With Japan's mobile e-commerce revenue growing by 80 percent last year, mobile spending may just exceed online if it continues to surge on.

Everybody talks about "mobile and Japan", but when you are actually planning a digital marketing strategy for the Japanese market, understanding where to put mobile in the marketing mix is a lot more challenging. With the high level of mobile internet penetration and strong psychographic/ demographic differences from a web userbase, it would be interesting to explore some of the data and key considerations you should be thinking through in evaluating how important the mobile channel is for you.

The emergence of the mobile space
While the rest of the world has been focused on the PC browser, since 2005 in Japan, internet access from the mobile phone has exceeded that of the PC. This translates roughly today into 69.2 million internet users using mobile devices, 66.0 million using PC, and 48.6 million using both, according to a July 2006 report by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC). Additionally, in December 2007, Japan had passed the 100 million mark for mobile subscribers (three-quarters of the population now use the mobile web), which firmly emphasises its stance as the world's number one mobile market.

In terms of e-commerce in 2006, Japan generated US$33.5 billion in B2C sales, of which 14.5 percent or roughly US$4.8 billion was done via a mobile handset, according to MIC Research. To put this in perspective, by 2009, combined mobile e-commerce revenue in the U.S. and Canada is supposed to reach 75 percent of where Japan is today. When looking at advertising revenue via mobile, however, the channel lags significantly behind web as marketers struggle to understand how best to allocate and utilise the channel effectively. At less than 24 percent of online spending, mobile has a long way to go, but considering that it has grown by more than 80 percent last year, it's showing very strong signs of catching rapidly.

Who's buying what through mobile?
While mobile use and m-commerce has been exploding in Japan, it has been driven by a significantly different social demographic. In terms of access, while almost 80 percent of women access internet from a mobile, this drops to just under 70 percent in men. (For web, this flips to become 77 percent and 94 percent respectively).

In terms of e-commerce, this gender difference is even more pronounced. A recent report by ImpressR&D, the top mobile shoppers in Japan were women in their 30s (47 percent), followed by women in their 20s (44 percent), with men below age 20 rounding it up. Additionally, 15 percent of these women in their 30s said they had conducted all of their online shopping from their mobile phone. The top mobile shopping categories from these groups were clothing, accessories and fashion (28 percent), books and magazines (27 percent) and CD, video and DVDs (23 percent). The survey also shows that 22 percent have used internet auction services like Yahoo auction, from their mobile device. And to drill down a bit further, 80 percent of e-commerce activities by teenagers in Japan aged 15-19 was done through mobile alone.

This obviously shows a major skew towards younger and more female audiences for the mobile internet, where as a rule, the younger a consumer is, the more likely he or she is to never access the internet via a PC at all. This logically flows from the Japanese social environment and use of the mobile phone such as widespread train use, men accessing using PC from work, women being more socially mobile and the young living at home and often don't have their own PCs.

In terms of use, outside of the mobile shopping experience, the areas Japanese users are spending most of their mobile time on range from email (75 percent), news (52 percent), search (51 percent), games (39 percent) and blogs (38 percent). 

With this breakdown, it would be possible to do determine whether mobile might be a relevant marketing channel in the Japanese market.

Andy Radovic is senior online markting and SEO consultant of Sozon. Read full bio.