INSIGHTS

You were in Tokyo recently. What did you take away?

I was there to keynote the Braze Partner Summit, where we had more than 150 partners joining us. We presented awards to our top-performing partners who’ve been instrumental in building our local customer base which has grown significantly over the past year to more than 80 customers.

An important learning from working with the Japanese market is that there are high barriers to entry, but if you make the right investments early, they will pay off. We’re being rewarded now for the investments we made three years ago. Japan is the first market where we localized our product and translated our dashboard into another language, which we’re now replicating in other markets.

Growing our Japan team is now a top priority. We’re laser-focused on hiring.

It’s notable that Japan is the first market where we don’t require employees to speak English. English speaking execs are limited in Japan, so this ensures we can recruit more broadly and find the best people in the market.

So morale is good?

Morale is excellent. Our Country Manager, Mizutani-san, has done a great job. He brought the company together recently for everyone to share their five-year vision for team growth, the culture of the team, their performance goals and how they want to deliver value to customers and to society. Mizutani-san’s leadership is very welcome and we’re excited to keep growing.

The customer wins have been great and renewals have been very strong. Japan is one of our top performing regions worldwide. Being able to win together is so important. There are so many opportunities for the members of the Japan team who’ve been with us since the early days to keep growing with us.

What’s been the key to your success in Japan?

Striking a balance between empowering the Japan team to do things the Japan way and making sure the global team provides them with the support they need, without being constraining, has been critical. A lot of times the strategies that local teams want to run are just unfamiliar and are not what we have experience in.

So a big part of success has come from investing in local knowledge and trusting in it. A lot of companies invest in local knowledge but they don’t empower their local teams. Striking that right balance between independence and support is key.

What challenges do marketing teams at Japanese companies face?

One of the things we’ve seen is that many marketing teams are still fairly siloed. That’s not uncommon around the world, but we do know that businesses that have greater collaboration between the marketing team and their partners in engineering or the data group, companies where the CMO, CTO, CIO and CDO work together, move faster and achieve a lot more.

Marketing teams in Japan don’t seem to have as much access to technical resources. Because they have to figure things out on their own, they’re not able to move as fast or have as comprehensive an impact. So we’re promoting more interdisciplinary collaboration. We’re encouraging teams to work outside their silos and come together more. There’s a lot of value to be gained by breaking down silos and assigning more technical resources to marketing, customer engagement and CRM overall.

Any customer stories you can share?

I did a number of customer visits. I met with the global CMO of Rakuten and the members of her team. That was a great visit. We’ve been working with Rakuten in various ways for a long time starting with our work with Viber in 2017 that Rakuten later acquired.

What they’re doing with their membership and data, with their rewards program at the center of their multifaceted ecosystem of services that are integrating more and more into people’s lives, is really amazing.

Do you see any trends emerging with customers?

Definitely. Our customers are shifting from just delivering basic promotions to building relationships with their customers over time. They’re becoming trusted companions to their customers throughout their engagement journey.

Speaking to customers across various industries, we’re finding that they’re increasingly looking at their customers’ journeys and finding new opportunities to expand their connection with the brand and deliver more products and services. Their relationships are becoming more multi-faceted, so they can drive more revenue, obviously, but so they can also play a stronger role in their customers’ life and realize higher levels of “stickiness,” to use a marketing term. This has been great to see.

With more holistic engagement, they are also building first-party data sets along the way. This allows them to understand where their customers are on their journey and what might be of interest to them in the future. They have the opportunity to communicate with them in a more targeted way. This gives them more strategic leverage than what they would get with more traditional, outbound marketing.

Another interesting thing that we’re seeing globally that we believe will happen in Japan as well is the shift from acquisition-oriented spending to investments that are more focused on retention and long-term engagement, which deliver much higher ROI. This is important because, although we haven’t seen as much of a macroeconomic crush in Japan that we’ve seen elsewhere, we expect to see similar levels of scrutiny on ROI for marketing spend in Japan that we’ve seen in the rest of the world.

In closing, how was your experience in Japan on a personal level?

I love my visits to Japan. It’s the country I visited when I traveled for the first time with a passport. I flew into Osaka. I was 19. Japan is still my favorite place to visit.

On my last visit I was able to go out karaoke-ing. I ended up having ramen late at night and they were playing the Beatles at the ramen counter, which was a great way to wrap up my journey.

I’m excited to head back to Japan in October for our City x City Customer Engagement Event.
We’ve wrapped up New York, London and Singapore so far and we still have Sydney, São Paulo, and Tokyo to go. It should be a wonderful and large event with hundreds of attendees.

We’re really excited to continue investing in Japan, growing the team and making our customers successful.

If you’re interested in exploring the open positions at Braze in Japan, visit our Careers page.