[Faculty of Business Administration] On Friday, November 15th, we had a lecture by Hiroyuki Nakagawa, President of Kansai Collection Entertainment Co., Ltd., in the Introduction to Marketing class.

The "Introduction to Marketing" lecture by Assistant Professor Mizuyo Touma of Faculty of Business Administration aims to help students understand how marketing is carried out in corporate activities through familiar examples. This time, we had a lecture by Hiroyuki Nakagawa, president of Kansai Collection Entertainment Co., Ltd., which manages the "Kansai Collection" held at the Kyocera Dome, plans and manages fashion shows and events, and develops models.
First, Nakagawa-san talked about his career. During his time at university, he studied abroad in Beijing, China for a year as an exchange student to make use of his Chinese language skills. He says that the experience of changing his environment and being exposed to diversity there has been very useful in his life ever since. After graduating from university, he used his Chinese language skills to get a job at a Hong Kong company, and while running a restaurant with his younger brother, he also used the IT skills he learned in high school to establish a web production company. However, he made a big change of direction, saying, "I want to do something big that will surprise a lot of people!" and planned an event at a dome stadium, which no one had done at the time, and in 2011 he managed to hold the first entertainment event in Japan's dome stadium, "Kansai Collection."
Kansai Collection got off to a start like this, and although the first event only attracted 13,000 visitors, the number of visitors has increased every year due to the event's early use of influencers such as YouTubers and TikTokers, which created a buzz and led to frequent coverage in the media, including on TV news, and the event's spread on social media as photography was allowed freely during the event. In 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic, the event attracted 44,000 people, and after being canceled and revived due to the pandemic, the cumulative number of visitors exceeded 720,000 in 2024.
On the other hand, seeing requests such as "I want to be a model too, are there auditions?" as a business opportunity, he established "Kansai Collection Entertainment" which is involved in the model training business. He also expanded into the business of dispatching (managing) the trained models. Now, he says, he has reached the point where he can send models who were just high school students until two years ago to the Paris Collection. In this business, it is important to create an environment where these girls can challenge their dreams and goals, and in the future, he will launch an audition event "Student Runway" to appear in "Kansai Collection", and he wants to make it an event that inspires more students and young people. President Nakagawa said, "When the environment changes, behavior changes, behavior changes, habits change, and habits change, so I would like young people to consciously jump into new environments."
A question and answer session then took place, with many questions from both men and women being asked, such as "Are you not recruiting male models?", "Was it a sure thing to set up 100,000 yen VIP seats?" and "How do you recruit models?", and each question was answered carefully.
Finally, President Nakagawa gave the students the task of "creating a marketing strategy that will significantly increase the number of visitors to the Kansai Collection, taking into account innovation, growth potential, and feasibility," and each group will be required to make a presentation in front of President Nakagawa in January of next year. We look forward to seeing the students' inspired and innovative presentations.

(Source: School Public Relations)