Meet mov, Rakuten’s partners in empowerment 

Entrepreneur Makoto Watanabe has a dream to revitalize Japan. Since 2015, Watanabe’s company mov has worked to support Japanese businesses in navigating the complexities of online marketing to welcome inbound tourists and domestic customers alike.

mov recently made headlines in Japan for completing its Series B funding first round, raising around 1.5 billion yen. The additional funds came from existing investors – including Rakuten Capital – bringing the total raised to over 3.5 billion yen. The company is now opening up to new investors from Japan and abroad, and has aspirations to go public in the future.

We spoke with Watanabe to find out how mov is positioning itself as a leader in the customer review marketing space, empowering the businesses that are powering the country’s economic future.

Mobilizing reviews for effective marketing

CEO Watanabe’s entrepreneurial journey began with an interest in exporting high-quality Japanese manufactured goods, particularly in the automotive sector. His path then led him to the world of IT, where he explored music-related online services before pivoting to inbound tourism strategy consulting.

The announcement of the Tokyo Olympics in 2013 sparked increased demand for Watanabe’s expertise, prompting him to found mov – his second company – in 2015. “We’re entering our 10th year now,” Watanabe reflects. “The scope of what we’re doing has expanded significantly.”

Initially, mov focused on organizing government data, publishing articles and advising on government assistance programs and trends. This valuable work quickly gained recognition. “Around 2017, we became the most visited inbound tourism business media site in Japan.”

As mov grew, it identified a critical challenge facing small and medium-sized businesses in Japan: limited marketing budgets. “If stores don’t get customers, they won’t make sales. And many don’t have the budget for advertising,” Watanabe explains. When it comes to inbound tourism marketing, Watanabe could see little long-term value in advertising to a potential customer who may or may not visit Japan in the near future, and will leave in just a few weeks.

“Advertising efficiency for inbound tourism marketing is essentially poor. But the one thing that those customers can do is write a good review in their native language, and that review can lead to new customers, improving the reputation of the store.”

Watanabe recognized the potential of customer review marketing as something that stores can engage in without breaking the bank. “That kind of product didn’t exist in Japan. We thought, in that case, we should make it ourselves and offer it to stores.”

The product in question officially launched in 2020 under the name kutikomi com – after the Japanese word for review. The platform aggregates store reviews and comments across a vast array of platforms including Google Maps, Yahoo Maps, Rakuten GURUNAVI, and many more.

Stores can not only check up on review activity in real time, but also have overall sentiment analyzed through AI, and update their information on all platforms at once.

“We had originally envisioned it as a way to do inbound tourism marketing, but then came COVID, and there were no more foreign tourists. So we kept the main function – being able to manage a wide range of review platforms – and officially launched it as a tool for Japanese customers in 2020,” Watanabe explains. “We struggled with growth until the end of the pandemic, but once foreign tourists started coming back, that served as a catalyst for us.”

Standing out from the crowd

Watanabe approached Rakuten at a startup event in 2021, hoping to collaborate on Rakuten’s many review platforms. The synergy between the two companies quickly became evident, and by May 2022, Rakuten Capital had invested in mov’s Series A round of funding, alongside several other Japanese companies.

Aside from impressive business growth, what is it that made mov stand out from the competition? In addition to the company’s core focus on inbound tourism marketing, Watanabe credits a proactive approach to integrating as many review platforms as possible.

“In the last three or four years in Japan, MEO has taken off in a big way – similar to SEO, but it stands for map engine optimization. It’s called local SEO in other countries, but basically it’s for using maps to acquire customers.

Many other services can do Google Maps, maybe Yahoo Maps, and that’s it. But a lot of stores will say, sure Google Maps is important, but most of our customers come through Rakuten GURUNAVI or Instagram and so on,” Watanabe reveals. “So the value for stores is that they can bring together marketing from lots of different platforms. And these reviews are extremely important for businesses that want to improve. So I think our investors have seen value in this.”

A mission of empowerment

One major area in which Rakuten and mov synergize is in a common mission to support the businesses that will revitalize and digitalize Japan’s economy.

“Japan’s economy isn’t doing well. We often talk about how 30 or 40 years ago, Japanese companies were all over the market value rankings,” Watanabe laments. “Japan’s value on the market seems to be buried… even though there is a lot of potential, it’s undervalued at the moment. And that disparity is painful.”

Alongside manufacturing companies, Japan has bountiful cultural exports and abundant tourism resources. This is one key way that Watanabe hopes to contribute to Japan’s ailing economy.

“Tourism is really simple. A tourist will go home and tell everyone about all the cool things they did, all the delicious food they ate – that’s marketing. So it’s a really good thing to have foreign tourists come to Japan,” Watanabe reasons. “I think inbound tourism marketing is the most important way to market Japan.”

Watanabe hopes to realize this future together with Rakuten and the many partners mov has made along the way.

“Japan is terrible at marketing itself, but it has so many great things going for it. Rather than doing that marketing directly, we want to support the companies that can do that effectively. And through that, we want to revitalize Japan.”