Soft Power Meets New Power
3 Plush Mascots + 3 Participation Models
This is a story about some silly yurukyara mascots from Japan and Taiwan. This is also a story about serious strategies for branding, business models, and public engagement.
We will examine the personalities and power models of two plush bears (Kumamon and OhBear) and a pear fairy (Funassyi) to uncover insights about crowd leadership and how to build participatory brands that stand out and thrive in a crowded market.
Context: Yuru-What?
A quick definition of terms:
- Yurukyara (ゆるキャラ), sometimes rendered in English as “yuru-chara,” is a Japanese compound word derived from the adjective “yurui” (loose, lax, laid-back, soft, gentle, weak, slow) and a truncated form of the English loanword “character.” Yurukyara refers to the mascot characters used to identify and/or promote various companies, brands, places, and government agencies. Yurukyara appear in a variety of formats and media: from icons on product packaging and signage to human-in-costume mascots who attend and perform at events. Yurukyara are meant to be an embodiment of a brand, place, or public service.
- Gotouchikyara (ご当地キャラ) is a compound word meaning “local place character.” Gotouchikyara refers to a subset of yurukyara that serve as the official, government-sanctioned, mascots of municipalities, regions, or even entire countries. The intention behind gotouchikyara is to tap into the Japanese and broader East Asian “cultures of cuteness” (可愛いカルチャー) and to help forge emotional bonds with locals and visitors alike. Gotouchikyara can serve as tools for place-branding for local economic development and soft power initiatives for international cultural exchange and grassroots public diplomacy.
In other words, all gotouchikyara are yurukyara, but not all yurukyara are gotouchikyara. We will also use the English word “mascot” to refer to both categories.
>> The Japanese language does not usually add an ending to mark the plural form of words. In this article, we will use yurukyara and gotouchikyara to denote both the singular and plural meanings of these terms.
The Challenge: Mascot Overload
While yurukyara and gotouchikyara are meant to be brand differentiators, they exist in a crowded marketplace. And due to their mass proliferation, they have faced somewhat of a backlash. Some people have criticized them for being childish, amateurish, and, in the case of public sector yurukyara, a waste of public funds.
Every year, Japan holds a national Yurukyara Grand Prix, where over 1000 characters from the public and private sectors compete for cuteness and consumer appeal. While some yurukyara who compete in the Grand Prix are created by professional designers with slick marketing chops, many of the gotouchikyara characters are designed by public servants, who are usually not professionally-trained designers, or they may even be crowdsourced from local amateurs or school children. While the crowdsourcing strategy may be a good way to engage citizens, it may not always be the best way to ensure the most effective brand identity or character designs.
>> For a related tale on the potential pitfalls of citizen crowdsourcing, refer to the story of “Boaty McBoatface” from the UK.
Even in the birthplace of kawaii cuteness, not everyone is convinced of the persuasive power (or return on investment) of these plush mascots. In 2014, the Japanese government launched a public sector yurukyara cull in an effort to trim spending. As part of the cull, Osaka, Japan’s second-largest city, reduced its total number of mascots from 92 down to 69 and instituted a moratorium on new yurukyara.
However, while many mascots remain mired in mediocrity, obscurity, and irrelevance, some mascots become transcendent celebrity phenomena, breaking out beyond the borders of their original local constituencies and catalyzing billions of yen worth of economic impact.
Love them or hate them, yurukyara are big business, with sales of toys and other licensed merchandise in Japan alone reaching up to $30 billion USD a year.
Meet the Mascots: Kumamon, OhBear, and Funassyi
For this comparative analysis, we have chosen three mascots that each illustrate a leadership archetype based on personality (Order or Chaos Muppet) and power model (new or old power).
After a brief introduction to the three mascots, we will define the personality types and power models that informed our analysis, and finish by exploring a bit of their stories and key lessons that we can learn from them.
Kumamon and Funassyi, the two Japanese mascots in this study, are among the most well-known and economically-successful yurukyara in the Land of the Rising Sun, and they have even crossed over to international fame.
