Working closely with marketing teams to create next-generation methods

Q. Please tell me your responsibilities.

Our role is to plan and consider next-generation marketing methods, conduct trial and error, and roll out effective methods to the advertising and marketing departments for each brand and product. Since it is the role of each department to roll out specific marketing measures for customers, we work closely with them to create new systems for analyzing effects and help ensure that the "next marketing measures" are fruitful.

I want to create a culture of discussion based on data.

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

Our company has been focusing on advertising measures through various channels for some time now, and each individual measure has produced a certain level of success. However, there was a growing awareness within the company of issues such as the synergy effects generated by each measure, the optimal combination of advertising measures, and efficient use of advertising budgets.

For example, it is difficult to link KPIs for TV commercials to sales. It is also difficult to monitor the effects of brand awareness in real time. With digital advertising, it is possible to grasp the contribution to sales and real-time data movements to a certain extent, but even if you have a sense of how much the overall marketing picture contributes to sales, you cannot quantify it. As a result, in many cases, the next marketing plan could only be thought of by following previous examples, and without any supporting data, it was difficult to change direction and take on new challenges. The challenge was to firmly grasp the effects of the media mix with data and optimize the entire advertising measure.

The reason for introducing MAGELLAN was to create an internal culture where advertising strategies are discussed based on clear evidence by making the correlation between advertising effectiveness and each strategy visible objectively through data rather than just empirical data, and to incorporate the latest marketing analysis methods while making use of the knowledge generated by an organization with a long history.

"I want to create a culture where advertising strategies are discussed based on data," says Yasuhiko Akimine.

The reasons for choosing MAGELLAN were its immediacy and ease of use.

Q. Why did you choose MAGELLAN? What were your expectations for the product?

One is the speed of analysis. If we could automatically import and analyze the various data accumulated within the company, we could significantly reduce the time and effort required to process and input the data. This would enable us to make speedy decisions using the latest data, and we thought we could respond immediately to changes in the market.

Another advantage is that it structures the intermediate indicators, KPIs, and KGIs of the measures, allowing marketers to easily understand from a bird's-eye view that "the results are being generated based on this structure (the correlation between measures)." The reasons we chose MAGELLAN were its immediate effectiveness and ease of understanding.

Creating a change in awareness of "how to store data"

Q. When using MAGELLAN, was it difficult to initially prepare the data to be linked?

To be honest, it was difficult. This is because we had not previously accumulated data with these kinds of usage scenarios in mind within the company. However, I think it was a good opportunity to think about how to collect and accumulate data with the assumption that it will be used for analysis. Even if we cannot use it effectively right away, I think that thinking about operations with the future use of data analysis in mind is the first step in data-driven marketing.

By using MAGELLAN to define data requirements, we believe that awareness of "how we will accumulate data in the future" will spread within the company. People cannot act without a purpose, but the use of MAGELLAN, given that there was already awareness of the need to analyze the effectiveness of policies, has been a major catalyst in raising awareness of data.

"The use of MAGELLAN was a great opportunity to raise awareness of data," says Ryoji Matsuoka.

Data analysis turns “guessions” into “certainties”

Q. Please tell us your impressions about the analysis results of MAGELLAN.

It's great that what we had previously recognized as empirical values ​​has now been clarified by backing it up with data analysis. What we had previously spoken of as intuition can now be expressed through data. As a result, even though it has only been half a year since we introduced MAGELLAN, we feel that expectations for marketing mix modeling have risen rapidly within the company. We had expected that there would be resistance to asking each department, each with their own know-how, to provide us with data, but when we actually tried it, we were delighted to hear many people say, "Let's try it with our own brand too."

In addition, it is great that we can now discuss things like "This measure is effective in sales" when all the departments involved in marketing meet together based on the results of data analysis within the company. I think a culture of data-driven marketing is being created. Originally, there were many issues lying dormant, such as "What results will this measure produce when we analyze the data?", and the introduction of MAGELLAN has raised awareness of solving these issues all at once. We have also heard many people say, "This is what I wanted to do." Until now, we have deployed MAGELLAN with one brand, but in the future, we would like to introduce MAGELLAN to multiple brands and see results.

"I would like to introduce MAGELLAN to multiple brands in the future and see results," says Akimine.

100 years of wisdom and experience, reinforced with data

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

We are currently in the process of introducing MAGELLAN within the company, and in the future we would like to realize marketing that can tell everything through data. Creating a culture to achieve this is one of our goals. However, Panasonic has a 100-year history, and there is a wealth of experience and wisdom built up by our predecessors. I think our ultimate goal is to become an organization that can use past experience in a well-balanced way, rather than simply talking about data alone. We would like to continue to explore the optimal balance in the fusion of experience and data.

Using MAGELLAN, we can effectively utilize our experience and data to carry out marketing mix modeling, analyze the data generated, and use it in our next measures. We would like to promote our marketing measures while going through this PDCA cycle. Our marketing know-how, which is based on 100 years of wisdom and experience and is supplemented with data, will surely become a valuable asset that can be passed down to future generations.