In Tokyo, ‘Vanilla Beans’ sell music by selling the way they sell music.

Media analyst Jon Fine wrote in BusinessWeek last month about growth in below-the-line marketing: store events and temporary pop-up stores, guerrilla stunts for media coverage, social media campaigns, and company-built Web sites. In contrast, above-the-line activities such as advertising are declining.

“There is a whiff of the old-fashioned to some of this,” Fine wrote. “An event showcasing a product has a lineage you can trace back to a caravan coming to town to put on a show and pitch the latest, hottest, 19^th century patent medicine.”

Hiroo Miyagawa

In Tokyo, Hiroo Miyagawa, marketing director for Pitney Bowes Japan, describes one of the wackiest below-the-line examples to emerge from the Wild Wild East. Beyond websites and MTV-style music videos, the Japanese pop (J-pop) music duo “Vanilla Beans” drive word-of-mouth awareness by periodically appearing inside a windowed truck in popular shopping districts. These include Akihabara for electronics and Harajuku for teenage fashion.

Vanilla Beans don’t perform in the truck, and they don’t interact with the big crowds that gather. Instead, Rena (shorter hair) and Lisa (who replaced Rika shortly after the group formed in 2007) just kind of hang out, read magazines, and play with a handheld Nintendo. Their first stunt launched the single “Nicola,” where they reinforced brand consistency by appearing in retro stewardess uniforms in the video, the CD merchandise, publicity photos, and the event itself.

The strategy actually works, Hiroo reports. Thousands of domestic shoppers and international tourists shoot photographs of the Vanilla Beans events and share them online. And in typical J-pop tradition, Vanilla Beans music now opens Japanese television programs. Their new music? “Love and Hate“ came out in September.

Hiroo Miyagawa is reachable at hiroo.miyagawa@pb.com

Tagged as: Japan, Music, Social Media, Word of Mouth Marketing