I spent all of last week in Korea and Japan.

It has been a while since I was in Seoul and whilst it would not be true to say that the place was unrecognizable - the Han river is still there - many new buildings and business centres have emerged since my last visit.

Perhaps the most significant development in FMCG terms has been the explosion of convenience stores which now exceed 15,000 outlets plus the arrival - and dominance some would argue - of large hypermarkets like LotteMart, E-Mart and of course Tesco/Homeplus.

In my short time, I got to visit at least one outlet of each.

E-Mart reminded me most of a large Japanese mall, in terms of size, cleanliness and product selection.

I also like the company’s branding. Just using a name like E-mart is in itself modern and gives imagery of technology and the future. The combination of black and yellow colours gives standout. Perhaps for Korean shoppers the roman letters instead of Hangul give a more foreign and perhaps premium image too?

Looking back, perhaps the only difference was that there seem to be more sampling girls in Korea than Japan. In fact to use the word sampling is an understatement, as these ladies were aggressively selling and were clearly working on some kind of incentive basis.

Korea itself seemed to be in a buoyant mood; it was winter olympics and the country has had a fantastic games. Televisions everywhere were running non-stop images of ice and speed skaters, sports this Northern Asian country clearly excels at.