Kumamon is the official mascot of Kumamoto Prefecture (a prefecture is the equivalent of a US state), a largely rural agricultural region in the southwest of Japan. While Kumamon began as a prefectural government initiative and presents himself as a public servant with the title of “sales manager” for his home region, his brand equity and economic reach has scaled nationally and internationally thanks to an open licensing scheme. This is why we have recognized Kumamon as a successful Public Private “Pawtner.”
Funassyi is an energetic, anarchic, and gender-neutral pear fairy who hails from Funabashi City in Chiba Prefecture, part of the Greater Tokyo Area. “Nassyi” (sometimes spelled “nashi”) means “pear” in Japanese.
Unlike the other two mascots in this study, Funassyi is not an official gotouchikyara, but is instead the initiative of an entrepreneurial private citizen from Funabashi. Funassyi is much better known across Japan than Funaemon, Funabashi’s official gotouchikyara. The creator of Funassyi offered the character to Funabashi’s municipal government, but they declined. We recognize Funassyi’s hustle and initiative and labeled it the Maverick “Underpear” Entrepreneur (that’s like an underdog, but a pear. Ok some puns are better than others. Nobody’s pearfect).
OhBear (“喔熊” in Chinese) is the official tourism mascot for the Taiwan Tourism Bureau. We chose OhBear to serve as a kind of baseline Business as Usual Bear in this analysis. Although he has international ambitions with a trilingual Chinese, English, and Japanese website, most of OhBear’s social media content is in Chinese only and seems to target a domestic Taiwanese audience.
Note that the point here is not to single out OhBear for his, or his human handlers’, shortcomings. A vast majority of yurukyara and gotouchikyara in Japan and Taiwan would also fall into the “business as usual” category.
Personality: Chaos and Order Muppets
In a tongue-in-cheek piece published on Slate, Dahlia Lithwick laid out a unified theory to explain Muppet and human personality types. You are either a Chaos Muppet or an Order Muppet. We can also use this framework to understand yurukyara personality types.
Chaos Muppets are out-of-control, emotional, volatile. They tend toward the blue and fuzzy. They make their way through life in a swirling maelstrom of food crumbs, small flaming objects, and the letter C. Cookie Monster, Ernie, Grover, Gonzo, Dr. Bunsen Honeydew and — paradigmatically — Animal, are all Chaos Muppets. Zelda Fitzgerald was a Chaos Muppet.
Order Muppets — and I’m thinking about Bert, Scooter, Sam the Eagle, Kermit the Frog, and the blue guy who is perennially harassed by Grover at restaurants (the Order Muppet Everyman) — tend to be neurotic, highly regimented, averse to surprises and may sport monstrously large eyebrows. They sometimes resent the responsibility of the world weighing on their felt shoulders, but they secretly revel in the knowledge that they keep the show running. Your first grade teacher was probably an Order Muppet.
We have identified the anarchic and norm-bending Funassyi as a Chaos Muppet. Stay tuned for heavy metal music, temper tantrums, and explosions.
Both OhBear and Kumamon present themselves as hard-working public servants, which would put them more on the Order Muppet side of things. The mild-mannered OhBear is clearly an Order Muppet, while Kumamon has engaged in some mischievous, albeit clearly staged, publicity stunts (more on that later) that would put him in the middle between Chaos and Order. Thus, we have categorized Kumamon as an Orderly Chaos Muppet.
Power Model: Old and New Power
Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms introduced the concept and term “new power” in a Harvard Business Review article, TED Talk, and best-selling book.
Old power works like a currency. It is held by few. Once gained, it is jealously guarded, and the powerful have a substantial store of it to spend. It is closed, inaccessible, and leader-driven. It downloads, and it captures.
New power operates differently, like a current. It is made by many. It is open, participatory, and peer-driven. It uploads, and it distributes. Like water or electricity, it’s most forceful when it surges. The goal with new power is not to hoard it but to channel it.
