Asia-Pacific Power List 2022: Hikaru Adachi, FamilyMart

Hikaru Adachi

Executive director and chief marketing officer
FamilyMart
Japan
Member since 2021

According to the company, Hikaru Adachi was appointed on the strength of his strong planning skills, which when faced with a pandemic and a convenience store chain facing a lack of hit products, he would undoubtedly need. 

Responsible for FamilyMart’s product planning and sales strategy, Adachi got to work on the most immediate marketing challenges facing the convenience store operator, namely the renewal of its private brands to be more in line with modern times. 

FamilyMart's own private brands, ‘Mom's Diner’ series and ‘FamilyMart Collection’, were integrated under the name ‘Famimaru’ last October after the name ‘Mom's Diner’ drew criticism that it would ‘implant in society the view that cooking is a mother's task’. Adachi commented that the reform of the private brands was done to produce a name, concept and packaging that will be accepted by people of all generations and genders. Thanks to a huge buzz created, mainly due to provocative advertising (especially OOH and newspapers), the rebrand resulted in historically the highest media exposure of FamilyMart in October 2021.

In the past year, FamilyMart has seen a recovery in the number of customers from earlier declines brought on by the pandemic. The operator has managed to outpace competitors Lawson and 7-Eleven in terms of introducing labour-saving operations, and has set forth a plan to open 1,000 unstaffed shops by the end of 2024, in the first large-scale deployment of fully automated stores in Japan.

Going forward, certainly for Adachi, he has no intention of resting on his laurels, commenting that part of the appeal of joining FamilyMart was that it represents a new challenge. "I believe that if you don't constantly update yourself and gain new knowledge and experience, your achievements will soon become obsolete," he said. 

Adachi is a regular contributor to Marketing Agenda, the largest marketing conference in Japan, both as a council member and as an aid in planning and booking speakers. In the past year, he has also provided volunteer-based marketing sessions to several major universities across Japan, including Hitotsubashi University, Waseda University, and Housei University.