Want to visualize the effectiveness of advertising that contributes to sales in an increasingly complex customer journey

The important thing is to design communication from online to offline

Q. Please tell us your roles and the roles of the department that introduced MAGELLAN.

Mr. Ikeshiro:I oversee everything from promotions to digital marketing for men's brands, including TV commercials, and my mission is to manage the product liability for five men's brands, including the pharmaceutical Medical Minoki 5 and men's shampoo Scalp D, which are promoted with the Minoki Brothers at the core.

Mr. Sakuma:As the leader of the Digital Marketing Unit, I am in charge of all online marketing, and my mission is to achieve the overall web sales target for the men's brand. I am also in charge of promoting advertising measures in cooperation with the Promotion Unit and analyzing the men's brand as a whole.

Mr. Hongo:In the Digital Marketing Unit, I am mainly in charge of advertising for Medical Minoki 5. I also oversee the production direction of the brand website and distribute email newsletters as a CRM measure.

MAGELLAN has been introduced by the Digital Marketing Unit, and it not only collects data on online advertising, but also on offline advertising such as TV commercials and transit advertising handled by the Promotion Unit, allowing for integrated analysis of both online and offline data.

Q. Please tell us about the characteristics of the market and your company’s situation.

The hair care market is characterized by a high level of competition. Competition is not limited to products such as hair restorers and hair growth agents for thinning hair and hair loss, but also to general services such as clinics. As there are many competitors, sales channels are becoming more and more diverse, making it difficult to differentiate functional value from competitors.

Our products are in the high price range in the hair care market, and because they address a range of concerns, many customers research, compare, and consider various information before making a purchase. For this reason, communication design, both online and offline, is all the more important, and we feel that this is a difficult aspect of marketing. In addition, with the launch of the pharmaceutical product Medical Minoxidil 5, we have to be more conscious of advertising expressions that comply with the Pharmaceutical and Medical Device Act, which presents challenges unique to pharmaceutical products.

As customer journeys become more complex, it was difficult to visualize the effectiveness of each advertisement.

Q. What challenges have you faced in marketing so far?

We felt that we were facing an issue of not being able to accurately visualize the effectiveness of advertising, i.e., which ads, both online and offline, contributed to sales. As the customer journey from awareness to purchase has become more complex, and even after exposure to an advertisement, customers continue to come into contact with various media before making a purchase, it was not clear how effective each advertisement was.

Also, taking into account the media trend that online advertising costs continue to grow beyond those of TV commercials, the weight of web video advertising has recently been increased as a means of awareness in the online domain. As awareness-based online advertising that does not directly lead to conversions has increased, it has become difficult to evaluate each advertisement equally, and we were still feeling our way through how to incorporate this into our plans.

Furthermore, while sales on malls such as Rakuten and Amazon are large, it was difficult to see in numbers how much our own advertising was contributing to mall sales, so we wanted to analyze this as well and dig deeper.

To be able to confidently decide on the optimal investment balance

Q. Please tell us why you introduced MAGELLAN.

What was attractive about MAGELLAN was that it can be analyzed and evaluated using a statistical approach.

In addition, the three issues they cited as challenges, which had previously been evaluated and judged based on experience, were: 3) To visualize the effect of each advertisement on sales; XNUMX) To evaluate measures with different indicators, such as harvesting measures and awareness measures, on an equal footing; and XNUMX) To visualize the impact on sales at the mall. These were the three issues that they had previously evaluated and judged based on experience, but now they can be understood numerically. This was also a deciding factor in their adoption.

Q. Have you discovered anything new through your MAGELLAN analysis?

It was a new discovery for us to be able to visualize the synergistic effect of TV commercials and web video ads on sales in numbers. Up until now, we had not been investing in awareness measures using web video ads with clear confidence, but had been making investments by taking into account media trends and judging the indirect effect on other measures based on experience. After receiving the results of MAGELLAN's analysis, we increased our budget for web video ads, which created a synergistic effect with TV commercials and turned the overall return on investment into a positive one. As the results were clear, what we had judged based on experience, it also led to our decision to take future action to strengthen our awareness measures using web video ads.

We are also seeing cross-brand effects. Since the launch of Medical Minox 2018 in 5, we have shifted the focus of our advertising budget from Scalp D to Medical Minox 5. In making this switch, we were also conscious of the spread of the effects from Medical Minox 5 to other brands, including Scalp D. MAGELLAN's analysis has shown that advertising for Medical Minox 5 has also had an impact on sales of Scalp D, meaning that there has been a ripple effect on other brands, which we have been able to visualize numerically.

Q. Is there anything you would like to analyze with MAGELLAN in the future?

By visualizing the effects of each ad, which is difficult to see in numbers, and the effects of ads between each other, which are difficult to see in terms of connections, it becomes possible to determine the optimal investment balance, which is something we hope to see in the future from MAGELLAN.

One new thing I want to look at is not just looking back at monthly measures, but also incorporating mid- to long-term thinking into my analysis, such as how much the cumulative results of these measures have affected the base of sales. I want to efficiently connect what I'm doing now to future results.

We value communication with customers beyond the numbers

Q. Lastly, please tell us about your goal in marketing.

We always think from the customer's perspective. We want all members of our team to be conscious of "what value does the brand want to provide?" and "how can we deliver that value to our customers?" when conducting marketing.

Our products are designed to help customers overcome their worries, which can lead to negativity, so we want to help our customers become more positive, even if only a little, and make their lives more fun and bright. By interacting with our customers with this mindset, we believe that we will ultimately achieve our sales target. As for MAGELLAN, we want to use it as a guide for communicating with our customers, so that the goal is not to see the numbers.