THOUGHT LEADERSHIP: Tsuyoshi Yoshikawa, General Manager, Corporate Marketing Division, Yamaha Corporation

We sat down with Tsuyoshi Yoshikawa to discover more about his career with Yamaha.?

“Throughout the 25 years of my career at Yamaha, I have been with many different business units, and that’s due to the diversity of Yamaha’s business domains.” Tsuyoshi started with the Audio-Visual business managing the wholesale area with sales and product planning. ?

“That was a highly competitive business sector with many competitors, so I learned how to define our core competence and differentiate from other stronger brands. “?

Tsuyoshi then moved to a new division that was running web-based online services and was involved in a project to create Yamaha’s first membership service called Yamaha Music Online Members.

“The project was quite complex due to new personal information protection laws initiated for the first time in Japan. We faced many new challenges with customer database creation but carefully curated a valuable process of communication.”

With experiences across different fields and overcoming new challenges, he then started his longest assignment at Yamaha’s record label – Yamaha Music Communications.”

“It was fun doing sales and promotion activities with artists, visiting TV and radio stations, and during this period I really learned how artists and their fans were Making Waves together. I had the honor of witnessing moments of music creation, the joy of creating something new, and how people are moved by the music.”

Tsuyoshi then transferred to Yamaha Music Media, a software music business, where he managed digital content storage, such as ‘Printo Gakufu (Print Sheet music)’ and MySound.

In 2017, he was appointed Managing Director of Yamaha Music Australia and spent 3 and a half years Down Under.

“This was another important period for me, I learned a lot about our global business perspective as well as having so many talented and friendly colleagues with refreshing insights, evolving my mind to be far more inclusive, and people-oriented.”

During his tenure in Australia, the world faced the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I owe a lot to our Yamaha Music Australia members for surviving that challenging period without serious problems.”

In 2021, he returned to Yamaha Corporation Japan and became General Manager of the Customer Experience Strategy Department, and recently from this year, adding the entire Brand Marketing teams, he has been appointed General Manager of the newly created Corporate Marketing Division.

Tsuyoshi’s experience across different aspects of Yamaha business segments can now be activated throughout our global marketing activities.

In part two of this article, we discuss Tsuyoshi’s vision with the newly formed Corporate Marketing Department.