Why did Toyota‘s design firm build a model American dining room in Japan back in 1986, and then invite the company’s top brass to spend some time there? The easy answer, and the one you see in headlines and social media posts, is that they were trying to teach Toyota executives just how much bigger Americans are than Japanese people. While that’s certainly part of the explanation, it isn’t all of it. If you look at the whole picture, it can teach you a lot. That’s especially true if you hope to bring your company’s product to new markets.
Today, Toyota is the world’s biggest carmaker. Back then it trailed badly behind both GM and Ford. Toyota had big ambitions, and to make them come true, the company would have to do better in the U.S. market. Calty, Toyota’s U.S. design firm, was trying to help the automaker do that. And that’s why its executives arranged to ship an American dining room set, along with a mockup of an American dining room, complete with windows, curtains, candle holders, and a chandelier, to Japan. To celebrate Calty’s 50th year, the design firm released a limited-edition book of photographs, including one of the Japanese executives standing in that fake dining room and taking it all in.
Americans are bigger. But there was more to learn
Think about it. The point of all this couldn’t have been just to teach the Japanese about American size. Calty could have done that better and more easily by bringing over some typical sizes of American clothes, or introducing the Toyota execs to a few American football players.
The larger point was to teach them about who we are. And the dining room did that perfectly. It showed them our size, but also our expectation of a certain kind of luxury and comfort. It was a fairly large dining table with six chairs arranged around it. That’s probably a typical setup in an American home, but those chairs likely seemed far apart to the Japanese execs. Our nation is large with relatively low population density. Even when we’re at home with our families, we like a fair amount of elbow room. Japanese people, on the other hand, live on a space-restricted island. They have a tradition of eating at a kotatsu, or heated table, where they gather in close. A typical kotatsu might be half or two-thirds the size of the table in Calty’s model dining room.
These differences in furniture preferences also reflect different societal values. The first Europeans in the United States were pioneers, and to this day, our culture values self-reliance and rugged individualism. Japanese culture values the collective and group togetherness. Where we strike out boldly on our own, they make decisions by consensus.
Learning how customers think
To succeed in our market, the Japanese executives first needed to understand Americans. Not just our size, but how we think, what we wish for, and what we expect. That’s what Calty set out to teach them with its model dining room. The number of Toyotas you see today on American roads tells you just how well they learned that lesson.
Are you trying to reach new customers in a new market, whether they’re in a different country or a different community, come from a different culture, or live a lifestyle different from yours? Think about what those Toyota executives learned in that mock dining room. Should you consider putting yourself into these new people’s shoes, or sitting down to eat at their table? It just might give you the insight you need.
—Minda Zeitlin
This article originally appeared on Fast Company’s sister website, Inc.com.
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