The Swimmer Savers of Kamakura

Imagine standing on a beach in Kamakura and watching a lifeguard climb onto their post. They look the part... red vest, whistle, a flotation buoy slung across their back. But something feels off. Then a swimmer begins to flail in the water, the lifeguard stares, unsure of what to do. They fumble with their phone. They open an app. They hesitate. A rip tide is sucking them out to sea, the swimmer is in real danger, and the lifeguard is paralysed, not out of malice, but because they’ve never been taught how to save anyone. They aren’t even sure how to swim and probably have their shorts on backwards. Then it hits you, they weren't lifeguards after all; they were Swimmer Savers.

This is a Japanese twist on an excellent analogy for the state of modern marketing by Mark Ritson , the acerbic and precise professor, and creator of the MiniMBA . Riston coined the phrase "SwimmerSaver" last week in a post on LinkedIn and has railed against this phenomenon for years: the rise of pseudo-marketers, the 'Swimmer Savers', armed not with any meaningful expertise but instead brimming with confidence, spewing jargon, and with a dangerously narrow field of vision, usually focused on performance above all else. In Japan, the disconnect is more than academic. It’s cultural, systemic, and quietly sabotaging the commercial engine of an entire nation.

Take a walk through pretty much any Marunouchi office tower and peek into a marketing department. What you’ll likely find is a digital enclave obsessed with metrics, ROAS, CTR, CPA, feeding dashboards like shrine offerings, waiting for the gods of performance marketing to smile upon them. This isn’t a strategy. It’s superstition. What was once a broad, rich, disciplined profession, grounded in research, consumer psychology, brand theory and commercial outcomes, has now been hacked like a prime blackfin tuna into small chunks. And Japan, despite its obsession with precision, quality and long-term thinking, has largely bought into the idea that tactical execution is marketing.

Performance marketing is the clearest example. It’s the beach’s loudest Swimmer Saver. It measures everything, yet understands nothing about the ocean. It has a chokehold on budgets because it’s easy to distract risk-averse managers with a simple, “Look over there, ROI!”, but offers no blueprint for growth. Instead of building brands, it chases the low-hanging fruit of search intent. It’s the equivalent of only helping people already waving for assistance, while ignoring the fact that half the beach doesn’t know how to swim and no one has taught them why they should care.

This blind spot is devastating in Japan, where loyalty is hard-won and even harder to measure in quarterly terms. Japanese consumers are brand loyal in a way that should be a marketer’s dream. They are slow to switch, sensitive to trust, and hyper-aware of quality and nuance. But brand marketing here has atrophied under the pressure of short-termism and a tech-fetish culture that treats Google and Meta as deities. A generation of marketers has risen with almost no exposure to actual marketing theory. Kotler? Ehrenberg-Bass? They're foreign names in a country that should understand better than most the power of accumulated advantage. Japan made kaizen a religion, but forgot that continuous improvement needs a damn strategy behind it.

Then there’s “growth marketing.” The term sounds ambitious, optimistic, even progressive. But peel it back and you’ll often find a cocktail of A/B tests, funnel hacks, and arbitrary retention nudges masquerading as strategy. It’s Silicon Valley cosplay, shipped wholesale to Japanese tech firms trying to look “global.” But there’s nothing global about this kind of myopia. Growth marketers rarely ask why growth matters or what the long-term implications of their tactics are. It’s just movement for movement’s sake. More dashboards. More attribution debates. More tinkering. Less thinking.

And the oddest thing? Japan, a country that values craftsmanship to the point of obsession, now lets anyone call themselves a marketer with zero foundational training. The country that reveres the tea ceremony for its ritual precision allows LinkedIn-certified charlatans to design brand strategy after watching a few overseas webinars. It’s a national contradiction. We would never accept an architect who skipped studying structure. But we’re fine letting marketers into boardrooms without any knowledge of segmentation, targeting, positioning, or brand equity models.

Product marketing, once a crucial node in the bridge between product development and customer insight, has also become a Frankenstein’s monster. In Japan it’s often just another name for sales enablement, or worse, a dumping ground or catch-all for anything that doesn’t cleanly fit in the performance dashboard. But this confusion didn’t arise in a vacuum. Traditional marketers let this happen. In their quest for purpose and passion and “emotional branding,” they lost the commercial plot entirely. They surrendered the product to engineers, the pricing to finance, and the promotion to agencies. Of course product marketing filled the vacuum. But it should never have had to.

Japan’s economic stagnation isn’t just about demographics or deflation. It’s about missed opportunity. Japanese brands once dominated the world, Sony, Toyota, Panasonic, built on decades of successful and coherent strategy, and category leadership. They knew that marketing wasn’t a tactic, but a system. Today, too many Japanese companies treat marketing as a cost centre or a tech stack. The result is a paralysis of creativity and a slow erosion of market presence.

We need to reset. That means calling out the 'SwimmerSavers' or pretend marketers. Not with cruelty, but with clarity. Just because you can run a Meta campaign doesn’t mean you’re a marketer. Just because your funnel is optimised doesn’t mean you’re building a business. The role of marketing is not to perform well on spreadsheets, but to drive something much more long-term, profitable growth. That requires training, rigour, and above all, perspective.

It also requires courage. Japan is not a country that likes confrontation. We prize harmony over disruption. But in marketing, that instinct becomes self-destructive. We’re too polite to challenge bad practice. Too deferential to titles. Too risk-averse to call BS on marketing theatre and general fluff. No one wants to be the lifeguard who shouts “You’re drowning!” at a smiling swimmer. But silence is complicity. And in a discipline as vital as marketing, that silence costs careers, companies, and entire categories.

We should all be training marketers like lifeguards. Proper curriculum. Real-world simulations. Repeated drills. And yes, a philosophical understanding of why marketing exists in the first place. The solution isn’t new titles or more tools. It’s better marketers. Trained ones. Ones who understand market orientation, brand building, segmentation theory, pricing strategy, distribution mechanics. Not just the “P” of promotion, but the full marketing mix. In Japan, this also means giving marketers more authority in a corporate setting, not just more responsibility. In too many companies, marketers are the last to know about product decisions or pricing changes. That has to stop. Marketing is a business function, not a service department. And it needs to be rebuilt as such.

Let’s get real. The boardroom doesn’t need marketers who speak its language. It needs marketers who speak the truth. Who can show not just what’s performing today, but what will sustain tomorrow. That’s not performance marketing’s job. Or growth marketing. Or product marketing. It’s marketing, full stop. And in Japan, it’s time we remembered what that really means.

I write a monthly magazine called UZU that provides commentary, interviews, and articles on branding, marketing, and life in Japan. Subscribe here. 📬 https://lnkd.in/gH-drv6B

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