What a parcel carrier's marketing is actually for

Most of my work at Kazemachi concerns a single moment: the evening before a parcel leaves the depot, when a recipient can still choose how to receive it. We send a notice to every recipient whose phone or app account we hold, with three options and the doorstep pre-selected: a two-hour window, a locker or pickup counter, or unattended placement at the door. Each option is designed to take under ten seconds. Behind it sits a network of 5,600 lockers, sited where people already go, at railway stations, supermarkets and municipal offices, and moved when a site stays below a third of capacity for two quarters. We run every change as a trial across matched groups of depots before rolling it out. Depot managers now see their own rate monthly beside their neighbours', and the board sees it by region each quarter. The rate fell from 13.6 per cent in the year to March 2022 to 7.9 per cent in the year to March 2026.

Pricing at Kazemachi is set by the finance and corporate sales divisions. My part is the structure customers see and the explanation they hear. For the April 2024 revision I argued that we should publish the causes of the increase in plain language: more drivers needed to cover the same routes under the new overtime cap, higher base pay for drivers, and higher costs for subcontracted trunk haulage and fuel. I also designed the parts of the price that reward a cheaper behaviour, such as a ¥60 discount for individual senders who address a parcel to a locker, and a ¥30 credit to shippers for each parcel whose recipient chose a pickup point at checkout. Before any change I test the wording with customers, brief the contact centres with the questions we expect and give contract shippers a written account of what has changed in our costs. Calls about price peaked at 6,200 in April 2024 and were below 900 a month by July.

A parcel carrier's notices are copied by criminals because people expect to receive them. From 2022 our name was used in waves of fake absence texts linking to sites that stole card details or installed malicious software. In September 2023 we stopped including any web link in our own text messages, told customers plainly that Kazemachi never sends links by text and moved delivery choices into our app, authenticated email and an automated telephone line. I chair the working group that reviews every new customer message against one question: could a criminal copy this convincingly? I also sit on our executive crisis management committee, where I am responsible for the first public statement on incidents ranging from a hub fire to the mishandling of personal data by a subcontractor. Japan's personal-information law sets reporting duties for some of those incidents; our legal team decides what applies, and I make sure the customer hears the same account the regulator does.

I spent five years at Mikasane Railway building overseas demand for slow regional lines, and three and a half at Sorahane Airways managing a loyalty programme of 1.8 million members, so I came to luggage forwarding with a traveller's view rather than a carrier's. At Kazemachi I oversee the marketing of Kazemachi Travel Baggage, which forwarded 1.46 million bags in the year to March 2026 from counters at four airports and eleven major stations. Most customers are visitors from abroad who book on arrival, so the service is sold in English, Korean and both forms of written Chinese, priced per bag from ¥2,400 for next-day delivery and ¥3,600 for same-day, and explained at the counter with a single printed card. The marketing problem is less about demand than about timing: bags arrive in waves during cherry-blossom and autumn-leaf seasons, and the same-day promise has to be withdrawn at a counter before it fails rather than after.

My training is in sociology, and I still think the best customer research is watching people at the point where a service fails them. At Sayodo Direct most customers were over sixty-five, and I learnt to run postal panels and telephone interviews because online surveys reached the wrong people. At Kazemachi I apply the same discipline to our 212 rural depots, which handle 11 per cent of our parcels but use 19 per cent of our driver hours. In those depots 41 per cent of recipients are over seventy, and only 9 per cent of recipients over seventy-five have registered for our app. I report rural results separately to the board so that national averages cannot hide them. The research led to an automated telephone line for delivery choices, which handles 1.2 million requests a year, to a larger-type absence slip and to contracts with 23 municipalities for a combined delivery and watch-over service.

About 71 per cent of our parcels come from contract shippers, and their decisions shape our network more than any consumer campaign can. My team markets to them as customers in their own right, through a shipper portal, quarterly service reports and a small research programme that studies their checkout pages and what their customers choose. The central offer is that the cheapest delivery for the shipper should also be the most convenient for the recipient. We give shippers our locker map and availability data so they can show pickup points properly, pay a credit for each parcel whose recipient chooses one, and report their second-attempt rates back to them alongside the average for comparable shippers. Six of our twenty largest shippers now show a pickup point as the first option at checkout, and their parcels need a second attempt less than 5 per cent of the time. I work closely with corporate sales, who own the contracts, and I do not make commitments on rates.