to their customers when responding to issues requiring more clarifications from the customers.
A combination of all these e-marketing programs helps Kinokuniya to achieve great success in its market performance and general operations. The programs have ensured easy accessibility of customers to the bookstore’s management without necessarily requiring the buyers to visit the bookstore’s physical location at the Dubai Mall.
Issues the Company is Doing Wrong
Fast adoption of affiliate marketers
Kinokuniya has recently shown great enthusiasm in seeking to hurriedly gain from the affiliate marketing program. As a result, the company has not been taking considerable time and efforts to ascertain its affiliate marketers. While not all affiliate marketers may turn out to be risky, it is critical to point out that some affiliates may turn out to be risky for the company in the long run and end up affecting the business operations negatively.
Kinokuniya has been allowing all affiliate marketers seeking to use the bookstore’s website easy access without putting any strict regulatory frameworks in place. The bookstore does not investigate the prospective marketing partners thoroughly and appropriately before granting them the go-ahead to form a marketing partnership with the firm.
The company risks entering into deals with suspect firms whose objectives may not necessarily be on creating market awareness and spurring growth given that the affiliate marketers on the company’s website increase in number with every passing day. Negative actions of these rogue affiliates could see Kinokuniya’s public image damaged significantly, including being required to pay huge amounts in fines and other legal fees.
Uncontrolled Customer Reviews and Opinions
Marketers need to be constantly checking and analyzing customer reviews and opinions as a way of establishing overall performance. However, customer opinions and reviews conducted online may not wholesomely be trusted as genuine. Without controlling and limiting the number of individuals who make such reviews, it is possible for the firm to even suffer damages as a result of endless negative opinions and reviews from non-realistic customers.
Kinokuniya is allowing a huge number of people to make such reviews. This is risky as it may even involve individuals working for other rival firms who may pose as customers only to achieve their selfish objectives.
The company will effectively reduce the possibility of false opinions and reviews from being displayed on its website by instituting strict rights admission requirements. Only genuine customers with realistic signup accounts will have the opportunity of relaying their reviews after purchases.
Social Media Marketing
Despite the high potential of social media concerning enhancing marketing activities, the management at Kinokuniya has not fully embraced its use. While the bookstore has established both Facebook and Twitter accounts, it does not maintain interactive kinds of discussions with online users. It is possible to deduce that both social account pages owned by the bookstore remain largely dormant.
The management appears to assume that since it uses the email service a lot more, it has no big pressure to maintain close contacts and interactions with users of the social media platform. However, this is a grave mistake because the global trend currently indicates the growing popularity of this platform. While emails sound very official, the social network platforms are more convenient, especially for young users.
Research and Development
Kinokuniya is not investing significant amounts of resources in enhancing its research and development performance. Many other rival bookstores have embarked on strategic research and development activities to improve on their service delivery to keep up with the fast-paced advancements currently being noticed in the area of ICT.
Amazon, for instance, has successfully announced a series of its e-book reader version, the Kindle Fire, much to the success of the company.
This has seen the company attract more potential buyers as they seek to optimize the value addition that the firm is working on. A similar focus by Kinokuniya will also see it improve on the quality of its service, thus attracting a huge number of potential buyers who will, in turn, enable Kinokuniya to improve on its revenue capability.
Recommendations
Address legal issues relating to affiliate marketers
Kinokuniya must begin by working towards choosing their merchants and other affiliate marketers carefully. This entails conducting diligent and thorough research before eventually giving the associates the okay to work with the bookstore.
All the prospective marketing partners must provide their credit report to enable the Kinokuniya management to ascertain their viability. The company’s marketing department must arrange for and attend forums with the objective of gaining more information and knowledge about the prospective marketer.
Equally, the bookstore’s management must insist on seeing the existing client lists of both the existing, as well as past company clients of the prospective affiliate marketer. This is a good starting point to establish whether the marketers are indeed genuine or not.
For any authentic affiliate marketer seeking to work with Kinokuniya, it is practical that they have a list of the customers they have served over the period that they have been in business. A bigger customer list will be a thorough confirmation that the firm has been in business for quite long, while a short list may be an indication of the opposite.
