ABSTRACT
In the late 1950s, Sony was having difficulty in marketing its radios in the several prefectures of the Tohoku Region. Sony radios were sold throughout National Panasonic’s retail chains, and it appeared that the sales had reached a plateau and were gradually going down. In differentiating Japanese from westerners, it is sometimes pointed out that while the Japanese are emotionally oriented, the westerners are intellectually oriented. Thus, a Japanese manager sometimes finds emotional means much more effective in solving a particular problem. In one of Tokyo’s suburbs there are two big stores, one is a specialty store selling home appliances, and the other is a general merchandise store. In the spring of 1978, a few days after the former started selling a particular type of electric fan, the latter pushed handbills through the doors of all houses in the vicinity advertising the same electric fan at a price one thousand yen less.
