Ad Studies Dialogue [14]Beyond Segmentation How has the understanding of consumers changed?―②
ADVERTISING STUDIES
Yukihiro Aoki
Gakushuin University
Kōwa Ogawa
As lifestyles, values, and consumption behaviors diversify, and the marketing world increasingly shifts its focus from mass to individual, how should we perceive the new consumer profile, and what kind of marketing is required? This time, we invited Professor Yukihiro Aoki, whose primary research areas have been consumer behavior theory and brand theory, and Mr. Kazuya Ogawa, who operates a business in the IT-driven marketing field, to discuss their perspectives on new approaches to marketing and consumer segmentation driven by IT evolution.
The Increasingly Important Marketer's Perspective
Aoki: What direction should consumer behavior research take going forward? If technology supremacy advances too far, even recommendations might become overly generic. Marketers will need to come up with more innovative ideas, won't they? It means we must look at people holistically, not just their purchasing behavior.
Ogawa: Recently, even employees at IT companies are seriously considering their own limitations. Plus, American IT tools rarely work seamlessly in Japan (laughs). Ultimately, we're realizing that just building impressive systems doesn't move people or make anything happen.
Aoki: True, technological advances expand what's possible, but they don't solve everything. The premise must be "what do we want to achieve?" Technology should be seen as an enabler to support that goal—that's the "IT as an enabler" concept we discussed earlier.
Ogawa: Exactly. For example, if there are 100 tasks in a CRM planning project, at least 80 involve marketing discussions, while only 10 or 20 deal with system architecture. If you don't understand marketing, no matter how tech-savvy you are, you can't participate in those discussions.
Aoki: Fundamentally, how should we perceive the market and consumers? If we only think within the IT world, it might seem like anything is possible. But in reality, I think we're entering an era where it's increasingly difficult to determine at what level and how we should understand consumers. I'd like to delve a bit deeper into that and continue our discussion.
Ogawa: A major difference lies in how marketing plans are developed: mass marketing versus one-to-one marketing using IT. This might be oversimplifying it, but you could say the former uses deductive reasoning, while the latter uses inductive reasoning. Both start by formulating a hypothesis deductively. However, in the mass marketing world, once you plan and prepare your initiatives, changes become difficult. It's a mindset of thinking things through, completing preparations, and then just hoping for success.
In contrast, the latter approach is premised on try-and-learn. After some consideration, it involves starting small and executing. Since the results of the measures can often be grasped in real time and the measures themselves are easy to change, the stance is to optimize the plan while executing the measures. Perhaps underlying this is the idea that even the most skilled marketer struggles to fully understand a single person; deep understanding comes through multiple interactions over time. In other words, this marketing approach assumes long-term customer relationships—like CRM or nurturing—rather than fleeting campaign connections.
Aoki: It feels like we're moving beyond hypothesis testing and straight into A/B testing first, right? (laughs) Of course, that approach works in some cases, but I still believe well-defined hypothesis-driven research, along with insights into customer profiles and needs, will remain valuable going forward.
Ogawa: Absolutely. Since there's always something core that moves many people's hearts, I feel the fundamentals of marketing don't change much. It's about continuing to tackle what could be called the eternal themes of psychology: how to perceive people and what stimuli can change them. It's not the psychology of a single snapshot moment like a campaign, but rather psychology premised on the long timeline of life, aimed at building better relationships. Therefore, the human understanding required of marketers will likely become deeper than ever before. IT helps, but the thinking remains fundamentally human—the marketer's.
From Lifestyle to Life Course
Aoki: For the past decade or so, I've been researching consumer behavior through the lens of life course. If lifestyle is a still-image approach, life course is a video (movie) approach. While capturing a single snapshot of life through a still image has its value, I also believe it's necessary to capture that life as a video.
Historically, segmentation was based on demographic variables like age and gender, or on psychographic variables. This evolved into lifestyle segmentation. Recently, however, researcher Moschis has introduced the concept of gerontographics, drawing on insights from lifespan developmental psychology, the sociology of aging, and gerontology.
Gerontology, sometimes translated as "gerontology studies" in Japan, is an increasingly vital academic field in Japan's aging society. Gerontographics is a framework grounded in this gerontology. Furthermore, it is based on the life course concept, which views life not just as individual cross-sections but as a single trajectory, opening up new possibilities for segmentation.
Ogawa: It would be remarkable if specialized insights emerged about what constitutes milestones or turning points within the long axis of life.
Aoki: In Japan, starting around the mid-1970s, the life courses of people who had followed postwar standardization began to diversify. For example, traditionally, many women followed the same path: graduating from school, then leaving their jobs upon marriage or childbirth to become full-time homemakers. However, as life course diversification progressed, while some women still followed the traditional path of becoming full-time homemakers after marriage and childbirth, others chose to remain single for life, or selected life courses such as DINKS (Dual Income No Kids) or DEWKS (Dual Earners With Kids). We want to properly organize the root causes of this apparent diversity in lifestyles as life course issues.
Ogawa: If academic or specialized insights emerge, I believe we can develop more precise customer journeys and strategies. The diversification of life courses directly translates to the diversification of customer journeys. Marketers will need to create scenarios for an even greater variety of turning points than before and instruct IT systems to ensure these turning points are not missed. This includes planning in advance what proposals the company will make when specific turning points occur, and instructing IT to report whether those proposals resonated.