Even after ascertaining the above issues, it is also crucial that Kinokuniya management understands whether the prospective affiliate marketer practices anti-marketing campaigns. Most companies may wish to engage in such activities because of the high potential sales that can be achieved as a result of anti-marketing activities.
Thus, if Kinokuniya analyses the affiliate marketer and discovers that he mainly bases his activities on a negative advertisement, then a decision should be made quickly to drop the firm. If this is not done keenly, then there is a greater potential of such an affiliate marketer portraying Kinokuniya as a scam, thus damaging the image of the bookstore in the long run.
Prospective affiliates should always work at generating their unique content rather than appearing to ape or rely on Kinokuniya’s content. Because the bookstore is paying to make use of affiliates’ space, it has a right to demand this to happen. The services being paid for do not involve the marketer regurgitating what Kinokuniya has already packaged.
Additionally, issues relating to the duplication of content will effectively be addressed by the bookstore company, ensuring that the affiliate marketer has his content. Kinokuniya must provide its content samples for the affiliate marketer to look at, but insist that value addition is done to its products and services by the affiliate creating their unique marketing content.
Increase research and development expenditure
As already mentioned, the global business perspective remains highly dynamic and complex for enterprises because of the fast rate at which ICT advancements are being released. Companies have increasingly incorporated IT in their operations, and the two are inseparable.
Even businesses that do not deal directly with IT are expected to incorporate the idea to benefit from the numerous advantages that come with it. Kinokuniya must budget on this aspect every year to effectively integrate its benefits within its overall operations.
One way through which this can be achieved is by forming partnerships with other IT companies. This will allow the latter to develop customized products and systems for Kinokuniya.
Google, for instance, has managed to establish itself as a strong IT company that can work in association with Kinokuniya to develop its customized e-book readers. Such a strategy would be much cheaper and more effective in the long run than pursuing one where the company establishes and relies on its own internal IT department.
Once Kinokuniya begins to announce and release its customized gadgets, it will have made great strides in winning over greater support from the market. It will lock in many customers because the buyers will have limited options other than buying the company’s online content immediately after acquiring a Kinokuniya e-reader. This will enhance revenue performance for the company as more loyal customers will be achieved.
Integrating customized technology would also mean that the company extends its business portfolio as well. Even where the e-readers and other related technologies will be manufactured by third-party firms, they will be branded as Kinokuniya devices. As such, the company will be involved in selling the devices and earning revenues in return.
This will eliminate the costs incurred by outsourcing the IT services, thus enhancing Kinokuniya’s competitive edge over its rival bookstores. Increasing fund allocations meant for research and development activities will equally enable the bookstore to venture into other critical areas such as mobile apps. Special Kinokuniya apps will allow smartphone users to easily access the company’s website and analyze the available products on offer.
It will also improve on the intractability of its clients. Firms increase their marketing potential whenever they consider creating and availing their specialized apps to the users given that smartphones are growing in popularity, and many users are adopting them. The apps play a critical role in enhancing customer satisfaction because of the many capabilities and functionalities that are embedded in them.
Another important issue worth considering by Kinokuniya management is the concept of brand siphoning. The bookstore firm must not allow the affiliate marketers to make bids on the Kinokuniya brand name.
Allowing the affiliates to purchase the brand name for their PPC campaigns means that the company will have surrendered the authority over its brand name to a third party player. There is no need for the firm to lease the brand name to a different company to market it because Kinokuniya is already a strong brand that has been built successfully over several years.
Equally important and worth considering is the fact that Kinokuniya should not allow its affiliate marketers to embed links on the bookstore’s local search profile. Giving the affiliates an allowance to do that will be tantamount to spamming the company’s local search.
Instead, Kinokuniya’s profile should remain as the priority and prohibit the affiliate marketers from using the local search directories to do their marketing. Such practices entail brand siphoning by the affiliates, and it eliminates the whole benefit of using the company for marketing.
Increase presence in social media
In as much as Kinokuniya insists on using email marketing to reach its customers, it must equally place similar or more emphasis on the use of social media. Presently, even though the bookstore firm runs official corporate pages on both Twitter and Facebook, there is a little benefit that is being gained from this move.
