It was the buyer's words that sparked five consecutive years of double-digit growth

Q. Please tell me your responsibilities.

Mr. Ozawa:Our company has three divisions: the Home Business Division, the Commercial Business Division, and the Overseas Business Division. I am in charge of the Home Business Division as well as communications such as advertising and public relations.

Mr. Okada:I am in charge of liquid seasonings such as mentsuyu and shiro dashi in the household products division. My job involves a wide range of marketing activities, from promotion to product development and PR.

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

Mr. Ozawa:They were concerned about wanting to visualize their integrated marketing communications. The brand Kappo Shirodashi, which was the focus of MAGELLAN's analysis this time, had seen double-digit growth for five consecutive years until the fall of 2019. However, while Kappo Shirodashi was initially valued by those who were good at cooking, other people thought that they "couldn't use it properly," and it was difficult for its reach to expand.

Mr. Okada:Unlike noodle soup or hotpot soup, white dashi is a product that has yet to fully penetrate the consumer market, which is why I think it is a market with great potential for growth. The reason why people have never used white dashi, or give up after using it once, is because they don't know how to use it. Since seasonings can be substituted with other products, it may not be necessary to use white dashi. In this situation, it is extremely difficult to convey that white dashi is a good product and that there are many things that only white dashi can do.

Mr. Ozawa:In the midst of all this, four years ago, exactly 20 years after the launch of Kappo Shirodashi, a buyer from a major distributor said to me, "If you don't expand the market, what will happen?" This became a personal trigger for me to launch a plan to unite the forces inside and outside the company and push forward with market creation.

Specifically, to encourage a wider range of people to use the product, rather than just a select few skilled cooks, we started using the father-son duo Shofutei Tsurube and Suruga Taro in TV commercials, and began promoting soup by saying that soup can be easily made with 1:9 Kappo Shiro Dashi. By promoting the use of Kappo Shiro Dashi in this way, we were able to achieve significant growth, but in the fourth year since we changed our marketing, our growth rate began to slow down rapidly.

At that time, we thought, "We have to move on to the next stage," so we hired Masaki Okada as a new TV commercial talent, and we asked him to create a quick-cook stew called "Satto-ni," which is a step up from soup in terms of the menu we were promoting. We also changed the container for Kappo Shirodashi from the conventional glass bottle to a plastic bottle, and as a catalyst for moving on to the next stage, we revamped everything from the advertising talent to the menu and the product.

We also reviewed our promotional methods, and while we believe that TV commercials have a huge impact, we improved our conventional methods to better appeal to people who don't watch TV. We held a press conference just before the TV commercial was aired, posted the press conference on social media, which then appeared in online news, and then aired the online news image on TV again. We then spread the topic on social media again, and when the time was right, we aired the ad. In this way, we used all channels to communicate with consumers in a complex way. As a result, we were able to appeal to people who don't watch TV, and we achieved the result of double-digit growth for five consecutive years.

Of course, each person in charge implemented their own measures with their own intentions. However, it is difficult to visualize such complex marketing communications, and we felt that it would be bad to end it with a situation like "We did a lot of different things and it was a success, yay." We wanted to clearly visualize the factors behind the success and make it possible to review them, so that it would appear that it was truly a success through integrated marketing. It was while we were struggling with this issue that we came across MAGELLAN and decided to introduce it.

MAGELLAN visualizes increasingly complex marketing communications

Q. What are the benefits of actually using MAGELLAN?

Mr. Ozawa:I think the biggest benefit of introducing MAGELLAN is that it visualized the effects of the various measures implemented in the integrated marketing I mentioned earlier, and we could see how much each one contributed to the results. Measures that we intuitively felt were highly effective, such as TV commercials and switching to plastic bottles, also showed a very large contribution in the analysis results, and our intuition was backed up by the numbers.

We were also able to clearly see the contribution of digital measures to results, and based on the analysis results, we were able to simulate how sales would change if we increased, decreased, or maintained the advertising costs for each measure. We feel that these analysis results will lead to our next measures, and this is also a major benefit.

Q. Please tell us about your future plans for using MAGELLAN.

Mr. Ozawa:I think it would be a waste to conduct a MAGELLAN analysis only once in a short period of time. The next time we take marketing action, we would like to conduct an analysis using MAGELLAN in the same way as this time, and compare the two analysis results side by side, which would allow us to gain a deeper understanding.

For example, the Kappo Shirodashi had a special requirement to be bottled in plastic, but by comparing it, we should be able to see what would have happened if that requirement had not been met. If we can do that, it may be useful when developing our next brand.

Being prepared to face the evaluation of your communication in agony

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

Mr. Okada:Dashi is a world-class food culture that we are proud of, and we have been involved in it for over 100 years. We would like to continue to spread the word about the deliciousness and goodness of dashi, focusing on bonito flakes.

I think most people probably agree that dashi is a pretty good thing, but what exactly is so good about it? I think people don't know exactly what it is, or how it's so good. For example, adding dashi can make food taste better even with less salt, and it can bring out the flavor of the ingredients and bring the flavors together - those are the great things about dashi. Rather than simply saying "because dashi is delicious," we want to properly communicate the good points of dashi. Ultimately, we want to promote our product in a way that will build a brand image where "when you think of dashi, you think of Yamaki" and "dashi = Yamaki."

Mr. Ozawa:I've been a marketer for over 30 years, and looking back to the days when TV commercials were the norm, I never doubted that the purpose of TV commercials was to gain consumer recognition, but people in the sales field would say things like, "Is advertising really meaningful?" and "They just waste all money." I think that's probably how people think of digital advertising these days.

In order to answer questions such as "What value does advertising have?" and "Is it worth spending this much money on it?", I believe that it will become increasingly important to consider how we evaluate communication with customers, and I believe that we will have to face this challenge every day, even as we agonize over it.