When I first joined Suzuki Motor Corporation's marketing division, I thought good marketing meant reaching the most people. More impressions, more clicks, more noise. I was wrong.
I was assigned to a campaign in Vietnam — we were trying to sell the Suzuki Carry, a kei truck that had been around for decades, to a younger generation of urban business owners. My initial pitch was flashy. Big production, influencer partnerships, the whole playbook I'd studied at Keio.
My senior manager looked at it and said one sentence that stuck with me: "You're selling to who you want the customer to be, not who they are."
He was right. I'd designed the campaign for the customer I imagined — young, trend-driven, digitally native. But the real buyers were 28-35 year old first-time business owners who didn't care about aesthetics. They cared about reliability, cost, and whether the truck would still run after 200,000 kilometers on bad roads.
We scrapped the campaign and rebuilt it. Simple. Direct. We interviewed real Carry owners — street vendors, delivery drivers, small shop owners — and let them tell their stories. No influencers. No polish. Just truth.
It became one of the highest-performing regional campaigns that quarter.
That experience taught me something I carry to this day: discipline means resisting the urge to be clever when the situation calls for being honest. Strategy isn't about your vision — it's about deeply understanding the people you serve and meeting them exactly where they are.
It's the same principle I built The Zaibatsu on.