To put it another way, new power is the ability the leverage networks and channel the power of crowds to reach desired outcomes. In the context of our analysis, these desired outcomes could be to put your city, region, or country on the proverbial map, as a way to promote tourism, industry, investment, soft power, etc.
Old power place-branding and promotion is very much top-down and hierarchical. Think of an extreme form of this as traditional, Mad Men-era marketing and advertising, where a few people (“creatives” and their clients in old power institutions) come up with a message and a campaign around that message. Then they broadcast that message out into the world. These kinds of old power campaigns sink or swim solely based on whether the message resonates with potential visitors, buyers, or investors.
Picture a bunch of bureaucrats, and if we are lucky, one of their savvy design agencies on retainer, who come up with a gotouchikyara and launch it into the world. Maybe it resonates with the people and even wins a Yurukyara Grand Prix. Or maybe not. The only participation that may have happened in this process was probably in some focus groups or public polling. The old power way is to launch and hope for the best. Often this old power way of working is not transparent or accountable for the results.
On the other hand, a new power approach to place-branding allows additional openings for participation, and not just in the crowdsourcing of design that we mentioned earlier. When done right, new power strategies can effectively channel the energy of citizens, fans, and businesses to scale the impact of yurukyara and related place-branding initiatives. The idea is to think of people as more than just passive consumers, and instead to engage them as co-creators and “co-owners” of a yurukyara brand.
A new power yurukyara is not just for the people, it is of the people.
New power and old power are not mutually exclusive. In their book, Heimans and Timms write about the concept of blended power. For example, an old power institution, like a prefectural government, could deploy new power strategies to scale their impact, which we will see below in the case of Kumamon.
Kumamon: Public Private Pawtner
Key lessons: invest in design, take creative risks, iterate, and scale through partnerships
We put Kumamon next to Pope Francis as a crowd leader in the new power leadership map above. Like the Pope, Kumamon is an example of someone from an old power institution tapping into the tools of new power crowd leadership. Both Pope Francis and Kumamon make frequent and savvy use of Twitter to connect with followers around the world.
We previously mentioned Kumamon’s blended power open licensing model, which allows companies across Japan to apply to use the mascot’s likeness, under certain conditions, for free.
Neil Steinberg, writing for the BBC, explains:
Rather than pay up front, in order to get approval to use the bear’s image, companies are required to support Kumamoto, either by using locally manufactured parts or ingredients, or by promoting the area on their packaging. It’s as if Mickey Mouse were continually hawking California oranges.
The usual old power reflex for government lawyers would be to lock down the intellectual property and brand assets associated with a mascot like Kumamon. But in this case, the licensing program taps into the scaling power of private sector partnerships from across Japan, and, as of early 2018, international companies are eligible to apply for licenses as well. While approved Japanese companies can use Kumamon’s image for free, international companies pay the Kumamoto government a licensing fee of between 5 and 7 percent of a product’s retail sales price.
This licensing program has put Kumamon’s likeness on over 100,000 products, from plush toys, to trains, to airplanes, to a solid gold statue. According to the Chinese edition of Bloomberg Businessweek, sales of Kumamon-related merchandise in Japan surpassed 100 billion yen (~916 million US dollars) in 2014, up from 64.3 billion yen (~589 million US dollars) in 2014. Outside of Japan, 2015 sales of Kumamon products in the Asian Pacific region topped 2.14 billion yen (~19.6 million US dollars).
All of this has Kumamoto batting well out of its league. Located on the southern island of Kyushu, the prefecture is far from the usual business and tourist centers of Japan, and has traditionally been known for its agriculture and natural beauty. Kumamoto attractions include Mount Aso, the largest active volcano in Japan, and one of the largest in the world. Kumamoto Prefecture, with about 1.8 million people, is sparsely inhabited by Japanese standards. By comparison, Osaka has 8.86 million people and Tokyo alone, not counting the outlying metropolitan area, has 13 million.
Kumamon’s name and ursine form comes from the etymology of “Kumamoto” (熊本) in Japanese, which means something like “the origin place of bears.” “Kuma” means “bear” and “mon” comes from the word “mono,” which can mean “person” or “thing” depending on the context.