Both platforms remain dormant, and the number of fans liking them daily has reduced significantly. Social media is a significant avenue through which Kinokuniya can build and enhance its clientele because the online platform as a whole is gaining fast recognition across the world. The company must consider employing workers whose specific roles will involve running the accounts daily.
The online social media platform will enable Kinokuniya to understand the feelings, concerns, as well as wishes of their buyers better because of the convenience and relative cost effectiveness thereof. It is easier for a customer to contact Kinokuniya via the Facebook or Twitter sites and the company to respond to the concerns promptly in turn.
The management of the bookstore should ensure that these platforms are operated in real time to allow buyers to have greater trust and confidence in them. Often, users of online social media do not consider these platforms as too official.
Thus they are likely to use them in pointing out at pertinent issues that may otherwise not be easy to mention on the official channels. In turn, if the company can consider such concerns with a lot of keenness, then they will enable Kinokuniya to achieve even greater marketing objectives in its operations.
Strict customer service
Going with the advent and expansion of IT capabilities, many benefits have been acquired by firms that integrate these capabilities into their operations. However, IT also has a greater potential of ruining the image or brand of a company. Kinokuniya uses online capabilities to issue customer services to its customers.
The firm allows users to issue their opinions and reviews regarding particular products and service delivery by the firm, but it fails to put strict control measures that restrict access to its website. This is a risky practice because rogue and malicious people can take advantage of such an offer to issue non-realistic reviews and opinions to satisfy their selfish ambitions.
Such negative or unrealistic comments and reviews are capable of affecting service delivery in the long run because Kinokuniya will not be addressing the right aspects or challenges that will be affecting its operations. As a remedy, the bookstore must consider restricting access for those intending to participate in reviews and issuing opinions. A mechanism should be set up to only allow consistent and loyal buyers to issue their reviews and comments.
Such a mechanism may involve tracking purchase frequencies by individual buyers before granting them the admission rights to issue comments and reviews. In essence, such reviews and comments are highly likely to be genuine because they will be coming from people who have already purchased and encountered the services first hand.
Summary
Kinokuniya is a bookstore company that originates from Japan. The firm has been in existence since its formation in 1927 and today boasts of a significant global presence that spreads across many cities and countries. Kinokuniya has established a physical book store in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates as it seeks to gain from the fast-growing Middle East economy.
The main e-marketing channels used by the firm include e-mail marketing and search engine optimization. The firm has also adopted a mobile marketing channel where it has announced specialized smartphone apps that customers can use to learn more about the numerous products and services that it offers. It uses online social media as a channel through which it markets its products and provisions, mainly including Facebook and Twitter.
However, the company faces numerous challenges and shortcomings in its e-marketing program, which require to be addressed immediately. Firstly, while it uses affiliate marketing to raise product awareness in the market, it has not been keen on scrutinizing the prospective affiliate marketers. As a remedy, Kinokuniya must consider laying down strict regulatory requirements that will see it verify the authenticity of such willing marketers.
The bookstore does not also consider investing in the area of research and development as being of great importance to the firm. This is evident from the lack of funds set aside to address this aspect.
As a remedy, Kinokuniya must set aside funds and enter into partnership deals with established IT firms to help in making innovations. Mobile devices such as e-readers are significant in determining the success of bookstores. Thus Kinokuniya must take the initiative of addressing research and development with more concentration and focus.
Works Cited
Evans, Michael P. “Analysing Google Rankings through Search Engine Optimization Data.” Internet Research 17.1 (2007): 21-21. Print.
Hosea, Maeve. “Digital Strategy: Email Marketing – More Power to Your Inbox.” Marketing Week (2011): 47-50. Print.
Kinokuniya UAE. About Us. 2013. Web.
Smith, Nicola. “Affiliate Marketing: A Good Deal.” New Media Age (2011): 25-26. Print.
Thongpapanl, Narongsak, and Abdul Rehman Ashraf. “Enhancing Online Performance Through Website Content And Personalization.” The Journal of Computer Information Systems 52.1 (2011): 3-13. Print.