[Music] [Mitsuru Nagashima] Good evening, everybody. How you're hanging up? Too much coffee.
Okay, thank you very much for attending our session today. I'm Mitsuru and I'm Adobe Consulting Manager from Japan.
I have helped a lot of Japanese customers in Japan for their digital transformation through the implementation like AEM and other Adobe solutions. And our CASIO is one of our outstanding customer in Japan's history. I'm very happy to be here, to be able to talk about our history and the future. So today we have Naruhiko-san from CASIO.
[Naruhiko Miura] Hello. I'm Naruhiko Miura. So I'm based in Tokyo. So my team is basically responsible for implementing marketing technology or mostly Adobe Solutions, AEM Commerce, Analytics Target, AJO, which we are going to talk a bit more details later.
So yeah, I'm very happy to be here. And thank you very much for coming at this time of day.
Hope the session is-- You enjoy the session. Thank you. Okay. So I will briefly talk about today's agenda. We want to talk about three things. First is about the overall CASIO's D2C business and what we have achieved through the journey of our digital transformation together. And second is MY G-SHOCK. MY G-SHOCK is a service that where you able to create your one of a kind G-SHOCK by changing the color and the design as you wish. And third one is, we want to share about CASIO's future vision. Okay, so I will hand over to Naruhiko-san for the first part to begin.
All right. So I just wanted to start with a bit of overview of our business. All right, then, well, before starting, maybe just ask one question. So anyone have ever owned G-SHOCK watches or CASIO watches or any products from CASIO? Would you raise your hand? Great. This is really, lovely paths working for the company. It's very well-known, especially when I travel abroad. There are a lot of users I can actually meet and people who love the product as well. So yeah, as you know so our major lines of business, timepieces, G-SHOCK, CASIO, BABY-G, all other brands and also education, calculators, scientific calculators, and so some software businesses as well. And the last one is the electric music instruments, right? So these are three major lines of business. And so in terms of numbers, there's a sales number here. But as you can see almost 80% of our sales are coming from outside of Japan. So it's pretty global company and we are almost hitting 70 years in history as well.
Right, so just looking back the time, probably, when CASIO created G-SHOCK watch. So this is more like a traditional value chain we had. So basically we had this innovative idea. We have this product design, that toughness watch, which never existed in the market. And then we manufacture it, basically based on our demand forecasting or planning, we manufacture it and sell it. So it sells mostly coming, going through our retail partners.
And then they own basically the touchpoints of our end users. And also for support, product support as such, we also provide support through different partners as well. So this is our traditional value chain, which probably similar to most consumer brands maybe 50 years ago or 40 years ago. Anyway, so, but in the age of digital, everything can be direct. So basically we have set the vision to be more user-centric people, we want to put our customers at the center of all the business activities essentially. So in this four stages, let's say from the product design point of view, of course, we create innovative products, but we also want to hear user's voice to continuously update or create new products. And also, in terms of manufacturing, we want to hear the feedback and we want to run this faster feedback loop so that we can basically manufacture as much as the customers need or customers want. And in terms of sales, we want to do personalized shopping experience, which has been, think, I talked a lot everywhere in the Summit and also the support. We want to provide a seamless support as well for better customer satisfactions, right? So the vision is good, but then back in the day we had lots of challenges here. So as I say, in the traditional value chain, we didn't have many direct touchpoints with our end users. So to get this knowledge or voice from users, we didn't really have effective way to do that. So to tackle this challenge, we decided to basically build this global marketing technology stack, which is mostly built on Adobe Solutions. I'm going to talk a bit more details on that. So that will include the user touchpoint. So websites, emails, push notifications, all of that. And with all these user touchpoints, we are going to have all of this user data coming from each of those, right? So we want to make this global.