Unfortunately, real wild bears are extinct in Kumamoto.
When the creative concept for Kumamon was under development, some officials in Kumamoto expressed concern that a bear mascot could scare away potential visitors, who might fear the possibility of a wild bear attack while visiting rural parts of the prefecture.
But the bear concept went forward anyway.
Kumamoto officials hired professional art director Manabu Mizuno to design Kumamon, in contrast to many other gotouchikyara, that are designed by amateurs. Even with professional design chops, some early versions of the Kumamon costume apparently scared young children and made them cry. In subsequent iterations, Kumamon’s body got rounder, more polished, with shorter limbs and a more neutral facial expression to become even more kawaii (cute). At the same time, officials kept a bit of edge to Kumamon’s personality which they have described in promotional materials as “potentially violent” but “irresistibly adorable.”
Kumamon launched as Kumamoto Prefecture’s official mascot in April of 2010, coinciding with the announcement of a Shinkansen (bullet train) extension that would connect Kumamoto’s capital city with Osaka.
In a staged public relations stunt that helped earn Kumamon our designation of “Orderly Chaos Muppet,” Ikuo Kabashima, the governor of Kumamoto, held a press conference where he announced that Kumamon had gone AWOL in Osaka during an official work trip to promote tourism. As the “where is Kumamon” story unfolded over a series of online videos and press events, Kumamon began his ascent into national stardom, bringing rural Kumamoto with him to share in the spotlight.
The following year, in 2011, Kumamon won the national Yurukyara Grand Prix by popular vote. This is when his meteoric rise really started reaching escape velocity.
Kumamon became the first yurukyara to meet with the Emperor and Empress of Japan.
In 2013, a national poll found that 90% of Japanese people recognized Kumamon, putting him in the ranks of A-list of characters, which include icons like Hello Kitty and Mickey Mouse. While Kumamon remains associated with his Kumamoto roots, his relatively simple and generic design has helped drive his national (and now global) appeal and has made him easily adaptable to a variety of co-branded product concepts.
The same year, Kumamon kicked off the American leg of his world tour with a guest lecture at Harvard University. Well, Kumamoto governor Ikuo Kabashima, who is a Harvard alum, gave the lecture. Kumamon and his human sidekick danced their hearts out.
Then came the quakes. A series of strong tremors rocked Kumamoto in April of 2016. First a magnitude 6.2 tremor and then hundreds of powerful aftershocks.
Kumamon, who is usually tweets daily, fell silent.
With 49 people dead, 1500 injured, and tens of thousands forced from their damaged homes, clearly Kumamoto’s public servants had more urgent things to attend to than to tweet on behalf of a bear, even an internationally-beloved bear.
Fans across Japan and the world noticed Kumamon’s online silence and started sending messages of concern and support:
“Kumamon, are you and your friends ok?”
“What’s going on in Kumamoto right now?
“How can we help Kumamon and Kumamoto?”
The brand partners got the message and started donating proceeds from the sale of Kumamon products to support the rescue and recovery effort. Kumamoto’s public officials got in on the act too. Kumamon returned to the scene in person and online, with visits to children displaced by the earthquake and social media photo-ops where Kumamon appeared to be helping with relief and rescue efforts.
In a press conference during the relief effort, Governor Kabashima called Kumamon “the chief flag-bearer” in the reconstruction work. “Kumamon is driving reconstruction. We will proceed together to achieve recovery.”
Neil Steinberg called Kumamon, “a power station of empathy generation.”
Kumamon has come a long way from local tourism mascot to merchandising powerhouse to symbol of hope and solidarity for the people of Kumamoto and their friends around the world. Soft power doesn’t get better than this.
And Kumamon’s good fortunes as business bear continued to grow. By the end of 2016, annual sales of Kumamon merchandise had generated at least 128 billion yen (1.1 billion US dollars), a 27 percent increase from the previous year.
