Big in Japan

Why is your company called Big in Japan?

We do interviews about ShopSavvy and our company almost daily and the most common question is, “Why is your company called Big in Japan”. I figured it was worth a post.

The phrase ‘Big in Japan’, according to Wikipedia, “was originally a scornful phrase applied to rock bands that failed to sell many records in the US and the UK. During the 1960s and 70s, Japanese pop culture was not yet considered very cool in the English-speaking world. Thus, though a band might have tens of thousands of Japanese fans, it was not considered truly successful: the band was only big in Japan.”  Of course, by the early 90’s Japan had become cool and everyone wanted to be big in japan so the phrase lost its original meaning.

Now that we have the origin covered, I will give you some of the reasons that had nothing to do with the name.  First, some of you have asked, “was the name inspired by Tom Waits…?”  Nope David, I had no idea Tom even sang a song called Big in Japan, but thanks for the new reference:

Others have asked how long ShopSavvy has been available in Japan; I assume they think our company is Japanese.  Our application is only available in the US and the UK currently and none of us have even been to Japan.  However, we will be in Tokyo meeting with NTT DoCoMo for our Japanese rollout in a month or so.

The next favorite question is whether not we named the company after the Alphaville song – Big in Japan.  Of course, the song is burned into my subconscious; becoming popular in the U.S. in the late 80’s.  But, no we didn’t really think about the song when we named the company.

Fewer people remember the punk band from Liverpool called Big in Japan, but no, we didn’t name it after them either.

The real reason is rather silly.  A colleague and I were sitting in a hotel in San Francisco during the Web 2.0 conference a few years ago after listening to Sky Dayton talk about how everything related to cell phones was “Big in Korea”.  We had an interview with INC magazine later that day and needed a name for our tool business.  I said, “how about Big in Japan?”  Thinking that it would look cool on t-shirts we went with it.  More than a year later we combined our consulting (WeblogsWork) and our tool business (Big in Japan) and during a conversation with new hire he said something that convinced me we should dump WeblogsWork in favor of Big in Japan.  He said, “Whenever I tell anyone that I work for Big in Japan they smile” I thought, ‘what better reason could we possibly have for choosing a name?’

Earlier this year we refocused our business for a third time and the name seemed to make even more sense – i.e. since mobile phones are so much bigger in Japan than they are here in the US.  I wish I had a better reason, but that is it.  It was a split second decision that stuck.

P.S. The domain we use ‘biggu’.com is the Japanese word for Big.  Of course I wish we had biginjapan.com, but I have never been able to get the owners to call me back.

Posted by admin | December 7, 2008 - 9:40pm4 Comments
Category: Uncategorized | Tags: Social Media, Uncategorized