And yeah, so then go back to 2020, five years ago, well, we decided to do this, but then our situation was basically this. So, well, we were not really like a early adopter or anything like that. In 2020, we have this situation like we have hundreds of websites, local website. So maybe one country had, okay, this is a site for G-SHOCK, site for BABY-G, site for calculator, and also maybe site for support, things like that. And multiplies the number of countries that we're operating. It's essentially very, very decentralized. So of course, because the website is decentralized, the user experience quite vary depending on the websites that you're looking at. And also in terms of, like a tech investment. So because you have like hundreds of website, if you want to add one feature or one function on the website, you basically need to go one by one. Maybe the websites are built on different platforms. So basically you need to invest as many as you have. Maybe building one small simple website is cheaper than building a big one, but when you think about maintaining and enhancing it, it's just that investment is very inefficient as well. And also the operations. We have to basically do the same thing on a different website in different countries. Essentially, you're doing the same thing, but you have to do it many times, right? And the later piece is the, so limited synergy. So basically, because it's very decentralized, so there's not much incumbent, they cannot really share the best practices and all of that. And finally, the data. So user data is scattered around and maybe stored in a different technology, maybe stored with the different definitions and different tracking methodologies and stuff like that. So we have like tons of problems when we start this project, right? So we are basically searching for different solutions. And then we selected Adobe to be a global partner to build on or solve all of these issues. So we have started the global website rollout with AEM, Adobe Commerce, Target, and Analytics in the first phase.
Okay, so yeah, this is basically how we started 2020. We started in Japan and went to APAC region.
So by the way the number on the top right corner, this is indicating the D2C, direct-to-consumer business revenue. So we had 100 in 2020 and now we are basically doubling within these 5 years of time. So yeah, numbers just counting up basically. Now we have more than 30 websites and in 21 languages. And yeah, pretty much covered our major markets in terms of direct-to-consumer, right? Right. Basically the problems that I just described earlier mostly solved, like we've got 33 global website consistent, user experience across all market. And there are automations, let's say we've got 21 different languages. We have this translation workflow running that can automate all of the data input operations as well, and also best practices. If something works very well in one company, sorry, in one country, it is very easy to replicate that in another country because it's all built on the same thing, right? And also for development as well. When we develop one feature, AEM, it's one new component, that can be applied to everywhere, right? And this also facilitate the synergy in collaborations across market. So we can now basically share the knowledge, share the best practices much better than before. And finally, data. So data is stored in one place with the same definition. We can do the reporting easily, you can make the use cases enabled very quickly as well, okay? Right. So yeah. This is the very high level architecture that we have implemented at the time of the initial rollout. So in the backend we have AEM Author Assets as well. And we have Adobe Commerce, which is connected to payment, delivery, and also ERP. And frontends, again AEM Commerce for checkouts, and also the Adobe Target, that is responsible for product recommendations, recently viewed, and A/B tests and all of that. And we also, at the same time implemented this CASIO ID, which is the single ID that you will basically need to use our service.
And then in terms of data, we have analytics, we have CDP, and also we build a lot of business intelligence like dashboards and stuff as well. So the last one here highlighting marketing automation here because this is the next topic, right? So with this we have implemented this architecture, but then we found this marketing automation piece is getting hard. So just talk a bit more details on that. So the challenges are here. So we had very limited real-time capabilities with this architecture. Most of the architecture are Adobe Suite, but then another product just sitting there, it belonged to another suite. So in this architecture, we had a limited real-time capability. Well, there is API, there is a way to do it, but it just takes more efforts, more investment, more maintenance and all. And also the ID, this ID resolution is another issue, which I'm going to talk a bit more details on it. And then, well, in order to work around these issues, we have to build custom integrations, complex workflows, and that's basically slow down everything. If you want to do, one use case, okay, we have to do this development and then that development. And these are workflows you have to maintain and also multiple partners. Adobe is in their Salesforce partner there. So it takes like long time and cost to just build one use case or make one change in any of these cases, right? So what we have done is we implemented AJO, Adobe Journey Optimizer, basically just replacing the other marketing automation. So here is also, again, high level architecture now. So we have AEM and Commerce that will send the streaming events data through Edge Server. So that will come real-time. And that's also-- Well, one thing to mention is this out of box. So that will-- Well, implementation is a lot easier.
And then those that come in real-time. And also we have a batch processing data as well. So that coming from CDP, and also CASIO ID.
So basically our architecture is much more like a streamlined now, real-time coming from Adobe, batch process ones coming from CDP, right? And then, yeah, we have replaced MAE tool to AJO globally last year, and now email and push, AJO is responsible to push it out, right? So now basically we have only CASIO and Adobe team in this picture, so that will also speed up the process and the costs as well.
