“Schoolgirl-Entrepreneur” Rika Shiiki Heads Marketing Unit of Middle- and High-Schoolers
“Teenagers, young people, Japan, the world — I want to be someone who can change them all!”
by Natsuki Fukuoka
Hands folded at a Tokyo intersection, smiling like she knows something you don’t, this girl looks like she could take on pretty much anybody.
“I want to be the kind of person who can change things for people — teenagers, young people, Japan, the world!”
Still in high school, Rika Shiiki is the leader of AMF, a marketing startup run entirely by girls in their teens.
Her competitive advantage, she explains, is “just being a teenager.” Armed with a distinctive marketing style, Rika is already consulting for major Japanese companies on product development, research, production, and many other fields. In industry, she’s developed a reputation as a “marketer who hears the voices of young girls around Japan.” Even outside Japan people have begun talking about her, with one observer saying that “in Silicon Valley, Rika is recognized as an impressive businesswoman with a ton of potential.”
Every day, Rika pushes herself to the limit trying to balance school and business. But what are these marketing advantages that come from “just being a teenager”? And what inspired Rika to go into business in the first place?
JCJK Research Team: Spreading the Wishes of Girls Everywhere
What areas are you focused on right now?
Right now we’re focused mainly on marketing and production support for product development targeted at high school girls. Relative to other generations, trends among teenage girls change very rapidly — on average, I think any given topic only has about a one-week lifespan. Especially nowadays, with the influence of social media, I have the feel like I’ll see people getting tired of one trend and switching to the next one almost every second.
But to get a hold on what’s popular with young girls, you need a unique marketing style. So in 2014, I set up the “JCJK Research Team” in partnership with eighty other middle- and high-school-aged girls.* Together, we conduct surveys to get a sense of what the growing trends are.
*JC = “joshi chūgakusei” (“middle school girl”); JK = “joshi kōsei” (“high school girl”)
To give one successful example, recently we had a request from Recruit Jobs Co., a large Japanese company, to consult on their “Panda Ichiro” LINE stamps.* I got in touch with three members of our survey team and we sat down for a roundtable conversation and asked “what do we think of this?” Then we ranked the stamps and distributed surveys about them.
*Character emoticons, used while texting or on social media. –Tr.
When people want to use a LINE stamp, most of them decide intuitively about which one they’re going to use. So we just sat down in our roundtable and just decided “OK” or “no good” for all the stamps. We reported back on what we thought, and Panda Ichiro went on to become a huge hit. Today, his stamps have been downloaded over ten million times.
Are certain kinds of trends likelier to become hits with young girls?
Whatever you’re marketing, it has to be something that has some kind of connection with our lives. Just speaking from my own impressions, it feels like lately the trend has shifted from “let’s spread Tokyo schoolgirl fads around the world!!” to regional trends coming to Tokyo from Osaka and other cities. The influence of the different regions in Japan is growing, and things people love in those areas have started to spread to girls in Tokyo. I feel like that’s one of the major trends that’s going on right now.
Adults and people on TV always like to say “today, XX has become popular with young people,” but the truth is a lot of the things in those reports don’t have that kind of universal acceptance among us. I think the media has a tendency to mix a lot of hearsay and speculation in with the facts. That’s why it’s important not to just rely on the internet, but to get real opinions from real girls.
With a Kickstart from Dad, Her “Business Buddha,” Rika Launched Her Company
What inspired you to start a business?
The first time I can remember feeling like I wanted to start one was during my first year of middle school. Back then I had all kinds of different things I wanted to do, and it kind of felt like “if I really want to do this many different things, even a hundred lifetimes won’t be enough to get it all done.” Around that time, my dad saw what I was going through and he told me “there’s such a thing as a startup, you know.” He explained a startup as a business where you can do a lot of different things within a single company. For me, that sounded absolutely perfect.