While Kumamon, the billion dollar bear, may seem like the apex charismatic megafauna of the yurukyara universe, as we shall see, there are entrepreneurial contenders vying for a piece of the pie.
Key lessons from Kumamon (Public Private Pawtner)
- Invest in design: Sometimes getting the right kind of simplicity is very hard to do. Kumamoto officials hired a professional designer to craft Kumamon rather than relying on amateurs or crowdsourcing design.
- Take creative risks: Parts of Kumamon’s persona and pranks may have seemed edgy or even inappropriate for a government entity, but these risks paid off.
- Iterate: The design of the Kumamon costume didn’t work the first time, but creative risk-taking means trying again until it works.
- Scale through partnerships: Kumamon’s national and international brand collaborations helped spread the mascot far beyond his provincial birthplace.
OhBear: Business as Usual Bear
Key lessons: copying a winning model isn’t enough; seriously invest in internationalization
OhBear. Oh Boy!
Life can be hard for a bear who lives in the shadow of Kumamon, especially if that bear represents a disputed island nation that some claim isn’t even a “real country.” With so much at stake, effective soft power strategies are essential.
OhBear is Taiwan Tourism Bureau’s official tourism mascot. Unlike in Kumamoto, where bears are extinct, there are actually still wild bears roaming around the interior of Taiwan. In recent years, the endemic (and endangered) Formosan Black Bear (“Formosa” being an old colonial name for Taiwan) has been adopted as a symbol of Taiwanese identity and has become the emblem for a range of local brands. The bear has also long been sacred to some of the indigenous peoples of Taiwan.
Clearly OhBear has local credibility and authenticity. But, it’s a crowded arena for bear brands, and Kumamon already seems to have the regional bear market cornered. It’s not enough for Taiwan to simply copy a winning model from our neighbors to the north.
I get it. Taiwanese Bears. Japanese Bears. We all love bears. Maybe it’s one of those deeply-rooted-childhood-love-for-our-own-teddy-bear kind of things. After the Kumamoto quake, we were all Kumamon. But really, maybe it’s just me, not to be speciesist or anything, but I’m not sure I can always tell different black bears apart. Even if you are smarter than the average bear, Kumamon is a hard act to follow.
Even some Taiwanese prefer Kumamon over the local contenders. In a national TV interview, a young girl (pictured above) was asked which of the two Taiwanese bear mascots standing next to her she preferred. She answered “Kumamon,” whose image was lurking on a sticker in front of her and on wall decal behind her.
Kumamon and OhBear have a lot in common, besides the obvious fact that they are both East Asian bears in the business of promoting tourism.
Like Kumamon, OhBear presents himself as a hardworking, ursine member of the civil service. In OhBear’s case, his official title is “Director of ROC (Republic of China, the official name for Taiwan) Tourism Bureau’s Super Task Force.”
That title sounds squarely Order Muppet to us.
And like Kumamon, OhBear has a licensing scheme (link in Chinese only) that allows companies to apply for permission to use his image in their products, in exchange for a licensing fee (~7% according to the government documents online). Unlike in the case of Kumamon, we couldn’t find any mention of a free license for companies that wanted to use OhBear to promote Taiwan or Taiwanese products. Nor could we find any official statistics documenting OhBear’s economic impact.
This apparent lack of open licensing and transparency about OhBear’s economic impact are reasons why we categorized OhBear on the borderline between “Castles” and “Cheerleaders” in the new power leadership map above. OhBear may play well to a local crowd as a cheerleader, but much of the evidence around OhBear’s strategy and brand management points to the closed and hierarchical leadership style typical of old power government institutions.
>> My Chinese reading ability is not as advanced as my English or Japanese, so maybe I haven’t looked hard enough. If information about OhBear’s economic impact does indeed exist somewhere online, please let me know: ls@foossa.com.
Unlike Kumamon and Funassyi, OhBear doesn’t have a Twitter presence, although he has a respectable 105K followers on Facebook. Most of the content is in Chinese and appears to be aimed at a domestic audience.