All right. So this is just one example of what we have been able to do with AJO. So let's say, for example, before we had this scheduled email and we sent it all, send the same content to all G-SHOCK subscriber. So yeah, this is easy, easy segmentation, easy email to make. But then now we have real-time data coming through, through the Edge Server. So real-time, we can do. The event triggers, let's say, okay, we want to send this email to people who have seen our product recently, so we can easily create a segment for that. And then in terms of content, we are also able to do personalization to some extent. So let's say, okay, maybe we want to change the top picture here, depending on the product that user has seen, maybe the last product they have seen or things like that, right? So yeah, this is upgrade that we have achieved. And yeah, another thing just to mention, this is actually new development for us as well. But now we have AJO in this picture and also a new Adobe Commerce SaaS Product Recommendations as well. So now we are trying to do now is from AJO, we want to use this recommendation engine, provided in Adobe Commerce.
Well, based on user's behavior or anything that coming in through to AJO, we going to send the request to say, okay, we want this recommendation to this specific person. And then, yeah, Adobe Sensei basically come up with a response, with the recommendations. And as you may know like Adobe Commerce recommendation has different variations, right? So it could be like Adobe Sensei recommendation, so it's different for everyone.
And then, maybe you can pick, well, most purchased, most viewed, product similarity, etcetera. So these are a pretty interesting use case that leveraging different part of solutions.
Okay, so the next bit is around the IDs. So this may not be the most exciting thing in the world, but this is one of my favorite parts of AEP as well. So IDs. So in terms of IDs we have, as I mentioned CASIO ID. So these are login members basically. And also we have subscribers who just put email on our website and subscribe to G-SHOCK newsletter, for example. And we also have guest purchases. You don't have to have that ID to buy something from us. You can be a guest purchaser as well. So we have these three different known customers. And, of course, we do have lot of anonymous customers who only have ECID, which is a cookie ID, right? So in this scenario, the challenge is really to identify uses accurately, especially in the real-time and also in the complex scenario as well.
So how this AEP can help is this. So we have actually joined the Beta Program, for what is called ID Graph Linking Rules in AEP. So this is great feature that help us to really accurately identify users in a very complex scenario as well. So we can now actually see, this person is a CASIO ID member and also a subscriber, and we also stitch all of these ideas together and created this ID graph thing. So ECID also can be stitched. ECID, cookie ID can be stitched. So we can basically consolidate everything like purchase history, subscription lists, and real-time events altogether, stick to one profile. So yeah, same for different type of members. So maybe there is a subscriber who like to purchase as a guest, that's possible as well. And we can capture that right now.
Okay? So yeah, just to close this section, we have this uplift in the conversion via marketing emails. So this is year-on-year comparison in the same period. So we have 137% conversions. So yeah, in terms of numbers as well, it's looking pretty good after the migration.
Okay? So yeah, I think that's it for the first section and I'll pass it over to Nagashima-san. Thank you very much.
Okay, next we want to talk about MY G-SHOCK.
Let's go. [Music] Thank you. Okay. So now it's time for a Japanese lesson.
Okay? I will say one word in Japanese, so everybody please repeat after me. I see a lot of Japanese here, but everybody repeat after me. Are you ready? O-shi. [All] O-shi. Okay. Thank you very much. For those who didn't repeat after me, please don't visit Japan anymore.
Okay, so what is this o-shi? I think this word got so popular in Japan from 5 to 10 years ago. And we often use this word to talk about, what is your favorite things in your life? What's you're passionate about? And what you want to spend many time and money for it through fan activities. So for example, we say, this soccer team is my o-shi, or this idol group is my super o-shi, something like that. So we use this term to talk about what you value as a person. Okay, so now you got what o-shi is.
So my G-SHOCK, as you saw in the video, you can create your one of a kind G-SHOCK by changing the color and the materials of the watch. And what's happening here is that, we are observing, many people are getting excited with that idea and trying to create a very unique watch that represent their o-shi. Isn't it awesome, okay? So in addition to that, we're seeing many people creating a watch as a pair watch, or a team watch, or something a special gift to present to somebody important for you.