Then, even without human marketers constantly scrutinizing the data, IT will report: "Mr./Ms. XX reached turning point XX. We made proposals A, B, and C, and they responded perfectly to C. Should we proceed with the next action G as planned? Please decide." By collaborating between human marketers and IT, it becomes possible to anticipate the distinct life paths of each individual, detect when those paths deviate from the initial course, and respond flexibly.
The Time Axis as a Critical Perspective
Aoki: In terms of analytical focus, what areas should we deepen? At various crossroads in life, what choices lead to diverging life paths? Life course choices actually reflect an individual's values. We're exploring this through research groups with professionals from diverse industries. Hearing Ogawa-san's perspective made me realize that viewing the customer journey as a broader life journey might yield new insights.
Ogawa: While I can't say which industry is best, any product or service that accompanies someone through various stages of their long life is relevant. If we can understand the choices available at these branching points, we should be able to create quite accurate scenarios.
Aoki: We've created personas based on life courses, but envisioning the next steps proved difficult. Hearing about the customer journey approach was truly valuable in that regard.
Ogawa: When researchers produce new insights, marketers in the field want to use those insights to gain even a slight competitive edge over rivals. "Life Course Marketing" is something marketers who can only do traditional mass marketing simply can't handle. It's a form of marketing only possible for marketers who use customer databases and one-to-one communication systems as tools, and who can map the customer journey as a long-term relationship. As a marketer, it's an exciting theme.
Aoki: Since consumer data keeps pouring in even without active research, I feel we're entering an era where marketers can't engage with consumers without their own worldview—their perspective on life, the market, history, and society.
Ogawa: I agree completely. With data and tools (IT) infinitely available right before us, the real challenge lies in whether marketers can look down upon the changes in the market, era, and society, interpret them, and then create scenarios for building long-term trust with customers. Short-term success may hinge on whether one can use IT tools, but once a certain level is reached, it becomes a battle of marketing planning once again.
Aoki: Do you have any requests for researchers? It could be your own research challenge, but please tell us what you think should be studied.
Ogawa: I believe we need the perspective that humans possess multiple personalities and are constantly changing. The decisive difference between mass and one-to-one marketing is the presence or absence of a time axis. I'd like to explore what happens when we incorporate a time axis into target audience theory.
Aoki: Hearing your discussion today has changed my perception of IT-driven marketing and provided a refreshing surprise. In our research group, we use scenario planning to discuss how the senior market might evolve by 2025 or how women's life courses might change by 2020. I believe we need to understand consumer profiles not just as they are now, but also considering their temporal evolution.
Ogawa: Our relationship funnel with targets starts with an anonymous mass as potential customers. Next come cookies, which you often hear about lately in DMPs. Then comes lead nurturing using personal information of prospects. After conversion, CRM nurtures them into premium customers. It's marketing that builds lifelong relationships with premium customers, following the journey from anonymous mass potential customers to customers to premium customers through long-term dialogue. This target theory anticipates not only individual differences but also the fact that people change over time. If we can clearly map out scenarios and leverage IT to assist us, this is entirely achievable. I believe the era of the marketer is returning.
Aoki: Thank you for sharing such fascinating insights today.
[End]
*The full text is available on the Hideo Yoshida Memorial Foundation website.
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ADVERTISING STUDIES
<a href="http://www.yhmf.jp/index.html" target="_blank"><span style="color:#336699">http://www.yhmf.jp/index.html</span></a><br/> The Hideo Yoshida Memorial Foundation publishes the research and public relations journal "AD STUDIES" four times a year. Each issue features special topics on advertising, communication, and marketing. Back issues from the inaugural edition to the latest issue are available on our foundation's homepage.
Yukihiro Aoki
Gakushuin University
Born in Kiryu City, Gunma Prefecture. Graduated from the Department of Business Administration, Faculty of Economics, Gakushuin University in 1978. Completed coursework for the doctoral program at the Graduate School of Commerce, Hitotsubashi University in 1983. Served as a research assistant at Hitotsubashi University's Faculty of Commerce, then as a full-time lecturer and associate professor at Kwansei Gakuin University's Faculty of Commerce. Assumed current position in 1995. Primary research themes include cognitive science research on consumer purchasing decision-making processes, brand research, and consumer life course studies. Serves as Standing Director (Journal Affairs) of the Japan Marketing Association; member of the Japan Consumer Behavior Research Association, the Japan Commercial Science Association, and the Japan Marketing Science Association. Major publications include: Life Course Marketing (Nikkei Publishing), Brand Strategy in the Era of Co-Creating Value (Minerva Shobo), Knowledge of Consumer Behavior (Nikkei Publishing), and Consumer Behavior Theory (Yuhikaku).
Kōwa Ogawa
Graduated from the Department of French Literature, Faculty of Letters, University of Tokyo in 1981. Joined Dentsu Inc. the same year. After five years in the sales division, spent approximately 20 years in the marketing division. Subsequently returned to the sales division for another five years. From 2009, seconded for five years to Dentsu e-marketing One, a specialized IT marketing company, as Managing Director. While involved in managing IT venture companies, gained experience in one-to-one marketing leveraging IT. Currently researching "Marketing for Success in the Coming IT Era" through practical work. Author of Marketing Automation for Hospitality: What IT Can Do for Marketing (Cross Media Marketing). At the time of publication in Ad Studies, held the position of Deputy Director, Marketing Solutions Bureau, Dentsu Inc.