I finally got around to setting up a business during my third year of middle school. At that point I didn’t have any concrete motivation or business plan; I just kind of lit a fire under myself: “ok, I’m gonna do it now!” Once the fire was lit, I went to a notary my dad told me about and took care of all the paperwork to establish the company. My operating capital was ¥450,000 I’d saved from my allowance, combined with a loan from my dad. When I borrowed the money, I made sure to fill out a formal IOU and everything!
Your father is the CEO of his own startup. In other words, you could say he’s your “senior entrepreneur.” Has your dad been influential in you starting your own business?
When I was three or four years old, my dad quit his corporate job and set up the company he runs today. From then until I started elementary school, he would always be at home working, so I saw a lot of him. Whenever I looked at my dad, I always thought “work = looks fun!” So I’ve had positive ideas about work from the beginning. That’s definitely thanks to my dad’s influence.
Conversations with him were a big influence on me too. Every morning when I was in grade school, dad would drive me to school, and almost every day he would ask “what’s your dream today?” So every day, I would talk to my dad about what I wanted to be: “I wanna be a florist,” “I wanna be an actor!”*
*”actor” = “tarento” (“talent,”) literally a combination of actor, singer, model, and TV personality. –Tr.
Dad never said anything negative about any of the dreams I had. Thanks to him, I think I got in the habit of asking myself what I wanted to be in the future — and that habit is still with me while I run my business today.
What’s one of the biggest challenges you’ve overcome since you started the company?
By itself, starting the company was actually very easy. I just had the notary draw up the papers, took them to the Legal Affairs Bureau, and that was it. So it still didn’t quite feel real at the moment the company was launched.
The hard part came after the company was officially in business. This may be a normal part of the process, but I had no name recognition so there was no work to do. Plus, I had no experience running a company, so I had no idea what to do to get work. Around that time, I started looking at the Tokyo Otaku Mode web site, and I created a version for high school girls called “Tokyo Teenage Girls Culture.” But it had only had 40 likes after a month’s time, and it eventually got taken down. When I looked back to ask myself what went wrong, I realized the problem was I had no idea what I was doing and I’d made a web site just because I felt like it. Plus, I didn’t have the experience or the creative reputation to be able to partner with other companies, so my first venture as an entrepreneur was a total failure because I had no network. I decided I had to do more to increase my personal name recognition.
What did you do next?
We’d launched on February 14, and on April 2 I set up a blog and a twitter feed. I knew I had to do something to generate buzz, so I started just uploading personal pictures and things, and all of a sudden I blew up on 2channel [a Japanese message board service]. “Nice form! “You’re naughty!” All kinds of strange comments started flooding in.
At first I was uncomfortable with all the attention and kind of got depressed. I even cried: “why do they have to say those kinds of things?” But because of what was happening my Twitter following went through the roof, and I caught the attention of Cyber Agent, a major IT company, and got my first official work order. After that, as time went on, I started getting requests from all kinds of different companies.
“I Want to Be as Great an Entrepreneur as My Dad (But That’s Impossible)”
Right now you’re concentrating mostly inside Japan. Do you think you’ll eventually expand internationally?
I think we will. But I think, before we do that, we need to capture the market here in Japan, and we’re still a long way from the market share I’m thinking of. I think Japanese girls’ culture is at the cutting edge of global pop culture. Once we’ve gotten more established in that area, I think we’ll be able to expand into Asia.
(I think I already know, but) who are the entrepreneurs who inspire you most?
Haha, my dad, definitely. For me, my dad is almost like Buddha. Whether he’s at work or at home, he’s always the same guy — his behavior and his way of speaking don’t change from one place to the next. He never says bad things about other people, and he’s always polite and kind no matter who he’s talking to. He’s a great dad and a great CEO — and he always keeps his cool, just like a Buddha dishing out wisdom.
But at the same time, I have my own personality and my own way of doing things. I like to go around meeting people, and I try to pick up things from them that compensate for what I feel I’m not very good at. I could never be as rational as my dad, but if we’re talking about a “dream,” well…if I could be like him, yeah, I think that would be pretty great.
(photo: by Daisuke Hayata translation: Michael Craig)
Originally published at ignition.co.
