U.S. students 'clueless' on country of origin of brands

and features, the American alpha-males are obsessed about the numbers, for TVs it is screen size...vying for the bragging rights to be the first on the block to get the 60" HDTV...and having a 400hp monster under the hood of the SUV with the 20" rims (never mind that it gets the gas mileage of a tank)... ...this mentality also extends to the office where you don't want to have a bigger computer monitor than your boss and don't dare have more processor speed unless you are the resident systems geek...

 

US students are clueless about a lot of things

 

"this mentality also extends to the office where you don't want to have a bigger computer monitor than your boss and don't dare have more processor speed unless you are the resident systems geek..."

Huh?

 

Get a job in branding - in Japan, and then tell me again what you've just said. I dare you.
MOST Japanese implies over 73% from the regular surveys my former company commissioned.

 

"For the most part, this next generation of educated American consumers either have no clue where the brands they use come from or simply assume everything comes from the United States, Japan or Germany," an Anderson Analytics official said.

So what?

If they were business school students, it would be worrisome, but otherwise, all it means is that Americans buy on the merits of the product, not the product's purported "nationality." It's a sign of a healty competitive market.

 

I would agree that "some" clueless Japanese will think that some of the companies mentioned are Japanese. would not go as far as saying "most".

I think you should look closer at Japanese consumer habits. They are "most" aware of the brands and the companies they buy from. Much more aware of this than the average American. This is why famous brand's come to Japan to sell their goods.

I would agree that most would not even know what Caterpillar makes let alone where the bulldozers were made.

 

are less sophisticated and satisfied with the 3 brands...go to a Foot Locker and there is Nike, Adidas and Puma sneakers...

Go to a ABC Mart in Japan and there are a hundred brands of sneakers and there are even specialty sneaker stores in Harajuku that sell limited edition sneakers...in Hong Kong there is a sneaker district, while Nike seems to dominate the main drag, there are many specialty brand stores also...

 

As a child growing up in one of the western socialist democracies, I was taught in primary school to always look at the barcode on products in shops, and only buy products with the barcode of that country I was in (no matter how crap it was).

I doubt many countries still educate their kids to buy domestic by checking the barcodes on products any more, but I have always found it useful knowing how to read the country codes in barcodes for indications as to where a product is coming from. For example, Cadbury uses different formulas for chocolate made in different countries, so I can tell when I am looking at chocolate in Sony Plaza if a Cadbury's bar is going to be more or less milky.

A useful guide is here:
http://www.mecsw.com/specs/ean_cc.html

By the way, I wonder how Koreans would react to Samsung being mistaken for a Japanese brand. I doubt that they would look at it positively, but they really should take it as a compliment and recognition of how far and how fast Korean products have caught up to the top rank of high tech consumer products.

And of course, given how meaningless brands are nowadays, brand nationalism really shouldn't be taken seriously to begin with. For example, not many Japanese know that their Sony Bravia TVs are using Korean Samsung LCDs. The outcome of this poll shows that companies are quite rightly more concerned about their brands' association with quality than with some particular nationality.

Peace

 

Now that is the mother of all crap statements!! And what country was that? Read bar codes??? Come on we're all friends here, no need to stretch it so much.

The wrapper says made in New Zealand or Australia!

but they really should take it as a compliment and recognition of how far and how fast Korean products have caught up to the top rank of high tech consumer products.[/quote
Oh pleeeeze...
Try ship building and see how you stack up against Hyundai. Call Hyundai ships Japanese made and watch the supertanker orders evaporate. Remember the missing hulls in double hulled Japanese vessels?

How can a brand be meaningless? A brand is a brand regardless of what you're trying to say. It's like a name tag on a kids uniform. If it's the kids name how would it be meaningless if it identifies it as belonging to the kid?

 

Korea bought the technology from Japan. They build more ships because their labor is way cheaper. Nice ships though.

But I do agree with what you say, Brand means a lot to Japan, and they are very conscious of where brands are from.

That's the difference between the J-consumer and North Americans. Japanese look a the the brand first, we look a the price.

 

I guess he found it hard to say, my son always called it 'Hage Dance' :-) We still do, it just struck us as funny.

 

111774 - mother of all crap statements? erm, oookay.

1) Not all products have "made in" written on them, and even when they do, the company address used can differ from the place of actual production. Also, we are talking about the 1980s just before "buy local made" campaigns got too huge, and it wasn't always obvious where stuff came from.

2) I was being complimentary about the Korean economy. No, the "missing double hull" scandal is not in the forefront of my mind, and yes, in both ship building and electronics making, Korea started later than Japan (the Korean civil war - you may have heard of it), and in both cases many Korean makers have now caught up and in places surpassed Japan, and good on them. I'm not sure what you have your panties all in a bunch over...

3) How can a brand be meaningless? Well, take the Apple iPod. The quintessential American geek brand. Of course, the most important component in it is the 1.3" Toshiba hard disk that it uses, and all iPod manufacturing is outsourced to a Taiwanese manufacturer. iPods are a triumph of Japanese and Taiwanese manufacturing - the implication of the brand that they are related to the Mac, for example is misleading, just is the impression that they are an American product.

I'm not saying that is a bad thing. I'm just pointing out that most big name manufacturers do so much outsourcing, especially in technology sectors, that the brand name is little more than a marketing and general warranty of product quality. Especially when it comes to brand "nationality". Most Japanese branded consumer products are made up of components made by other companies, and assembled in company owned plants in China. And as I pointed out in the case of the iPod, sometimes even component assembly and manufacture is outsourced. People don't think of Sony as a Korean brand, but increasingly for flash memory and display related products, it pretty much is. Hence my point - this survey is meaningless.

Globalization means that brandnames nowadays are themselves becoming commodoties, and are nothing more than advertising media for a whole swathe of goods not necessarily manufactured by the brand owner. All this is good for the consumer, and good for up and coming manufacturers able to meet the quality standards of established brand name owners.

Peace

 

that only has the purpose to provoke anti US whining on this site.

This post could have been written "US Students think Japanese Products the Best". but that would not have achieved the purpose of this site.

ask any student or adult in the world and they probably have no clue. when i was a student i was studying unlike Japanese college kids.

 

Scandinavia regions is the richest wisest region of the world, where incomes are distributed fairly and poverty is zero.Zero poverty is still far off for japan,korea and america.Is japan,korea and america top regions of the world???.

lmao, most of my relatives still live in Sweden and Norway - they are wonderful countries with a great sense of fairness... as for richest, if they were states in the USA they would rank in the bottom five economically....

 

Well, they aren't. And I strongly doubt that they would want to be. The moderator is going to step in, but before (s)he does, the overall difference in ranking says nothing if we do not take into account the blatant gap between the haves and have-nots which exists in the wonderful USA.