Shinkansen Snack Queen: we could all learn a thing or two from her
A fascinating article recently in The Times featured the story of Kumiko Mogi, who has risen to become the most successful snack saleswoman ever on the Japanese Shinkansen (Bullet train) network.
Whilst there may not appear to be an immediately obvious link between this and the world of internet marketing and web analytics, there are actually more than a few overlaps.
For one thing, Shinkansen sales(wo)menship is retail at its most raw: each trolley girl is in charge of her own trolley and completely in control of determining what the 800 passengers will be able to snack on. In short, their role is simply to keep on selling until the doors open. A poor choice in terms of which snacks to bring on board is clear: a dent in profits. A case in point being dried fish snacks on a train packed full of school kids.
Mogi manages to collect 5x what her fellow trolley girls collect, by virtue of “absorbing data at lightening speed: the ambient temperature, the size of the passengers’ baggage, the books and newspapers tucked under their arms, what the youngsters are wearing and a bewildering range of other variables.”
As Mogi goes on to explain in the article, she “works constantly to read and engage with the customers…and switches between regional accents to suit the person ”
As she willingly admits herself, her greatest innovation was to pull, rather than push, the trolley through the train “By pulling the trolley, and never turning my back towards the customers, I can constantly look at their faces and work out what they are going to want”
To me, this is the epitome of what internet marketing and web analytics should ideally be all about: analysing your data and using that to find out as much as you possibly can about your target customers and delivering what they want, all with a clear objective in mind.
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