Its electronic gadgetry is gathering dust on the shelves of high street stores, nobody is buying new fridges and the mountain of unsold plasma televisions is growing by the day.

But, in desperation, Panasonic has hit on an idea to counter-attack the consumer slump: it has ordered each member of its staff to go out and buy £1,000 worth of Panasonic products.

Large swaths of corporate Japan are expected to follow suit either directly commanding or indirectly “pressuring” employees to divert part of their salaries towards the goods that they produce. Toyota has already tacitly applauded a “voluntary” scheme in which 2,200 of its top people each decided to buy a new Toyota car, while the president of Fujitsu recently e-mailed 100,000 staff and gently pointed out how nice it would be if “employee ownership rates” of Fujitsu PCs and mobile phones were higher.

The 10,000 Japanese staff affected by Panasonic’s unorthodox strategy do not have long to consider their purchases – they have to buy their Panasonic goods, whether they need them or not, by the end of July.

Upper-level management, all of whom have been “encouraged” for years to fill their homes with Panasonic goods as a symbol of corporate loyalty, are being asked to spend at least 200,000 yen (£1,500). A spokesman for Panasonic said that because this “buy Panasonic” request was made to employees at management level, the company did not expect refusal rates to be high.

The emergency directive, say some Panasonic employees, is a particularly cruel blow: the same 10,000 managers now being commanded to buy unwanted electronics were told two weeks ago that their salaries and bonuses would be slashed.

Panasonic said that the move, which is not unprecedented in the company’s history, was aimed at forcing the management to “recognise the severity of the current business environment” – a recognition that might have been expected to be in place already, said brokers at Mitsubishi Tokyo UFJ. Only a fortnight ago, the company announced plans to shut 20 per cent of its factories and cut 15,000 jobs from its global employee base.

The company is staring down the barrel of one of its worst annual earnings performances, with losses of Y350 billion expected by the end of the year. Other warning signs from that announcement included pay cuts of between 10 and 20 per cent for directors and 5 per cent for managers.

Panasonic is among a number of Japanese companies that have encouraged the regular rendition by employees of the company song in an effort to instill a sense of loyalty and purpose. Panasonic’s anthem, which includes pseudo-religious stanzas such as “each one of us is a little piece of hope” concludes with the observation that “the sound of advancement is the sound that binds the world together”.

Even if other Japanese companies are less aggressive about compelling staff to buy their products, many are expecting the Japanese corporate tradition of socially enforced loyalty to kick in and force the issue anyway.

Companies such as Sony and Sharp hold regular discount sales of goods for employees and sources at both companies have suggested that the most recent events have involved a “clear sense of pressure” to be seen supporting the company by buying its products.

The “buy Fujitsu” campaign involved an e-mail from the president, which said: “If everyone in the company gets together, then it will become a great power.”

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