BTA#3| Helping Chinese Jwotas Save Money

Hi there, it’s Mariana.

This week I was trying to form a basic proposal for my site concerning the issue of purchasing albums of Johnny’s idol groups from China via Japanese shopping sites.

For more context of this issue, please visit my page for assignment#3 where I explained the current situation and pain points. (click here)

The problem that I came up with was originated from my own experience and observation of people around me in the same fandom. It didn’t actually take me a lot of time to settle the persona for my project, because “Jwota” in China is a relatively more homogeneous group compared to KPOP or CPOP fans. Johnny’s idols were most popular in China at the beginning of the century and are less trending in recent years compared to the uprising KPOP idols. Jwotas are generally older than KPOP fans and CPOP fans: one possible reason is that JPOP has a lot of rules in terms of copyright issues leading to the limitation of free resources to watch and listen online. Fans who are too young may not afford the expensive JPOP CDs (usually 2-3 times the price of KPOP ones) and drama boxes(usually over 1000 RMB for one single TV series).

This also explains why I set the age range for my persona at 20-35 years old. Most of the people that I know in the fandom fall in this range: they do have some buying power and habitually spend some money every year on buying physical albums and singles. They are usually well-educated, because it requires certain learning ability for them to figure out all the rules of the agency and find information by themselves on Japanese platforms. Since we don’t have many people to translate the TV programs and other materials, it’s very common for Jwotas to learn some Japanese as well.

Considering the limitations of overseas shipping, I assume that my target will mainly be in large cities because it’s relatively convenient and more possible for them to choose direct buying albums from overseas. In terms of their lifestyle, I guess my target audience is living a life busy but stable: Busy because they don’t want to spend so much time researching about shopping choices, stable because they have a regular income to support their hobbies.

To confirm whether my persona was reasonable, I contacted five members from a WeChat Jwota group that I’m in. From their answer, I confirmed my previous assumptions and finalized my persona.

1) All of them are above undergraduate;
2) Three of them are living in Tier 1 city (Beijing & Guangzhou), two of them living in Tier 1.5 (or 2) city (Hangzhou & Wuhan);
3) Most of them makes quite a lot of purchases from time to time, even the COVID-19 didn’t lead to much reduction of their regular spending on idols.
4) They have tried to share the shipping with other fans and feel the need to do so.

In the interview, I also tried to learn about what possible functions for premium membership appear to be reasonable for them.

According to their feedback, they are not that willing to pay for a calendar to mark release date, because it is not that worthwhile to them. However, the price-comparison function received very positive feedback. I learned from my interviewees that they didn’t want to miss the discount or spend extra money, but they were sometimes too lazy to make comparison because it could be quite troublesome. If there is a section to show them the price-comparison and discount of different platforms at a time, they are willing to pay a membership because they could possibly save more by choosing the right platform and shipment group. In the last question, some interviewees also offered some constructive ideas, such as making the price-comparison a premium function for the group formation section (so that users can compare between groups that use different platforms for purchase) and sorting participant-seeking posts into different categories so that it’s easier for users to locate groups formed by fans of the same or different idols with theirs.

Based on interview with these fans, I finished my journey map and story map which also helped me to define what data I need to develop these functions. What’s good about these shopping sites is that they offer a category for each artist group gathering all the albums available for the moment so that you may scrap down data of different albums without having to search respectively for each of them.

This is my very first time doing a project like that. Even though it’s very basic and I may not
be able to completely realize some functions due to my limited technical capability, it’s a good experience for me to start from finding a problem existing in my life and to building structures for possible solutions.