Marketing That Provides Customer Satisfaction

I specialize in marketing management and strategic management, and my research focuses mainly on what types of corporate strategies lead to success in the marketplace. What do you think the indispensable element is for ensuring a company's survival? The answer is "customers."

Take the example of the Ford Motor Company, who succeeded in business through use of mass production: they generated new demand for a vehicle that the common consumer could buy, thus creating a large number of customers. One factor behind their success was the transformation of the personal automobile, formerly a status symbol of the wealthy, into a medium of transportation for everyday life—technical strength and mass production were merely supporting factors for their success. However, it seems they failed to understand this. Because Ford clung too strongly to their mass production approach, they lost out to the General Motors Corporation, who altered the production system to meet new and diversified customer needs. The searching out of company success factors such as these is tied to the discovery of processes that create value. I think this area of academic marketing studies is highly fascinating.

How is value created? In the field of economics, value is measured by price, and it is determined according to the balance between supply and demand, but this is merely a quantitative matching. Marketing, on the other hand, pursues the linked process of providing products that meet customer desires in order to generate customer satisfaction—a qualitative matching of supply and demand. My research is based on the latter (qualitative matching).

Identifying "Principles for Success" for Management and Putting Them to Practical Use

Management cannot be taught by simply talking about current state of the company and industry, although many people fail to understand this. The same thing never occurs twice—merely knowing about examples such as Ford's success is actually more dangerous than helpful. Rather than knowledge, management professionals need to have theories that show, "in this situation, this type of thing will occur." In business school, students aim to verify the current state of businesses, and from there new theories are conceptualized. Theories are abstracted from current facts, but they cannot always explain reality; however, accumulation of numerous joseki (a phrase used to describe "principles for success" learned by shogi Japanese-chess or go players) will drastically improve the chances of business success. In reality, as a business professional grows more experienced, that individual accumulates greater numbers of theories and skillfully deploys these "principles for success."

In my classes, I often employ the case method teaching approach. I don't try to teach based on examples from successful companies; instead, I provide an array of cases as bases for students to create theories from. Although there are numerous excellent cases from long ago, I offer a mix of both old and new cases in an effort to help students come up with sets of widely varied theoretical approaches. In short, I don't request answers or conclusive statements from students, but instead encourage them to work independently to extract "principles for success" from the cases provided.

Highly Diverse Asia Becoming a Focus of MBA Studies

At Harvard University's business school and other western business schools, it has become the norm to utilize consortiums for creating business relations among business people, students and researchers. Businesspeople and students introduce new cases, and through discussions strive to formulate solutions for them. Theories are verified through comparison with actual businesses to deepen studies further.

In Japan, most people still accumulate knowledge through on-the-job training and experience within their business fields. However, when the current status of the world is taken into consideration, it becomes clear that mutual learning in ways that transcend the boundaries of business fields is necessary. By adopting this style of learning, more universal theories can be obtained, which facilitates innovation.

I believe that the role of the business school is to cultivate business professionals with an abundance of knowledge on management theory. Currently, western business schools are starting to turn their gazes toward Asia, and in a decade's time Asia may very well become the central focus of MBA studies. In an age when international collaboration has developed to the point that researchers are able to move about freely and business professionals can travel to universities around the world to learn, we must focus on these realities as we act. This intermingling of researchers and students guarantees diversity, and a learning environment in which new and old are mixed to the proper degree creates the ideal situation for creativity and provides a basis for new values to be born. At Meiji University, we aim to achieve this type of diverse graduate school learning environment and cultivate business professionals who can be active anywhere in the world.

Profile

Tenured Professor, Graduate School of Global Business (MBS), Meiji University Professional Graduate School

Born in Hokkaido. Specializes in marketing management, distribution theory, and strategic management. Graduate in 1968 from Faulty of Economics, The University of Tokyo. After working at the Nippon Kangyo Bank, Uehara performed research at the The Distribution Economics Institute of Japan, and was employed in his current position after serving as a professor at the Faculty of Economics of Meiji Gakuin University. Uehara serves as the chairperson of the Distribution Section and Service Section of the Japanese government's Industrial Structure Council.