ranKing ranQueen trend shaping consumer product branding? | Cactus advertising marketing communication design agency Denver Colorado

06.20.07: ranKing ranQueen trend shaping consumer product branding?

Yesterday, one of my co-workers at Cactus forwarded me an Advertising Age article about a consumer product branding trend emerging in Japan. The AdAge.com article, which links to a video by Martin Lindstrom, a self-proclaimed 'brand futurist', covered a small chain of Japanese stores called ranKing ranQueen . ranKing ranQueen is located around Tokyo and only sells top ranked products, typically the top five. When I visited the store, it was kinda strange at first. Seeing 5 bottles of soda sitting next to the top 5 CDs of the week caddy corner to the top 5 lip balm. It was a bit surreal.

Lindstrom talks about how the store will potentially shape the way brands are introduced, the way manufacturers receive feedback about products, and how it could bring about different versions of consumer products. I don't disagree with this, but I question how much the ranking of toothpaste or black tea would actually affect sales here in the states.

While the concept of ranking so many products is a bit quirky, the concept of the store is actually very insightful and relevant to Japanese consumers. Language shapes culture probably as strongly as environment. And in the Japanese language, all superlatives are expressed with numeric ranking.

If something is the fastest, it is the number one fast, if something is your favorite, it's your number one like. Given this grammatical structure, Japanese culture has a tendency to rank everything. I visited the number two garden in Japan in Kanazawa and was told by my students that I had to eat sushi there because it was the number one town for sushi.

I'm not sure if I could offer the same recommendation on a national park to a foreign visitor or if I could offer advice on the number one city for hamburgers. Although Americans have favorites and do rank some products, i.e. CD sales, movie sales, I question whether the cultural relevancy of ranking will truly have an impact on the sales of everyday products. Nonetheless, this advertising/branding trend is on our radar at Cactus.