On January 10, 2020, an interview with Dr. Takamasa Fujioka, Director of Sasin Japan Center (SJC), was featured in ArayZ, a Bangkok-based Japanese magazine. Spanning seven pages, Dr. Fujioka expressed his views on a wide range of issues including aesthetic consciousness in good management of Japanese companies as well as his outlook for 2020. This interview with Dr. Fujioka in ArayZ has been an ongoing feature for eight consecutive years. In the first half of this report, he took a brief look at the Thai economic situation, and he identified challenges that Thailand faces, such as the US-China conflict, income inequality, and a shortage of IT experts. He clearly points out that Thailand won’t develop into an advanced country without long-term investment, including education and R&D. In the second half of the report, Dr. Fujioka showed a new direction for Japanese management, considering the impact of digitalization in an era in which everything is connected to the Internet. He put an emphasis on a discussion of how the servitization of the economy impacts on value chains. In this context, we need to think of the 3 Ps: process, participation, and physical evidence, which are included in the 7 Ps of service marketing. With this framework, one can not only analyze how much added value is created in the process flow from raw materials to final products but also understand what kind of values are created after product ownership is transferred. In the era of SNS, companies prepare platforms and then users autonomously develop content. In other words, companies don’t have to make any investment to add additional content (i.e. it’s zero marginal cost). In summary, the relationship between a company and its customer is dramatically changing. Companies have to get ready to develop strategies to respond to these changes. Download the full article here.