New Habits to Increase 5 Times the Annual Chocolate Consumption of Japan

Abstract

Chocolate has been used as a fatigue recovery and energy source as a food having various effects not only from luxury items but also from the nutrition side in the past history. In recent years, studies of ingredients contained in cacao have progressed, and excellent physiological functions of antioxidant polyphenols and other ingredients have been revealed to be useful for health. However, the annual consumption of chocolate in Japan is only about 2 kg, which is about one fifth as large as the top three countries. In this research we consider a strategy to fill this gap of one fifth. In this research, attention was paid to students (university students/graduate students), and in this research, chocolate products of a confectionery company A, which provided data for analysis, we aim to increase in the sales volume consumed by students five-fold. Using the WEB quantitative survey conducted in June 2013 (raw data), we analyzed the two points of students’ ‘good image for chocolate’ and ‘information source for chocolate’, by using the correspondence analysis method. The analysis of the ‘good image for chocolate’ is plotted near the university students, in respect to the college student, and the category ‘easy to carry ∙ suitable for distribution’ is plotted in the vicinity and ‘a substitute for meal’ was plotted in the vicinity of the category of graduate students. In addition, the analysis result of ‘information source for chocolate’ shows that categories such as ‘Reputation’, ‘SNS’, ‘video sites’ are plotted in the vicinity of ‘college students’ and near ‘graduate students’ are ‘Advertisement’, ‘Radio CMs’ plotted. From the above results, we set up three hypotheses; place importance on friendship compared to other occupations, graduate students live such a busy student life that they save meal time, and students tend to dislike physical advertisements which are conveyed with letters, that is, they prefer digital information and auditory information. Based on the above analysis results and hypothesis, we developed a product of tablet type chocolate (10 capsules) referring to ‘a Bottle type package of a breath-care product of A company’, and appointed YouTubers as a video advertisement medium. The amount of contents of the product advertised is 27.4 g, and if one package can be consumed, per day, the goal of increasing the annual consumption by five-fold can be achieved. Moreover, by advertising on YouTube, it is possible to reduce advertising expenses, and that you can draw interest of students through the effect of YouTubers popular among students. If we provide rental service of tablet type chocolate replacement servers and increase the number of variations of bottle type chocolate, as an increasing sales promotion plan, we can promote the habit of eating chocolate every day without ending the proposed product with a temporary trend. Since it is a problem that there is an idea which incurs expenses in the promotion plan, we need to carry out the sales promotion plan step by step. Then, even if the sales target is not reached, the deficit can be minimized by stopping the product development. In this way, we aim to increase the Japanese chocolate consumption by 5 times from a long-term perspective.