Tsutaya Bookstore taught me user management: attach importance to retention and provide value and status for super users
Someone once asked me, how many new books do I read in a month? I’ve never kept an official count because I sometimes buy (or receive) several new books in a day, but I imagine the number is in the dozens. As a book lover, it seems normal to visit bookstores of all sizes.
As a result, I was often “captured” by netizens at Eslite Bookstore, and I also visited Japanese bookstores such as Tsutaya Bookstore and Kinokuniya Bookstore. This time I am very happy to have the opportunity to learn from the two gang leaders of the Book Fan Alliance Sary (opens in a new tab) and Meifen (opens in a new tab) to jointly organize an event to discuss the interesting theme of “Learning user management from Tsutaya Bookstore (opens in a new tab)”.
Have you ever visited Tsutaya Bookstore? What is your impression of it? Is it a temperament bookstore that looks very similar to Eslite, or do you have other ideas?
To paraphrase what my friend Lin Chengyi (opens in a new tab) said, Tsutaya Bookstore (opens in a new tab)’s business focus is not on selling books. Books are just an important contact point it has set up. The actual focus is on curating exhibitions through experiential elements. The purpose is to make proposals to the customers who live in Taipei and have a lot of money and have relatively high material and food requirements. In other words, this is a concept store that starts from the needs of users and presents its imagination of a better life in the future through real-life performances.
Tsutaya is a practical place that uses “planning power” to stimulate inner needs and desires. It is definitely not a bookstore, but an experience store that uses “environmental education” to inspire you on how to live.
After actually visiting Tsutaya Bookstore, I also discovered some differences in service experience design between it and Eslite Bookstore. I heard that Tsutaya Bookstore had previously sent staff to Eslite Bookstore to observe, and later they blazed their own path.
From my point of view, Tsutaya Bookstore has three attractive attributes, namely planning, appearance and data. From a planning perspective, this is the strength of the founder of Tsutaya Bookstore Muneaaki Masuda (opens in a new tab). From time to time, you can find on the Internet or media reports that the various curatorial activities they launch are quite fascinating; but I must also say in fairness that the performance of our Eslite Bookstore is not inferior. As for appearance (software and hardware design), to be honest, Eslite Bookstore’s performance is not bad either!
But in terms of data operation and application, Tsutaya Bookstore, which has the T-POINT (opens in a new tab) alliance system, is obviously better. How they manage users and then create loyal fans is a topic that I am very interested in.
If you have read “PUZZLE TSUTAYA: TSUTAYA Future Life Proposal Laboratory (opens in a new tab)”, “Style is a business opportunity: the business thinking and work mentality taught by Tsutaya Bookstore founder Masuda Muneaki to his employees (opens in a new tab)》You will understand that Masuda Muneaki’s intention is not just to open a bookstore, but also to sell interesting life suggestions to everyone.
Therefore, he put CCC Group (opens in a new tab)(カルチュア・コンビニエンス・クラブ) has been built into a strong planning company. Every time a new branch of Tsutaya Bookstore is opened, it never forgets to start from customer value and actively explore customer needs and market trends.
Only by integrating a lifestyle (opens in a new tab) into products can we transcend eras, races, generations and genders. ——Masuda Muneaki To analyze the user management strategy of Tsutaya Bookstore, we can start from different aspects such as field, marketing and community management, such as: contact place, user value, operational goals, category strategy, crowd strategy and marketing purpose, etc.
We can also understand that Tsutaya Bookstore adopts a generous customer retention strategy and encourages consumers to hang out in the bookstore as much as possible-whether it is drinking a cup of coffee or reading a book, it will help the company convey its brand image and user management.
Different from other merchants’ views on selling lifestyle style, Masuda Muneaki prefers to interpret life proposals as a longing and yearning for a better life. Everyone’s interests and preferences are often completely different. In addition to providing book buying guides such as rankings, Tsutaya Bookstore also makes extensive use of event planning or store staff guidance to help every consumer find the books and products they love.
In recent years, Masuda Muneaki has brought together diverse products and diverse people through Tsutaya Bookstore, thereby producing a very attractive lifestyle proposal and continuing to provide unique value to a wide range of customers. Anyone who comes to Tsutaya Bookstore can quickly find their favorite products or books; from the perspective of this customer journey, the most valuable thing is not only promoting consumption and performance growth, but also jointly participating in and creating a new life proposition.
I think this is where we should learn more from Tsutaya Bookstore!
★ Photo Credit: Vista
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Further reading
- I read “The Yield of Thinking”: Strengthen the four thinking skills and develop business thinking
- I read “First-class people read, where do they draw the line?” : Deep Thinking Techniques for Elite Reading: Don’t draw lines on existing beliefs, but absorb the unknown
- I read “Narrative Arc: Pulitzer Prize judges teach you to write good and popular interview reports”: My review of the interview writing career
Next step
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Vista Cheng speaks and runs workshops on AI workflows, writing and content systems for companies, schools and public agencies.
