Product Manager of Photo Division@Agfa Gevaert Japan Ltd.
Agfa Gevaert was one of five top photo-sensitive material manufacturers back then. It had once had a major market share in Japan until the end of the WWII. Agfa Gevaert photo division finally reopened its business in Japan in late 80’s. Fuji Film, the leading manufacture of photo film, back then had 70% of the market share, whereas Agfa Gevaert had only 0.5% when I entered the company. The marketing expense budget it had was said to be around one thousandth of that of the large competitor.
As an inexperienced product manager, I first spent almost all the time in communicating with sales promotional agencies, logistics people and sales persons of the domestic subsidiary, as well as the German headquarter executives to learn resources and marketing options that I had. After that, I began visiting wholesalers and retailers as well as trade journal editors to learn the market structure.
I segmented the market and planned to concentrate the resources into…
1 advanced amateur market
2 lay person market through a few mass-merchandising chain stores, and
3 lay person market through several high-loyalty shop owners.
Witnessing the brand recognition gradually soaring, the division decided to start OEM film supply to the market. I maintained the relationships with house-brand film sellers. Agfa Gevaert’s market share hiked up to 5%.
When reflecting what I did at the position and when taking a brief look on marketing textbooks, I realize that I could experience all the aspects of marketing in the non-internet environment. I could exercise efficient channel marketing strategy for the globally well-known complex Japanese distributional channels. It was great to learn the planning of guerrilla marketing approaches with very scarce marketing resources. I could exercise Lanchester’s Linear Law in the process of strategy and tactics building even before I learned it in the books.