As a tourism mascot, OhBear does seem to have some international ambitions and maintains a trilingual Chinese, Japanese, and English official website. Unfortunately, the site commits some annoying design sins, like automatically blasting grating music at visitors when it finishes loading. And again, despite the appearance of a global, multilingual site, much of the content is only available in Chinese.
To be fair in the comparison, Kumamon and Funassyi also primarily post in their native languages. Kumamon does have an official English-language Twitter account, albeit with only 1142 followers. Ultimately, good foreign language skills matter for engaging international followers and friends. But even more important, as we have seen in the case of Kumamon, is a simple, and just the right amount of generic, character design that transcends linguistic and cultural barriers to reach global appeal.
Both OhBear and Hero the two Taiwanese bear mascots pictured above, do a good job of reflecting local identity and culture. OhBear literally wears the letter “T” for Taiwan on his chest and has “Taiwan” emblazoned on his cape.
I guess for a country that even isn’t allowed to use the name “Taiwan” or to fly its own flag at the Olympics, that is a bold statement to make. Hero proudly wears pants with a Hakka floral design. The Hakka are an ethnic and linguistic community in Taiwan.
But Kumamon stands naked with a blank expression on his face. In order for us to all be Kumamon, for us to really resonate with Kumamon, we must be able to project ourselves onto and into an ambiguous and open-ended mascot. OhBear and Hero are clearly Taiwanese, whereas Kumamon can be what we want him to be. This is one of the strategies of new power leadership, to be and to lead as a kind of empty vessel, with which followers and fans to make their own meaning.
Ultimately, OhBear is a solid Taiwanese mascot, but not a transcendent international mascot like Kumamon has become.
But maybe that isn’t the point.
I am sure there are of smart, hardworking public servants and creatives behind OhBear, but Taiwan’s furry mascot will need to up his game if he is going to be more than a Business as Usual Bear.
Key lessons from OhBear (Business as Usual Bear)
- Copying a winning model isn’t enough: Despite the authentic and credible local story behind OhBear and his kind, quality design and brand differentiation are needed. It’s hard to live in the shadow of Kumamon. Mascots aside, what are ways to set Taiwan apart? Be inspired by the calculated risk-taking behind Kumamon, but don’t just half-heartedly copy the model whole-hog (Or whole-bear? Enough, we can’t bear these animal gags anymore!).
- Seriously invest in internationalization: Maybe OhBear is just fine as a local star, but if he is going to be a global brand, invest seriously in foreign language translation and content localization. Leverage private sector partnerships and engage the Taiwanese diaspora around the world to make it happen.
I recently wrote a piece on Medium about positive, participatory responses to Taiwan’s tourism promotion and soft power challenges. You can find it here.
Funassyi: Maverick Underpear Entrepreneur
Key lessons: hustle hard; when institutions say no, go straight to the people
We might be comparing apples to oranges, or bears to non-gendered pear fairies, here, but unlike OhBear and Kumamon, Funassyi is not, strictly speaking, a gotouchikyara (official government yurukyara). While Kumamon is a public servant with a knack for profitable public-private partnerships, Funassyi is a private citizen, hustling hard as an entrepreneur, while also promoting their hometown.
>> I haven’t been able to find information about Funassyi’s human handler(s), or their gender and preferred pronouns, so I will stick with “they” here. And I will use “it” to refer to Funassyi, who is officially neither male nor female. Both Kumamon and OhBear have been assigned a male gender identity.
The enigmatic creator of Funassyi started posting videos on YouTube in 2012, and also started gaining a substantial following on Twitter. Today (May 2018), Funassyi has a 1.49 million-strong Twitter following, more than Kumamon’s 811K followers.
Later in 2012, Funassyi’s creator petitioned the Funabashi City government to have the mascot recognized as the official municipal mascot. But city officials passed on the offer.
