Japan Railway Group - My Japan Railway (case study)

Train lines operated by Japan Railway form the backbone of public transportation infrastructure in Japan. They traverse the entire country, and have made life more convenient and helped society grow for 150 years. In fact, they are so integral to daily life that people often take them for granted. To address this issue, we were asked to develop a campaign that would reconnect Japan Railway with its customers in a personal way.

Despite the fact that Japan is a small island nation, only 6% of Japanese have visited all 47 prefectures. So our objectives were twofold: 1) to maximise interest in domestic travel that had grown during the pandemic and encourage people to visit Japan's scenic attractions, and 2) to inject an element of fun into rail travel and engage people in an interactive activity that enabled them to create their own personal "My Japan Railway".

To replicate the look and texture of traditional Japanese woodblock printing—and to emphasise the historic nature of the role that railways have played in Japan—we deliberately chose to work with a restricted colour palette of just six colours. And for the stamp designs, we used only simple letterforms and graphic elements that could actually be reproduced in analogue form on wooden or rubber stamps. Although the medium of stamp delivery was digital, our designs had a warm, handcrafted look that evoked nostalgia for the past and a sense of human connection that directly supported the psychology of the brand-customer relationship the campaign sought to create.

The tradition of collecting woodcut-style stamped images in a travel scrapbook has a long history in Japan. It traces its origins to the nation’s shrines and temples, where visitors can have the official “seal” of a shrine or temple stamped into a travel scrapbook as a way to commemorate their visit. The collection of such stamps is something of a national passion, and “stamp rallies” have become a popular way to encourage people to visit all of the points of interest at travel destinations. Our campaign was conceived from the insight that we could leverage this traditional stamp rally culture and national affinity for stamp collecting to communicate with customers in an interactive way.