Sumarni, a 39-year-old Indonesian mother of three, trundles her pink bicycle through a wealthy Jakarta suburb every day, hawking Yakult probiotic yoghurt drinks door-to-door.
Dressed in a red-and-white checked shirt with matching trousers and hijab, she is one of about 5,000 “Yakult Ladies” spearheading an expansion drive in Indonesia by the quirky Japanese company that makes the drinks.
Booking sales, however, is never easy. “It is hard to sell to the A-class customers because their security guards and maids won’t let us speak directly to them,” she explains.
At Yakult’s low-rent distribution centre in Cipete, south Jakarta, the walls are plastered with posters displaying sales patter to be used in every conceivable situation from when a potential customer is reading the Koran to when they are cooking dinner.
The company tries to keep morale high through a daily midday meeting. The agents pray together and chant corporate slogans (“Keep going, each time higher” and “Yakult should be delivered whether it’s boiling hot or pouring with rain”) before a hitherto quiescent Japanese executive strides to the front of the room and pumps his hands in the air, shouting “Ganbaru”, a Japanese slogan that means “tough it out”.
The push is part of a wider effort to tap emerging markets as sales stagnate at home. There are now more than 80,000 Yakult agents around the world, including more than 40,000 in Japan. They act as brand ambassadors as much as sales agents with their neat uniforms and pushcarts adorned with dictums such as “love your colon”.
Yakult was launched in the 1930s after Minoru Shirota, a microbiologist at Kyoto University, cultivated a strain of bacteria that was strong enough to survive stomach acids and pass through to the intestines, where he claimed it had a positive effect on digestion and health.
The company has since been promoting its idiosyncratic philosophy of “Shirota-ism” which combines the concept that “a healthy intestinal tract leads to a long life” with the idea that the company should sell its products at “a price anyone can afford”.
Sanae Ueno, head of Yakult in Indonesia, says the ideal Yakult Lady is aged over 30 and has children – because mothers tend to be more “health conscious” and have a good network of other women to target as customers.
The key for Yakult is hiring women who understand the local culture, can communicate well and who will keep to a regular schedule. It asks new recruits to draw up their own maps of their neighbourhoods, broken down by socioeconomic groups.
Yakult wants the Ladies to have ownership of their weekly routes, but it also monitors their performance closely, with each woman’s sales figures tallied on a wall in every district office.
The most successful Yakult Ladies, such as 43-year-old Sumarti, enjoy their job, stopping to natter with people. But, like in any sales role, they also need a deep well of persistence.
“Before, it was hard to find work because people thought I was too old. Doing this job has helped me send my two daughters to school,” she says.
“But it can be very hard sometimes when people refuse to come to the door.”
Almost 10 per cent of Yakult’s global sales of its trademark shot of sugary fermented milk now come from Indonesia. The company plans to continue relying on the Yakult agents to help it expand in the world’s most populous Muslim nation.
The Yakult agents entered the story in the 1960s when the company followed in the footsteps of Nippon Insurance, which had tapped the large pool of widows from the second world war to create a door-to-door sales force of respectable women in need of employment.
Initially, at least, selling the digestive merits of bacteria required the same sort of persuasion as pitching an insurance policy. “When people thought of bacteria, they thought of something harmful,” says Takashige Negishi, Yakult’s Tokyo-based president. “A proper explanation was essential.”
Today, some countries are given a more Yakult Lady-centric sales model than others: in the US, with its high proportion of two-income households, the company found that not enough people were at home during the day to bother.
Maintaining a local sales network with personal ties to customers can also help in times of turmoil. In China, Yakult’s sales increased by a quarter last year in spite of protests against Japan and boycotts of Japanese brands, the product of a heated territorial dispute between the two countries. Yakult has three factories in China and is building two more. “We have local people selling and it’s perceived as a made-in-China product,” Mr Negishi says.
Even so, getting the localisation formula just right can be difficult. When Yakult first tried to replicate the “Yakult Lady” model in Indonesia in the 1990s, it found the going tough.
“Until we restarted our business in 2007, we found that we would employ 100 Yakult Ladies and that after one year, 100 would have resigned,” says Sanae Ueno, who has led Yakult in Indonesia for 14 years.
To incentivise the women, they were only paid in commission. But with little education about the product or door-to-door sales techniques, most could not sell enough Yakult to make a living.
While Indonesia’s economy started to take off in the early 2000s, after it had recovered from the Asian financial crisis and the concurrent political collapse, Yakult struggled to increase its sales and more than 10 per cent of its stock typically had to be thrown out.
The company started to turn round its fortunes after a revamp in 2007 focused on better training and management for the Yakult agents. The area that each agent covers was cut from 2,000 to 1,000 households to ensure they could visit almost every home once a week and maintain a regular rapport with residents.
And the training programme was beefed up substantially to ensure that the agents were able to generate the incomes that were needed to persuade them to stay on.
Since 2007, sales of Yakult, which costs Rp7,500 ($0.66) for a pack of five 65ml bottles in Indonesia, have jumped from about 1m bottles a day to about 3m in spite of several price increases.
About half of sales now come from the Yakult agents, up from about a quarter five years ago. The company is building a second factory in Indonesia, in Surabaya, east Java, to meet rising demand.
The rate of Yakult agent turnover has fallen to just 2-3 per cent a year as the women now typically earn Rp3m-Rp4m a month in Jakarta, well above the minimum wage of Rp2.4m.
As she carefully tots up her sales in a little blue book issued to all the Yakult agents, Ms Sumarni, who has been working at the company for more than a decade and currently earns Rp4m a month, says she is keen to stick around.
“Until recently I was getting a bigger income than my husband but then I helped find him a better-paid job as a driver for one of my regular customers,” she says.
With a paucity of employment opportunities for married Indonesian women such as Ms Sumarni who do not have an advanced education, the company knew there was an opportunity to deploy its Yakult sales force. But it took the company almost two decades to work out how.
Now, as Yakult targets other growth markets such as Brazil and Mexico, Indonesia has become a model for matching its global products and marketing to local realities.
