Can the recording star make people gaga over the idea of working at Family Mart?
Family Mart has been making a big push to establish itself as the fashionable choice within the Japanese convenience store space. Sometimes in the literal sense of having its own apparel line, and sometimes in the sense of cultivating a fresh, avant garde approach to store design, even if that means making some of its convenience stores feel a little less convenient.
Family Mart’s latest stylish strategy? Recruiting none other than international pop star Lady Gaga to promote the chain.
Set to the sounds of her song “Killah,” the video shows Gaga dance-working a shift at Family Mart. The visuals are in black and white except for the green and blue of the Family Mart signage, helping the colors really pop and establishing an atmospheric sci-fi flare. Adding to that vibe is Gaga’s outfit, a futuristic reimagining of Family Mart’s themselves-new employee uniforms which were just introduced to the chain at the start of this month.
Yes, as indicated by the “Family Mart Staff” written on her top, the video casts Gaga as part of the convenience store’s crew, since while her star power is drawing attention to the chain in general, it’s specifically meant as a recruitment promotion to drum up excitement for the idea of working at Family Mart, which is why the video ends with her asking “Famima de hataraku?,” or “Do you want to work at Family Mart?”
Gaga doesn’t appear to have been in Japan since this past January, and the recruitment commercial was actually filmed in Los Angeles at a studio-built Family Mart replica. In an interview conducted after filming, though, Gaga mentioned that she has visited Family Marts while in Japan, and that while she loves traditional Japanese fare such as sushi and cold soba, she’s also very fond of Family Mart’s cooked-in-store Famichiki boneless fried chicken.
▼ Really, everybody loves Famichiki.
So will this video, set to air as a commercial on Japanese TV and play inside Family Mart stores, lead to a flood of applications from people swayed by Gaga’s dance moves to apply for jobs at Family Mart? It’s hard to say. Obviously, there’s zero chance of the chart-topping recording artist herself giving up her current lifestyle to stock shelves with the new Family Mart seasonal sweet potato sweets or make sure that the branch’s Monster Wolf is in proper operating order. Japanese audiences tend to take a less literal, arguably rosier-tinted interpretation of celebrity endorsement, however, and famous Japanese entertainment industry stars lending their auras to more plebeian projects, including job-hunting services, has been a part of the media landscape here for a while, so the implied thumbs-up towards convenience store work will probably have some extent of positive effect on Family Mart’s brand image, and by extension its recruiting efforts.
Source: Universal Music Japan, PR Times
Top image: YouTube/familymart
Insert images: PR Times, YouTube/familymart
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