Japan’s web brands: Yahoo!, Hotmail, Rakuten and iTunes

By Ken Y-N ( February 23, 2006 at 23:08) · Filed under Internet, Polls, Rankings

Instinctively, web mail is ...? graph of japanese opinion japan.internet.com, in conjunction with goo Research, carried out another of their short surveys, this time regarding what first sprung to mind when thinking about web services. They interviewed 1,036 people, 57.9% female, by means of an internet questionnaire. 2.7% of the respondents were teenagers, 23.0% were in their twenties, 42.3% in their thirties, 22.7% in their forties, 7.3% in their fifties, and 2.0% in their sixties.

Whereas an earlier survey looked at primarily how brand image is conveyed via advertising, these web services are perhaps not sold as heavily through conventional advertising channels, but instead make their mark by some combination of word of mouth, familiarity and accessibility.

The mere one percent naming Gmail as the first mail provider to come to mind seems very surprising to me, although I wonder if Google has been targetting that service towards the English-speaking demographic at the expensive of foreign language speakers? How does the Gmail brand image rank in other countries, including at home in the USA? Does anyone know?

One nice thing, however, about Gmail being below the Japanese radar is that our office’s firewall does not block it (yet…), unlike Hotmail, Yahoo! web mail (Japan but not the UK) and the other big providers. Not that I check personal mail at work; no no no, not me at all.

In addition, Gmail is still invitation-only, but that hasn’t stopped SNS services spreading widely amongst the Japanese. By the way, if anyone out there would like a Gmail invitation, I have lots to give away!

Q1: Where instinctively comes to mind when thinking about a search portal? (Sample size=1,036, free answer)

Yahoo! JAPAN 59.3%

Google 30.6%

goo 5.5%

MSN 1.9%

Infoseek 1.6%

Ask.jp 0.1%

livedoor 0.1%

Other 0.1%

Don’t know 0.8%

I don’t know if by having “portal” in the question people were put off selecting Google instead of Yahoo!, although Yahoo! does seem to be a very strong brand in Japan.

Q2: Where instinctively comes to mind when thinking about web mail? (Sample size=1,036, free answer)

Yahoo! mail 43.3%

Hotmail 40.4%

goo mail 5.8%

BIGLOBEWeb mail 1.5%

Gmail 1.0%

infoseek mail 0.9%

livedoor mail 0.2%

Other 0.6%

Don’t know 6.4%

Q3: Where instinctively comes to mind when thinking about a shopping site? (Sample size=1,036, free answer)

Rakuten 70.2%

Amazon 18.3%

Yahoo! shopping 7.9%

Netprice 0.8%

Bidders 0.6%

livedoor department store 0.1%

Other 0.4%

Don’t know 1.7%

Other genres investigated included auction sites, where Yahoo! Auctions came in first at a massive 85.5%, followed by Rakuten Auctions at 8.9% then Bidders at 3.1%.

For music download, iTunes Music Store had just over a third of the mindshare at 33.9%, followed by Yahoo! Music Download at 8.5%, Mora at 3.7% and Rakuten Music Download at just 2.1%. This category had the largest number of don’t knows, with almost half (48.6%) failing to come up with the name of a music download service.