The Campaign

We capitalized on "kawaii," a concept highly valued among Japan's younger generation. We fused "miso," a traditional staple of Japanese food culture, with "kawaii," a staple in contemporary Japanese culture, to create "the world's first kawaii miso soup." Kawaii is a multifaceted word that can mean "pretty," "cute," "innocent," or "fleeting." Focusing on a girl contemplating the meaning of "kawaii," the video jumps through kawaii history and concepts, showing how the word dates back to thousand-year-old text, as well as changes in schoolgirl uniforms and makeup styles. Modern interpretations of what "kawaii" has meant through the ages build up to the girl becoming a concentrated entity of kawaii culture. She then fuses with miso soup, giving birth to "kawaii miso soup." The video attempts to make miso appeal to the younger generation, while starting a discussion as to what kawaii is by presenting the multifaceted meaning of the word.

Creative Execution

On September 4th 2015, in the 160 years of Marukome’s history, we changed the brand character to a girl for the first time. The development of "Kawaii Miso Soup" began. Naturally the appearance of the miso soup is Kawaii, but we also added a secret ingredient. Just like if you continue to tell a girl she is “Kawaii”, she will surely become that way, what would happen if we kept telling miso it was “Kawaii”? Focusing on this point, we held events around the world (Tokyo, London, Paris) in which people told miso it was “Kawaii”. Then we played the feedback to the miso in our plants. On February 22nd 2016, the product and commercial were launched, then the pop-up stores opened in Harajuku and Shibuya.

• Our new graduate recruiting site saw a 200% increase year-on-year in users. The campaign helped in recruiting, which was our first and foremost objective. • There was continued media coverage, including 15 TV features, 66 newspaper and magazine features, and 992 online features. • The campaign had the equivalent advertising value of five million USD. • Media impact is estimated to be 1.4 billion. • "Miso soup served as a medium to collaborate with young people, allowing us to communicate in a way that wasn't possible through supermarkets." (quote from client)

We produced two music tracks to highlight the thousand-year-old history of Japanese "kawaii" culture. The campaign video starts off with an arrangement of "Mack the Knife" in a French musette style, resonating with the concept of kawaii and adding a retro and girly feel to match its history. The music then switches to a modern interpretation of kawaii, composed specifically for the campaign. It has an energy that manifests the contemporary relevance of kawaii culture, as well as girl power and the power to make headway on a global scale. Overall, the music represents the old and new in girliness.

The history of kawaii is equivalent to the history of Japanese women. The image of women has changed drastically over the years since the old times. We portrayed this transformation through video and music. In particular, we highlighted the old and new in girliness through music to represent "grace" and "power," the two sides to a woman's persona. Just as the concept of kawaii has changed over its long history, miso, which also has a long history, needed a change. Miso has supported Japanese cuisine for 1,300 years, and "kawaii" appears in text written a thousand years ago. Transcending a history of over a thousand years, we produced a collaboration of these two Japanese cultural elements to make miso appeal to the young women of today.