2003年度（2003.4～2004.3）　ワークショップ講演

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8th Workshop (May 29, 2003)
Entrepreneurship Study, Graduate School for Creative Cities, Osaka City University,
Guest Speaker: Mr. Nobufusa Yamada, President & CEO of MOC Corporation

1. Lecturer Profile
Mr. Yamada, the 39-year-old founder and president & CEO of MOC Corporation, set up his company in Nagoya in 1994, and later advanced to Tokyo, listing it on Mothers of the Tokyo Stock Exchange in April of this year. The company has grown to a capitalization of 713.5 million yen, with 105 employees and a separate Tokyo headquarters. It started in business producing post-wedding parties, and based on that know-how (compiling a comprehensive database on restaurants), the company currently provides party support services for corporate clients via the Internet, in addition to sales of wedding-party souvenirs, furniture and lifestyle proposals for new married life.

2. Lecture Summary: Lifestyle Production Services Provided by MOC Corporation
1) Background to the Founding of the Company and Mr. Yamada’s Business Concepts
Mr. Yamada’s father operated a manufacturing company for over 40 years, but the same year Mr. Yamada set up MOC, his father’s company went bankrupt. That led him to foresee the demise of the age of quality goods, high earnings and mass consumption. After years of contemplation, he came to realize that users had both superficial and unexplored motives and how important it was to clarify the unexpressed needs of each client through consultation and help fulfill them. Specifically, he came up with a business model centered around matching service providers and users based on an intimate understanding of their respective points of view.
The name MOC stands for “materials,” “organizing” and “communication.” If the 20th century was the age of value generalization driven mainly by manufactures, the 21st century will be the age of value creation where the ability to provide excitement becomes increasingly important. He says he wants to stick to helping customers enjoy themselves, by collecting objective information on trends in people’s expectations and coordinating software and hardware in the market. MOC’s party business is a “coordination business” whose goal is to provide the optimum match between a customer (consumer) and a restaurant (supplier). By acting as the intermediary between the customers and the restaurants, the variety of requests can be satisfied with flexibility and precision. This concept underlies all the services that MOC provides. Market research is indispensable to combining the many factors that go into coordinating an exciting party space. Mr. Yamada believes that rather than follow traditional mass-marketing practices, it is essential to extract the particular needs of each customer.

2) How Financing Was Arranged
Mr. Yamada considered three ideas before actually founding the company: to establish a company according to his own likes; to establish a company where he could gain the maximum leverage from where he stood; or to establish a profitable company. After deep reflection, he chose the second concept, which meant concentrating his resources on understanding future demand and responding to it. He decided to gather investments from third parties and elaborated a business plan so that investors would understand his paradigm-shifting ideas. First, he contacted an investor company, a semi-public venture capital group, but his request for money was repeatedly turned down. But he kept going back, 200 times in all, until his request was finally approved two years after the initial contact. His efforts to explain what his company would bring about and what it would be in the future bore fruit, and he obtained the investment funds to found the company. He feels that this investment from an investment company was advantageous for later financing from other banks and venture capital groups.

3) How MOC Corporation Has Become What It Is Today
He chose to start his company as a producer of post-wedding parties because it seemed the most profitable and had the added value of an entry into the bigger market of dining. He developed the business by cold-calling companies, then, based on the know-how gained from arranging post-wedding parties, the company started a telephone service to introduce business and individual customers to restaurants - dubbed “Welcome! Party Organizers!” - following this with the Internet service beginning in 2000. Currently, the company's database contains 15,000 member restaurants, 3000 to 3500 of them being the main force. The company has been striving to attract as many customers as possible to its member restaurants through thorough control of its member database while ensuring the accuracy and currentness of its restaurant database for the benefit of service users. Constant updating and expansion of these databases is the basis of MOC's competitiveness.
Based on information obtained through the post-wedding party arrangement business, MOC extended further into the bridal field, opening the wedding gift salon Vingt cinq ans Style 1 in Ginza and four other locations. Just as individual lifestyles are diversifying, married life is also changing. The company also opened the lifestyle-oriented interior shop Laune to provide the counseling and coordination for proposals that address such changes.

4) Future Business Development
With the goal of developing one-to-one marketing into one-to-one relationship marketing (ORM), Mr. Yamada intends to extend the company’s business model in the future to take advantage of such opportunities as the summer and winter gift-giving customs and various other anniversary events, while focusing on business in the overlapping fields of the “life-cycle market,” “annual event market” and “lifestyle market.” Targeting these kinds of fields has been the central concept since the company’s founding. It continues to develop business based on its information distribution service.

5) MOC as a Local Industry Leader and Its Expansion to Tokyo
Why did Mr. Yamada expand to Tokyo? Because of the scale of the market there. However, he keeps a headquarters in Nagoya, in addition to the one in Tokyo, to give something back to Nagoya as one of its native sons. In the future, certain companies may follow this strategy of starting business locally and expanding to Tokyo for the sake of profitability, depending on the type of industry and operations.

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