The brand for companies in Japan to survive with individuals in the AI and 5G era
We are living in the AI and 5G era. There’s no doubt that AI and/or 5G will become the cornerstone of businesses over the next few decades. So emerging solutions powered by AI or 5G are drawing so much attentions from companies. It’s also often referred as industrial revolution and expected to transform the game of business drastically.
At the same time, we see the present age is the individual age where individual persons can unlock their potentials through the internet, mobile computing and social computing. People as end users are taking a step ahead by individually changing their behaviors prior to companies changing their strategies. Both of AI and 5G have the aspect that the advanced technologies are being popularized, and then those technologies are also empowering individuals. So, it makes sense that not companies but consumers are leading the future of markets.
In customer PoV, ultimately it doesn’t matter which one made services, a big enterprise or an individual creator. Customers think more of how helpful the service is to them.
The reach of customers is extending and going global. The internet enables them to access to information all over the world, and the latest machine translation translates all contents into customer’s language even without their noticing. Customers can reach services and products across the globe as they want.
In other words, Japanese customers don’t need to buy services or products from big companies in Japan. They might not buy services or products from any big companies without their realizing.
About 20 years back, mass production and mass marketing were still effective to attract most customers. However, it wouldn’t work at all now. The advantage of being a big company has been shrinking, and they may need to fight against myriad of individuals providing services all over the world in the business scene.
Concretely, services and products are going to be ultra-personalized, which I call “individualization”. 1 million different people would have 1 million different preferences. Rakuten are working on matching 1 billion customers on a world-wide basis to tons of products and services. The challenges are how they understand each preference of customers and when and how they deliver services to customers.
Organizing a variety of information holds a key. It is significant to sort out information on each product, and use geolocation data as well as SNS data, with considering privacy preference of customers.
You can process the summarized data in a statistics way. However, you cannot process each of bigdata one by one manually. AI can do that in your place. Ultra personalization requires AI platform.
Currently, AI speaker is getting common. However, much information on the website, for example product description on EC site, is not suitable for it, and you may need to rewrite descriptions for AI speaker. As you can guess, it is almost impossible for you to do it by hand. That’s why you want to have the platform of Creative AI to generate automatically descriptions which are good for it.
I wrote about Creative AI in the other article.
Creative AI. It is kind of new concept, increasing the momentum. Creative AI means, AI application which is enable to do the non-routine work, based on the expert knowledge and to generate valuable contents. Art work generated by AI is a good and easy-to-understand example, like novel, paint, music, film, and so on. Not only the art work, journalism is also in the scope of using creative AI.
You see many cases to apply creative AI to services. Some artists tried to have AI compose the music and based on it they created music video. Some projects had AI write the screen play and based on it they made a short film.
Consumer businesses including EC are basically within the scope of creative AI. You have more potential by using creative AI for EC which has tons of data from merchants and users. Supply side and demand side. Combining both data, you can propose new creative products, new creative genres, new creative trends and so on with the support of creative AI, not just for product description.
You have the technologies such as Creative AI to handle ultra-personalization. But, how about the organization? What kind of operation should you do as well?
If you see 1000 promising segments in the market, try to reach all 1000 at low costs with the power of AI or big data platform. Then, in the next phase, you will concentrate your resources like budget or human resources into more potential segments you confirm out of them.
To do so, you may need to change the structure and culture of the organization and the flow of information within it.
You have more and more channels , that is sometimes called omnichanells. Now, the scope is expanding and you’re also doing services through AI speaker, IOT device, etc. One section cannot do everything. One manager cannot make every decision. So, to keep your service level high, you may want to keep the size of each team small and delegate the decision to them at team level. Otherwise, your company cannot keep up with the change of customers and the evolution of technology.
After the delegation, you may want to build the management structure to absorb the decisions and thoughts of teams on scene and make a big strategy on top of it.
Internet service companies like Yahoo Japan, Rakuten, etc look like a big enterprise. In reality, they are running a variety of businesses as an aggregation of many small businesses and always pursuing the ideal ecosystem.
In addition to organizational change, you may need to update the brand.
From now on, the brand you create is getting more critical to your success. However, customers might not see your company as a great brand like the brand power of old major companies has been decreasing through the transition from mass marketing to personalization.
To make your brand outstanding, it’s a key to get your initiative connected to topics about the root where you come from, meaning “local”. For example, local ecosystem or local issues. On top of that, it’s becoming important to get your offerings powered by emerging technologies like AI, 5G, deep learning, smart contract, etc.
In that context, my personal suggestion is that the contribution and collaboration to education in local schools is really significant. For example, your company will do collaborative projects with local schools teaching how to utilize IoT technology for solving social issues. Through that, you will contribute to creating unique curriculum with them and that will lead to creating your brand for new era. That brand will attract young people or business partners who are in favor of your initiative. Then, you will engage young people and business partners into local activities. They can also join the program of local education to add values and foster people in the long term.
Now, in the AI and 5G era which empowers individuals, the brand leads to the survival and prosperity. If you create the next identity through new brand, you can thrive in the transformed business environment.
