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Seminar Report: “Customer values which Cinema 5 created in the past, is creating today, and will create in the future”
On Thursday, January 17, a “RCAPS Onigiri Seminar” entitled “Customer values which Cinema 5 created in the past, is creating today, and will create in the future” was delivered by Mr. TAI Hajime, the manager of Cinema 5 in Oita City.[Report by Associate Professor KANAI, Shusuke (Education Development and Learning Support Center) as the Seminar Organizer]
This seminar is regarded as a part of a Grants-in-Aid research project on “The Mechanism of Customer Value Creation of Japanese Small Local Cinemas”.
In Japan, the number of small local cinemas has been dramatically decreasing for decades. “Cinema owners are facing an increased level of competition, owing partly to the spread of multiplexes.” (Grappi and Montanari 2009). According to Motion Picture Producers Association of Japan (2018), the number of screen of non-multiplex cinemas has decreased from 1,401 in 2000 to 429 in 2017, while the number of multiplex cinemas has largely increased from 1,123 in 2000 to 3,096 in 2017. However, under such difficult circumstances, some small local cinemas have been profitable for decades while they have severe competition with multiplex cinemas nearby. Cinema 5 in Oita is clearly one of those limited excellent small local cinemas in Japan as it has been profitable in every year since its establishment in 1989 until now.
Theoretically it might not be possible for cinemas to be profitable for years without creating competitive values for customers since customer value is the major source for competitive advantage (Woodruff 1997). What sort of customer values are created by Cinema 5 then? And how can such values be created? Mr. Tai, the owner of Cinema 5, was asked a number of key questions concerning those myths. One of the important findings from the seminar is that Mr. Tai always tries to create unique contexts on films showing in Cinema 5 around the customers. What he implied was that people enjoy watching films in certain and unique context, not enjoying them as data without context.
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