I recently visited the Osaka Expo 2025, and to be upfront, I enjoyed it a lot. But I can assure you, 99% of international visitors will give up buying tickets—the 1% are people like me who love Japan so much that they can tolerate this level of pain.
Why? Because its user experience is absolutely terrible. And I'm not alone—there are tons of complaints online from international visitors.
Meanwhile, slightly more than 9 million tickets were sold before the opening, a far cry from the target of 14 million. At the same time, construction costs nearly doubled from their original estimate of 235 billion yen ($1.65bn). This means there's a strong likelihood that following the failure of the Tokyo Olympics, Osaka Expo will follow in the footsteps of the 2000 Hannover World Expo, which racked up a deficit exceeding $800 millions.
Its digital strategy is a huge disaster contributing to this catastrophe. Because of the depth of the topic, I'm going to analyze its digital marketing strategy in today's newsletter, and I'll cover its customer journey & on-site digital experience over the coming weeks.
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Fundamental Mistake: Setting the Wrong Promotional Strategy from the Get-Go
A World Expo Targeting Only Japanese?
Awareness is the fundamental step of the marketing funnel (if you want to learn more about fundamental marketing concepts, check out my playbook above), and that ties back to the promotional strategy. As a consumer living abroad, I have never seen any promotional materials about the Osaka Expo. Turns out it's due to their strikingly weird marketing strategy.
The 2020 Dubai Expo (delayed to 2021) expected 70% of their audience from international borders, which in the end was only 1/3 of the visitors due to COVID travel restrictions. How about Osaka Expo? The Japan Association for the 2025 Expo projects "nearly 90% of visitors will be residents of the country."
That's a stark contrast: 70% international vs 10%. That explains why there haven't been any international campaigns—the only one I could find is an "EXPO2025 Digital Wallet" NFT campaign which, frankly, I couldn't understand even after reading the webpage.
Osaka Expo's YouTube Channel reveals the same strategy: almost all videos, even the channel title, are in Japanese. The Expo committee didn’t consider international audiences in the first place, and that leads to a lot of problems subsequently.
The website follows the same pattern—very Japanese style with information overload (versus minimal and clean website design in the western world) with poor call-to-action. Foreign language pages are only offered via machine translation and contain much less information. As of now, English, Chinese, Korean, French, and Spanish are available, already much more than when I was making my purchase back in January 2025. We'll go over the customer journey in the next newsletter.
A Shocking Forecasting Mistake
Let's reverse engineer their 10% international visitors target. This math doesn't add up at all.
Japan tourism stats:
- 36.9 million tourists traveled to Japan in 2024
- JTB forecasts 40 million for 2025, with 40% visiting Osaka
- Foreigners make up 44.9% of hotel room bookings in Osaka 2024
Inbound arrivals during Expo months:
- 40 million × 60% (April-Oct share) ≈ 24 million foreigners in Japan while the Expo is open
Osaka Expo forecasts:
- Targets 28 million total visitors, 10% from international ≈ 2.8 million international visitors
This calculation implies that:
- No tourists are going to specifically travel to Japan for the Expo
- Tourists in other parts of Japan (like Tokyo) won't be interested in the Expo
- Even for tourists already in Osaka, only 1 out of 3.4 tourists are expected to visit the Expo (9.6 million potential visitors / 2.8 million expected)
This is not a Japanese festival—this is the World Expo. How did the organizers conclude that such a world-class event would be so unappealing to international audiences, especially when Japan is experiencing a tourism boom? This doesn't make sense even to a high-schooler.
What's even more ironic? The local Japanese, aka the majority 90%, have little enthusiasm for the Osaka Expo. In a poll conducted by Kyodo News, nearly three in four Japanese said they had no interest in visiting the event. The organizers also suffered PR setbacks due to venue construction delays and negative comparisons to the troubled Tokyo 2021 Olympics.
Lessons Learned: How to Avoid an International Marketing Disaster
- Understand your product: The Osaka Expo is a World Expo, and Osaka is a growing international tourist destination with Japan having a tourism boom. Whatever your offering, be honest about its true nature and potential appeal. Is it truly local or does it have broader appeal? The mismatch between Osaka Expo's global nature and its local marketing approach created a fundamental strategic error.
- Know your potential audience, not just your current one: The audience should NOT be only Japanese but international visitors—the Dubai Expo is a great reference point. Too many businesses fall into the trap of marketing primarily to their existing audience rather than expanding to their potential audience. In digital marketing, this is like only using remarketing campaigns and ignoring prospecting.
- Base your forecasts on data, not assumptions: The Osaka Expo team seemed to make projections based on what they felt comfortable handling rather than what the market data indicated. When you have 24 million international tourists in your country during your event, targeting only 2.8 million is severely underestimating your potential. Always sanity-check your forecasts against objective market data.
- Language strategy is business strategy: For any international business (which includes tourism), your language support directly determines who can become your customer. Relying on machine translation and providing less content for non-Japanese speakers instantly cut off millions of potential visitors. A proper localization strategy isn't a nice-to-have—it's essential infrastructure.
- User experience should be universally accessible: Even if the Expo had perfect marketing, the complicated ticketing and reservation system (which I'll detail next week) created frustration that drove away potential visitors. Remember that your digital experience is often the first impression of your brand—and poor UX can kill conversion rates regardless of how good your product actually is.
Having seen these mistakes play out on such a massive scale, I can't emphasize enough how important it is to step back and question your fundamental audience assumptions. Most businesses aren't running multi-billion dollar World Expos, but these same principles apply whether you're selling software, services, or physical products.
Is There Still Hope for the Osaka Expo?
Despite these strategic missteps, the Osaka Expo still has potential to turn things around - I love the Expo experience, it just requires the right communications. What would it take? First, the team needs to urgently pivot their marketing strategy to capture the massive international tourism wave already hitting Japan. With 40 million visitors expected in the country this year, even a modest increase in conversion rate could dramatically boost attendance.
Second, they need to address the local enthusiasm gap by appealing to the younger generation in Japan.
But even if they solve these awareness challenges, they still face a more fundamental obstacle: the byzantine user experience that creates extreme friction for anyone trying to purchase tickets and reserve pavilions. The current system is so convoluted that it's actively discouraging visitors who are already interested.
In my next newsletter, I'll break down this customer journey disaster step-by-step—showing you exactly how over-engineering and poor UX design are costing the Expo millions in lost revenue, and providing takeaways you can apply to your own digital customer experience.
After all, even the best marketing strategy fails when customers can't easily convert their interest into action.
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