When you walk in downtown Vancouver, you can walk without anybody bothering you. If it were in Japan, advertisements come flying at you. Coming to Canada has made me realize the how heavy marketing in Japan relies on tissue-pack advertisements. On every street or near station exits, there are people handing out tissue packs that have advertisements on the back.

This type of advertising began in Japan in the late 1960s and is a popular type of marketing because it could cost as little as 10 to 25 yen with a high possibility a person would look at the advertisement. According an Internet survey by Marsh Research, 76 percent said they accept free tissues. As we have learned, it is crucial for a consumer to at least know about its brand for it to be within the consumer’s evoked set. People hand out these tissue packs as part time jobs, and since their job for the day is done when they finish handing out all of their tissue packs, some could be quite annoying and desperate to hand them out. As a pedestrian, yes it’s annoying when they block your way until you get that tissue packet from them, but at the same time you feel as though you can never have too much of tissue packets.

My question is, why isn’t this form of advertising popular in other countries? It has been spreading overseas such as New York but the main market still lies in Japan. Two reasons I could think of is that paper products may not be as cheap as it is in Japan, and certain areas may not be as safe. However if these two requirements are fulfilled, I believe tissue packets are an efficient way for advertisement.

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2007/08/21/reference/pocket-tissues/#.US_bkKXEHaI