And here are some voice of customers. You see, there's a design of F1 car, and there's a pet bird, and also there are 10 years marriage anniversary. So all of them are very unique and invaluable.
And this is the gallery that you can see all of the customization created by CASIO's customers in the past. And when I first saw this, I felt that this is a personalization.
So, of course, it's important to understand the customer's need and delivering the relevant content and at the right time throughout the right channel. That is we are telling to the customer all of the time. But at the same time, also felt that this is something beyond that.
All watches are so unique and so special and personal. And I'm very proud that our solutions and our service is part of that.
Okay, so next, I want to talk about how we built this. And what I want to appeal here is that, all of this are purely created by Adobe Solutions. So we are using Adobe Creative Cloud solution and integrating them with Experience Cloud solution, starting from Substance 3D, Photoshop, AEM, and Adobe Commerce. And I won't get into too much detail of this thing, but I want to share some aspects here. And first when we thought about how we could even create this thing, even if we can develop the function of the customization, it was obvious that we can't physically shoot the product because of the number of the customization and the combinations. And not only the combinations, we also need to show the preview image on the website from 10 different angles. So the mathematics will be astronomical figures. So that is why we decided to use the Substance 3D to create the 3D model and use Photoshop to separate the layers, so that we can change the colors of each parts and also leveraging the AEM Dynamic Media function to dynamically render the customized watch on the website.
Okay.
And I also want to touch upon the numbers of MY G-SHOCK. So from a design perspective, the current possible combination is more than 10 billion. And since the launch of MY G-SHOCK, CASIO produced more than 150,000 combinations created on the website. And also this is very remarkable, but 90% of the watches are completely unique.
That means that there are more than 100,000 people in this world wearing this MY G-SHOCK, that is truly one and only. Isn't it cool? Okay? So from the business perspective and this number is very good. Out of the entire purchase of this MY G-SHOCK, 80% was the first D2C purchase on the website. That means that this MY G-SHOCK is strongly contributing to the acquisition of the new customers, right? And second, 45% of the consumers were at the age of below 30s, and 30% were female. Okay. And G-SHOCK brand has a very long history. It has more than 40 years of history and the brand were, I feel that mainly acknowledged as a masculine brand type because of the toughness of the watch. But MY G-SHOCK, I'm getting a really good attraction from the new customer segments that CASIO couldn't reach in the past.
And last but not least, the people who purchased MY G-SHOCK, out of the entire purchase, 10% of the customers bought the second G-SHOCK at the website.
So this means that my G-SHOCK is also increasing the customer's lifetime value of G-SHOCK business. Okay? Isn't it great success? Thank you.
Okay, so I'll hand over to Naruhiko-san about the future vision. Thank you. Actually, before moving to the next section, I just wanted to do a quick poll.
So this service currently only available in Japan. So I was just wondering if the same service we made it available in your own country, would you want to buy one? If you're interested to get one, would you raise your hand? Only this? Okay.
Thank you. Sorry, I could have done better.
Right. We all get approval internally.
All right. So yeah, the last bit is future vision.
So yeah, in the first section I talked about the Global MarTech Rollout and also, MA Enhancement, replacement of the tool. And Nagashima-san covered MY G-SHOCK. Essentially, these activities are more focusing on convergence, in terms of customer journey. So yeah, we want to have a good website, that's easy to use and also improving operations and that aspects as well. But we are focusing on, more on convergence, basically make it more sales in our D2C websites. But then the future visions that we are working on will be covering like a wider part of the customer journey from awareness to loyalty. So one piece, one topic that we want to look into will be personalized contents. So we want to create more content, and also 3D contents as well, and the user data as well. We want to have more user data, in order for us to be able to personalize the content as well. So this is the first bit and then second part it'll be enhancing web experience. So our AEM is not on Cloud yet. We have started with AMS, Adobe Managed Service. But we are now starting our project to moving to Cloud. And also, we are looking into adding more 3D experience on that. And the last bit is, to make this-- Well, marketing activities or engagement more interactive. So I'm going to talk a bit more details like fan engagement. We want to get more voice of customers. As I mentioned very early in the presentation, we want to put our customers at center. So this is where we really want to enhance in coming years.
