
Preparing for Peak

How Rakuten are preparing for Peak

Sebastiaan Rasterhoff
September 1, 2020
Read Time: 1min

We (virtually) sat down with Sebastiaan Rasterhoff, Marketing Director at Rakuten Germany, to discuss his challenges when preparing for Peak. From driving brand awareness in a competitive European market to why "the whole the company is a war room during Black Friday", Sebastiaan reveals what's behind Rakuten's strategy.

Rakuten, a Japanese company offering ecommerce, Fintech and mobile services, have focused heavily on sports marketing to help build their name overseas. Known in Europe for being featured on the shirt of football's most valuable player, Lionel Messi, they've also partnered with the NBA's Golden State Warriors in the US.

As Sebastiaan explains in this Q&A, their focus now is on building consumer understanding on the one hand, whilst helping their sellers increase profits on the other.


  1. Introduce yourself and Rakuten (1:07)
  2. What's your strategy for this year? (6:18)
  3. What's your #1 learning from last year's Peak? (10:00)
  4. Do you have any tips for fellow Marketing Directors during the Peak season? (11:16)
  5. Have you had any technical challenges in the last few years? (16:07)
  6. Complete this sentence: Black Friday weekend at Rakuten is like... (17:50)
  7. How does Contentsquare help you during Black Friday? (20:00)

Give me more

For more golden nuggets of Peak advice, head over to our hub.

Take me to the Hub

Sebastiaan Rasterhoff

I am Sebastiaan Rasterhoff Director Marketing for Rakuten Germany (Marketplace). A Dutchman heading the German Marketplace business, fun fact! I am with Rakuten for almost 6 years and gained experience in Performance Marketing, CRM and data driven Marketing. Beside that I also managed our e-Commerce businesses in UK & Spain where I worked with a multi-functional team.

The German marketing team exists of 50% non-Germans and 50% Germans. This makes working at Rakuten fun, never boring and I got to know I few good recipes across the world.