From "Digital Marketing" to "Marketing Digital" ~ Dentsu Inc. and Oracle Japan's Vision for Digital Transformation ~

Recently, Dentsu Inc. and Oracle Japan announced a collaboration to support customer companies in their digital transformation. Digital transformation refers to "the digital reform of corporate organizations, operations, and communication centered around the customer."

Marketing encompasses all activities within a company's business processes that involve customers.

When I explain this to client companies or journalists, they often react with surprise: "Dentsu Inc. is tackling that too!?" Indeed, when people think of Dentsu and digital, the first area that comes to mind seems to be the enhancement of promotions—so-called "digital marketing"—such as web advertising, website production, and O2O. Of course, we are also deeply engaged in this crucial area.

Particularly over the last five years, attention has focused on digital utilization, centered around ad tech, aimed at this promotion enhancement. However, if the primary output is "optimizing web advertising and digital sales promotions," it remains limited to a portion of the customer experience and touchpoints a company provides. Consequently, the impact on the company's overall activities and revenue seems to leave something to be desired compared to the level of public attention and expectation.

Therefore, we defined the effort to expand digitalization beyond digital-only experiences and touchpoints to include real-world experiences and touchpoints as "Digital Transformation." To achieve this, the "marketing" provided by advertising agencies must be broadly redefined. It is no longer just promotion; it encompasses "all activities within the company's business processes that involve customers."

Digitalization of "Marketing Business Processes" is Critical

Now, let's return to our collaboration with Oracle Japan. This time, we jointly developed and announced the release of the "Digital Transformation Promotion Support Program." This program systematizes support for redesigning the four structures (PCDS framework) that primarily underpin corporate activities.

These four structures are: "Marketing Business Processes," "Customer Touchpoints," "Utilized Data," and "Marketing Systems." First, we diagnose the digitalization of marketing within each structure using 20 items based on the organization's "Process Maturity Management Model." Then, through an additional 50 interview items, we outline the desired state of marketing digitalization.

Among these four structures, as previously covered in our series, cases of enhancing "Customer Touchpoints," "Utilized Data," and "Marketing Systems" through the digitization of real-world experiences and interactions are increasing. However, the remaining "Marketing Business Processes" are particularly crucial.

Why is it important? Because two challenges arise when digitizing a company's broad marketing activities. The first is "difficulty in seeing the return on investment." The second is "changing long-established operational processes." We believe these challenges can be overcome by undertaking the redesign of the "marketing operational processes."

First, organize the "marketing operational processes"

As part of the program's approach, we first conduct interviews with personnel from all internal departments involved with customers to organize the current company-wide marketing operational processes. We then share the "volume" and "rates" of customer funnel transitions within this internal chain structure among stakeholders and set operational goals (KPIs and KGIs) achievable through digitalization. This makes it easier to determine which processes need digitalization to improve KPIs and to estimate the impact such improvements will have on the ultimate KGI at the end of the chain.

Furthermore, digitizing and enhancing "marketing systems" and "customer touchpoints" often leads to changes in "business processes" that span departments and even the entire company. In such cases, by having all stakeholders map out the current state and the desired business process, and clearly defining the differences, it becomes possible to minimize the burden on frontline operations.

The primary reason for partnering with Oracle Japan is our belief that leveraging data accumulated in corporate core systems is crucial for enhancing the "Utilized Data" within the 4 Structures. Oracle Japan possesses extensive experience in the core systems domain and actively promotes the cloud migration of core systems and seamless integration with the cloud. We believe that collaborating with Oracle Japan will enable the secure and rapid utilization of core data for marketing purposes. Furthermore, implementing these solutions requires indispensable collaboration with IT vendors like Fujitsu, with whom we also have a partnership.

From "Digital Marketing" to "Marketing Digital"

While "Digital Marketing" to "Marketing Digital" may seem slightly awkward in Japanese, we deliberately chose this contrasting expression for the title. As marketing broadens in scope, traditional industry boundaries dissolve, and the number of competing and new entrant players increases. We believe advertising agencies have reached a point where they must rethink the definition of "digital marketing."

While writing such grandiose content, I myself am still working with client and partner companies on initiatives starting from scratch, through trial and error. I look forward to introducing new discussion topics here once we achieve further progress.