Today, Japanese cuisine is a boom at a global level. Various Japanese cuisine such as sushi and ramen are popular across the world. However, much of the overseas Japanese restaurants are operated by the non-Japanese firms; the Japanese firms are unfortunately not being able to capture such market opportunities. What are the reasons behind this weak presence of Japanese firms in the overseas Japanese restaurant markets?

Our hypothesis for this question is the lowness of Japanese firms’ capability to meet market needs. In particular, Japanese firms have difficulty in objectively viewing their cultural products. Persisting too much on the authenticity of Japanese cultural products (e.g., sushi police), Japanese firms are “selling” what they want to sell instead of “marketing” what customers want. However, there could be a gap between what Japanese want to sell and what overseas customers want to consume.

In order to accelerate the globalization of Japanese cuisine and for the Japanese firms to capture this new market opportunities, marketers need to assess the attractiveness of Japanese cuisine from the foreigners’ perspective. Using Clue ScanTM, a tool to understand customer experience, this workshop aims to design a new Japanese cuisine cultural experience for the foreigners.

• Experience the creation of new business model from the customers' perspective
• Viewing the familiar world from new perspectives and make the familiar strange

Service design from customer perspectives

Clue ScanTM (customer experience tool created by Experience Engineering Inc.)