Аннотация:Executive Overview For more than two decades Japan has ranked as a market of unusual complexity. Japan's distribution system permanently baffles; negotiation is as if with alien beings; its long-term approach to business disconcerts; choosing market intermediaries is an art in itself, while securing a business foothold and market presence entails massive costs. Prescriptions for how to do business with Japan are largely the same that dominated Western thinking in the 1980s, as if Japan has not moved on. If our company had applied the conventional thinking, our strategy for entering the Japanese market would have floundered. But we refused to follow the standard wisdom. We proceeded on the assumption that our best chance lay in a novel approach: we would co-create the market with our Japanese business partners through a synergistic process of knowledge sharing. In its planning and implementation our strategy turned on its head much accepted marketing wisdom. Perhaps most strikingly we learned that it is possible to transfer knowledge even if headquarters representatives are not locally present on a permanent basis. As we will describe, key cross-cultural interaction took place at corporate headquarters, where Japanese expatriate employees performed the crucial knowledge transfer activities. This approach enhanced the value of the knowledge among our business partners in Japan and their willingness to absorb it into their everyday business operations.