In 2013, officials in Funabashi presented Funassyi with a certificate recognizing the mascot’s work in promoting the city across Japan. But Funabashi’s officials again stopped short of recognizing Funassyi as an official gotouchikyara for the city. This time, the decision was made with the consultation and consent of Funassyi, as official recognition of the mascot by municipal authorities might restrict the kind of public antics and commercial partnerships made by the pear fairy.
In contrast to Kumamon, who serves as a kind of public resource, Funassyi is a privately-owned enterprise, and as such, is not required to disclose its earnings or measure its economic benefit for Funabashi City. Being independent does give Funassyi the freedom to make daring creative choices.
Funassyi’s outrageous persona sets it clearly in Chaos Muppet territory. One time, Funassyi slapped Kumamon on live TV.
Funassyi bucks the usual norms for yurukyara to move slowly and not speak. In the video clips below, you can see the hard rock-loving Funassyi singing, playing guitar, throwing a temper tantrum on TV, and running away from explosions.
Explosions. Yay!
While Kumamon’s disappearance was a tightly-scripted PR stunt for a regional government, Funassyi’s antics put it in a different category, breaking out beyond the usual rules and characteristics of a yurukyara, and becoming more like a celebrity tarento (タレント). Tarento is the Japanified version of the English word “talent,” and refers to celebrity “personalities” who appear on various TV talk and variety shows, food programs, and advertisements. Tarento often have a tagline, personality quirk, or some other schtick. In Funassyi’s case, it often adds “nashi” (meaning “pear” and a nod to it’s own name) to the end of every sentence.
Funassyi appears to have remained an independent artist, avoiding the usual agency system for Japanese entertainers, which often heavily manages the career choices and public persona of tarento and also takes a hefty share of their earnings.
Funassyi, the maverick underpear entrepreneur, has built out a business empire that spans merchandise, cartoons, live events, albums, DVDs, and television appearances. On the new power leadership scale above, we placed Funassyi in the “Crowdleader” quandrant next to Lady Gaga. Like Lady Gaga, who maintains a subscription-based fan site called Little Monsters, Funassyi has a subscription-based fan site, 274ch.com.
According to We Love Funassyi, an English-language fan blog:
Membership (to 274ch.com) is open to everyone (although the site is entirely in Japanese so it may be hard to navigate unless you read Japanese) and costs 600 yen per month or 6,000 yen per year. Membership gives access to a a frequently updated video library, a members-exclusive shop, the chance to go to fan meets and more.
Rejection by Funabashi City officials didn’t stop Funassyi, it just motivated it to keep on going. By maintaining independence, Funassyi has gone direct to fans for engagement and monetization. The hard rock- and heavy metal-loving Funassyi has itself become a rock star of sorts, connecting directly with over a million fans online and selling out arenas for live shows.
Funassyi combines its “bad pear” stunts with business acumen and a real savvy for branding and product design. In 2015, Funassyi launched a line of “otona-kawaii” 大人可愛い (adult cute) products, which ended up a hit with adult women. And, according to the Japan Times, overturned some of the childish stereotypes around yurukyara branding and merchandise.
Key lessons from Funassyi (Maverick Underpear Entrepreneur)
- Hustle hard: Funassyi is a pear fairy with a whole of spunk, grit, and determination, a perfectly entrepreneurial pear-shaped symbol of forging one’s own path away from a Japan, Inc. suffering from labor rigidity and still bruised by the Lost Decade after the Bubble Economy burst. Fierce independence is both part of Funassyi’s persona and business strategy.
- When institutions say no, go straight to the people: Funassyi was initially rejected by traditional old power institutions, but built its own new power institutions instead, going straight to fans for engagement on social media and monetization on its subscription-based fan site, 274ch.com, and various branded merchandise deals.
What would your yurukyara mascot be? And what lessons could it teach us?
Let us know in the comments.
>> This article began life as a presentation for Hiroko Miyashita’s Contemporary Japanese Culture class at The New School. Special thanks and shout out to Caitlin Burns, with whom I share a love of Kumamon.
P.S. For a fascinating look at the craft behind the mascot suits, check out this New York Times Saturday profile of master costume maker Hiromi Kano:
