Leading High Performing Remote Teams
How can leaders ensure that performance remains high in remote or hybrid-work environments?
Content Marketing
In this course, you’ll learn how compelling blogs, videos, podcasts, and other media can reach customers and drive sales. You’ll also learn steps for creating an effective content marketing plan, and some important ways to measure its impact and success.
Content marketing is a essential digital marketing strategy for companies looking to provide relevant and useful information to support your community and attract new customers.
Get started on your content marketing journey today.
Sustainable Innovation in Times of Disruption: Choices for a Better Society
There are opportunities for progress all around us. The key is to innovate on these opportunities sustainably.
To help identify most effective path forward, you'll need to gain a global perspective to these challenges in an open discussion. How can Japan and the world take action to create a more sustainable, innovative world? Where do you fit in?
It's time to find out.
Social Media & Digital Communications: Impact on Global Public Opinion
Social and digital media have dominated the communications industry for decades. But it's no secret that social media has the power to sway public opinion, and the way in which many companies use these platforms could be seen as manipulative.
What do companies need to be aware of when utilizing social and digital media? How can these mediums be used to better communicate strategically with the world?
Discover what top media and communications experts have to say.
CAGE Distance Framework
Want to expand overseas? The CAGE distance framework can help ensure you're constructing a solid global strategy in four areas: cultural, administrative, economic, and geographic. Learn how to leverage useful differences between countries, identify potential obstacles, and achieve global business success.
Servant Leadership
There's more to leadership than driving a team to profit. In fact, there's a word for looking beyond self-interest to prioritize individual growth: servant leadership. Try this course for a quick breakdown of what that is, how it works, and how it can lead to organizational success.
Strategy: Creating Value Inside Your Company
Have you ever wondered why certain companies are more successful than others? The answer is strategy: internal processes that control costs, allocate resources, and create value. This course from GLOBIS Unlimited can give you the tools you need for that strategic edge.
Strategy: Understanding the External Environment
To plan strategy on any level, you need to understand your company's external environment. In fact, your level of understanding can impact hiring, budgeting, marketing, or nearly any other part of the business world. Want to learn how to do all that? This course from GLOBIS Unlimited is the perfect first step!
Using Japanese Values to Thrive in Global Business
Japanese companies have unique cultural, communication, and operational challenges. But they also have values that have led to remarkable longevity. Check out this seminar to hear how these values help earn trust from overseas head offices and develop employees.
Marketing: Reaching Your Target
Every company works hard to get its products into the hands of customers. Are you doing everything you can to compete? In this course, you’ll find a winning formula to turn a product idea into real sales. Follow along through the fundamentals of the marketing mix and see how companies successfully bring products to market.
Basic Accounting: Financial Analysis
Want to compare your performance vs. a competitor? Or evaluate a potential vendor? Then you'll need to conduct a financial analysis. This course will teach you how to use three financial statements and evaluate financial performance in terms of profitability, efficiency, soundness, growth, and overall strength.
Career Anchors
What drives you to be good at your job?
Career anchors are based on your values, desires, motivations, and abilities. They are the immovable parts of your professional self-image that guide you throughout your career journey.
Try this short GLOBIS Unlimited course to identify which of the eight career anchors is yours!
Leadership with Passion through Kokorozashi
The key ingredient to success? Passion.
Finding your kokorozashi will unify your passions and skills to create positive change in society. This GLOBIS Unlimited course will help you develop the values and lifelong goals you need to become a strong, passion-driven leader.
Brands exist in the mind of the beholder. If no one knows your brand, then it’s irrelevant how good your actual business is. As far as the general public is concerned, you simply don’t exist.
Building brand presence is a matter of communication. Communication—with your team, with the public, with the media, and with the world—is key to getting any startup business off the ground and maintaining long-term forward momentum. If you’re not sure how to start (or struggling with plans that aren’t working out the way you hoped), here are four secrets you might be missing.
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Iterative Innovation: The Culture of Successful Startups
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Systemic Marketing: The Holistic Marketing Strategy You’ve Been Looking For
Yoshito Hori’s Brand Communication Playbook
My communication playbook—I’ll be talking mainly about corporate and service brand presence here—is based on four simple principles.
- Be Different: Define yourself in contrast to your competitors.
- Be Aspirational: Project a big vision that your customers will want to be a part of.
- Be Media Pragmatic: Use every kind of media to raise awareness.
- Be Customer-obsessed: Word of mouth from satisfied customers is always the most effective communication strategy.
These four principles have certainly worked for me.
Be Different
When I started a business school in Japan in the early 1990s, I was up against the country’s oldest universities. Their history and prestige made them formidable competitors. We had no credentials, no office other than my apartment, no classrooms except a few rooms we rented by the hour, and a paltry $8,000 in the bank.
What did we do? We decided to play up all these differences as positives and present ourselves (build our brand presence) as a completely different animal in the jungle of business education.
Universities were academic—we stressed practicality.
Universities focused on general management—we focused on entrepreneurship.
Universities were large, monolithic, and faceless—we did our best to be student-focused, flexible, and responsive.
Be Aspirational
Having presented ourselves as new and different, the next step was to propose a vision that would resonate at an emotional level. We deliberately did not talk about our products—the courses that our school offered—in any detail. Instead, we sent out a message of how we hoped to contribute to the world by educating “visionary leaders who create and innovate societies.”
This is similar to what Apple did in 1997 when Steve Jobs came back to turn the company around. The PC makers were busy trying to lure customers by listing processor speed, memory capacity, and other dull technical specifications. Apple rose above all that, instead promising to elevate Mac users to the level of “crazy ones, misfits, rebels, and troublemakers” like John Lennon, Bob Dylan, and Martin Luther King.
Be Media Pragmatic
Once you’ve formulated your message, you’ve got the foundation of your brand presence. Next, you need to get the word out. My approach here is very practical: Use every form of media you can.
Back in 1992, we did direct mailing campaigns, put ads in business publications, and did our best to get written about. The media was happy to write about us precisely because we were different. One of the most effective forms of outreach was the GLOBIS MBA Series, a series of books we published on the framework and theory of the MBA. To date, the series has sold almost 1.5 million copies.
With the advent of the internet, we made a website, started producing an online magazine, and launched a blog. As the web developed, we expanded our presence to social media like Facebook and Twitter. We also set up a dedicated video streaming site to broadcast the conferences and seminars we hold. In 2013, I even hosted a TV program about the various social, economic and political challenges that Japan is facing.
Media is key to building your brand presence, but it’s also something of a lottery. You can never know for sure which book, article, blog post, video, or TV show is going to make a big impact. That’s why it makes sense to be proactive and use all the media you can to boost your chances of connecting with people.
Be Customer-obsessed
Ultimately, word of mouth is the most effective marketing tool. That is why we wanted to create a community of satisfied customers who would spread the word on our behalf and take care of much of our brand presence for us. We did this by introducing something highly unusual in the educational world: a service guarantee. Our business school promised a full refund to any student who was not satisfied with their course.
When you have a satisfied community of voluntary brand ambassadors—I call them fans—ready to share a unique and aspirational message across multiple platforms, your brand is in a very good place indeed.