Mind The Gap

9Deals Are Human: Align the Human Factors, or You’ll Fail

No country shaped the video-game industry more than Japan. Seminal companies such as Nintendo, Sega, and Sony are Japanese. Franchises like Pokémon, originated by Tokyo-based Game Freak, are global phenomena. It would be fair to say that gaming is embedded in Japan’s national culture. Japan long excelled at designing games and it’s also home to players who care deeply about how those games feel and function. So the story we heard from a Japanese VC, Shin Iwata, had strong undertones of irony.

He told us about a European gaming company that tried to enter the Japanese market. The product was proven in basic design, with success elsewhere. But the company failed to tailor other aspects of its standard playbook to the Japanese audience. The user experience didn’t fit the players’ preferences. A marketing campaign that had brought in big sales back home came across as clumsily off-target and the pricing structure didn’t help. It was as if the company’s leaders had walked into a music hall where experts and aficionados were singing their harmonies and annoyed them by chiming in with a discordant cascade of wrong notes. Without cultural resonance, the company managed to ring itself right out of the market.

One might ask, how could anyone be so foolish? The truth, however, is that many of us have sometimes ignored the human aspects of doing business. It’s too easy to get caught up in numbers and spreadsheets and technologies, ...