Okay, so talk a bit more details for each topic. So in terms of contents and data, well, there are a lot of contents and data in the Keynotes and other places as well. But yeah, that really resonate well to me. So yeah, we have a few challenges here. Let's say, on this-- Well, I just picked one product on our website, which is really cool. I love this watch. But in terms of creative and contents, it's more like a product-focused images.
So you can see from the photos, 2D photos in a different angles.
But on the right-hand side, there are image, like people wearing it. But those images are limited if you compare to like number of images on the left. So with the-- Well, if you want to personalize the contents, basically you need more contents depending on what users really need or that resonates better for each customers. So basically the challenge on the content side, we don't have enough content. And then on the user side, right-hand side, so we have basic attributes. As I said, there is a CASIO ID, we collect emails, basic, like age, gender, thing. And also we have-- Well, if the user has purchased anything, we have purchased history and web behavior, app behavior data. But is it enough to really personalize the contents? Actually, it's pretty hard to show, to say, okay, we should show this content to that user. Well, we can do basic thing like, gender, depending on gender showing different contents, but that's it, it's not really like a personalizing it's segment in it, right? So we actually have better knowledge than before, but it's still limited. There's a room to improve.
And also the try-on feature, there's a demand for that. So well, because we are selling mostly watches, most of the time what the user worry about is, before making a purchase, they want to see how that look actually on my own wrist, right? So these are the demands. And in terms of content, the contents are mostly 2D. So there is a mismatch or both contents and data users, user data, we do have challenges, right? So yeah, how we're going to do it is basically, I think it's mentioned in everywhere, but contents could be generated with GenAI or we also want to have-- We need to have metadata for the contents, otherwise the user data is enriched, but then we need to able to flag what content is for whom, basically. So we need to have this meta tag for each content. And also, we're working on 3D contents creation as well. And then on right-hand side, so users data perspective. On top of everything that we have already, we are going to add more touchpoints or get more data from users through surveys, through campaigns, or through partnerships, or maybe through machine learning. If the data is not enough, maybe we need to calculate it or do some prediction on it, right? So we need to work on both side already to be able to personalize our communications better. Okay, so this is the first bit. And then second bit is, well, when we have more contents ready, more data is coming in, we want to deliver them better as well. So in the AEM Cloud what we expect is, well, essentially that's a faster site through our Edge Delivery Service. But that's not only that on AEM Cloud, there'll be new integrations between AEM assets and the AJO as well. So you can use the contents more seamlessly in AJO in different channels as well.
Well, currently our channels are mostly in terms of, activation's, emails, and the push notifications, but we're also planning to add more things like WhatsApp, more like the channels, that users like to use. So yeah, more channels, more content, and better delivery, that's kind of things that we want to do. And also, the last bit is, well, this will be ready fairly soon in the US. But we are going to try this virtual try-on feature on our website. So that will be with the 3D models that you can actually try on your phone and look, try how it looked. So yeah, these are in a roadmap.
Okay? And then last bit is about the interactivity. So what we want to do is, basically, one is fan community. This is more for like our loyal customers, G-SHOCK fans. So where you can generate content, user can generate contents or will comment on or discuss something or we want do a poll. I just did a poll for MY G-SHOCK, but we want to do a similar polls on our platforms as well. That will help us to, probably, do this manufacturing planning, for example. So all of these touchpoints that we have been building, we can really leverage them and make an impact in our business. So there's a poll and a pilot marketing that I just mentioned about, and also some user research, maybe focused user research or something like that with the data that we have, we can do this fan engagement as well. And we'll call it CASIO Lab as well. So there's a fan engagement community, and the CASIO Lab is more for like a pilot marketing or polls and user research and sort of thing. So yeah, essentially, what we want to achieve is for our fans, we want to create environment where you can engage with the like-minds or maybe find useful information about products, or know the brand better, and also participate the brands by, giving us the information, like a poll. What do you think, your feedback about this idea or this product? We want our customers to participate as well. And for us, of course, we can know our customers better, just going back to the value chain thing. So we can really put our customers first to do the product design, plan manufacturing, selling and support, and all of that. We really need those platforms to really achieve that value chain.
All right, so I think that's pretty much it. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you very much.
[Music]
