Late to react to changes in the credit card industry, and need to revamp marketing

Q. What is the role of the department that introduced MAGELLAN?

Mr. Hara:The Integrated Marketing Department was established in May 2017 as an organization that brings together the functions of digital channel management, marketing, DMP analysis, and call center planning, such as owned media and email newsletters. It designs end-to-end communication with customers, from online information dissemination to building engagement and applications. In particular, it places emphasis on the three skills of response, understanding, and communication, and is working on communication reforms based on analysis of customer needs. Since April of this year, it has also been in charge of web advertising planning.

Hara Yusuke, Group Manager, Integrated Marketing Department

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

Mr. Hara:The credit card industry is undergoing a major transformation. Until now, credit cards were mainly provided by banks and credit card companies, but now distribution companies and other companies are increasingly entering the market. Furthermore, customers' lifestyles are changing, and contact channels are diversifying. In this environment, our company was facing the issue of being slow to take measures to acquire new customers. For example, the number of searches for our company name is sluggish. Nowadays, most card applications are made online. We are promoting our brand through TV commercials, but our share of the total number of searches for credit cards is declining. Furthermore, even if we wanted to improve our TV commercials and other measures, we were unable to take any measures because we did not have any concrete evaluation indicators.

In addition, they tended to focus only on clicks on web ads, without tracking conversions or LTV, and did not retarget customers who had abandoned their applications. Even when they released new services, they only introduced them on their own media, and there was little awareness of properly communicating information to customers.

Given this situation, we introduced MA two years ago, mapped out the customer journey, and are now working on overall communication design from the customer's perspective.

MAGELLAN is a bridge to understand both mass advertising and web advertising

Q. Please tell us why you introduced MAGELLAN.

Mr. Fukuda:The first major reason is to optimize web promotions using mass advertising, and to optimally allocate the promotion budget. Mass advertising does not have as many quantitative evaluation indicators as web advertising. We wanted to independently grasp the overall picture of promotion results, rather than using other companies' indicators such as GRP and viewer ratings, so we introduced MAGELLAN.

Another aim is to make MAGELLAN a common language for discussing mass advertising and web advertising from the same perspective. Currently, we are in the process of building a system for integrated on- and off-line promotion. In order to make the most of the strengths of both mass advertising and web advertising, we would like to use MAGELLAN as a common indicator and monitor results using statistical and actual data. Ultimately, we would like to use MAGELLAN as a common indicator not only within the company, but also with agencies and external partners.

Yasunori Fukuda, Deputy Director of Integrated Marketing Department

We want to strengthen our internal branding and realize marketing that gains favor and sympathy from customers.

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

Mr. Hara:First of all, we want to provide various channels that match our customers' interests and conduct marketing that helps them understand our company's role, including contributing to society. We also want them to develop favor and empathy with the ads, media, and content they come into contact with, leading them to choose Sumitomo Mitsui Card's services. To achieve this, we need to communicate from a customer perspective, as well as fan-based communication. Ideally, we would like to have consistent communication across all aspects of advertising, social media, call center support, and the site's UI/UX.

To that end, we want to reexamine our company's core values ​​and focus on internal branding. The key to consistent customer communication is for each employee to recognize the strengths of our company, understand the relationships we want to build with customers, and share our philosophy. We want to create a system in which everyone, including not only management but also managers and field staff, can face customers with the same worldview.