Business a la KARTE: Marketing tools from Japan that visualize customer behaviors
In this article, we’ll take a look at two marketing tools from Japan that visualize the behaviors of customers in both online and brick-and-mortar stores. They are Brand Official, which helps brands form strategies using user data from the @cosme ecosystem, and KARTE, which allows for strategic marketing measures in real-time.
Run by iStyle Inc., Brand Official is a company-targeted marketing service that makes use of user behavioral data from the beauty platform @cosme, which counts 13 million monthly users. By linking product IDs with user IDs from @cosme, shopping site @cosme SHOPPING , and offline store @cosme STORE and then linking those with brand IDs, the system can visualize the complete customer journey in all its detail — from the beginning where the customer simply knows about the brand to the customer’s behavior history of considering about purchasing and actually making a purchase, and all the way up to the customer making repeated purchases and becoming loyal to the brand.
In Brand Official, a brand’s relationship with its users is represented through a 6-step pyramid diagram that shows the user’s “brand engagement rank” that ranges from S through to E. This data is based on user actions such as product purchases, content views and review posts.
Along with being able to check detailed data on what content or other brands users of each rank are interested in, a User Growth Map (UGM) can be used to analyze what type of brand information each user comes into contact with and how many days it then took for them to make a purchase.
Another big feature of Brand Official is how it interlocks with the store promotions of @cosme’s e-commerce event “@cosme Beauty Day”, @cosme STORE and the company’s Harajuku flagship store @cosme TOKYO to verify their effect, allowing easier theorization and verification of how the customer base is being nurtured from the standpoint of promotions.
Brand Official is also able to track users who have a high engagement rate with a brand, allowing brands to gain a deeper understanding of their consumer demographic and use that in building their marketing strategies. The service also allows the understanding of the interests and buying habits of those consumers who show interest but don’t quite make it to purchasing — the ‘potential’ demographic — meaning it can help not just in marketing and promotions but in product development as well.
Going beyond data accumulation to understand individuals online
While Brand Official is a tool for forming strategies on how to grow a fanbase from users of the beauty platform @cosme and includes tracking of potential customers, PLAID Inc’s KARTE, on the other hand, is a product that visualizes customers in real-time to form strategic measures. It does this by bringing in not only the user’s data from a brand’s own website or online store but also from its customer database and core system.
Web analytics tools such as Google Analytics collect data and evaluate it quantitatively, however, KARTE goes beyond this to provide a special UI/UX that revolves around users and shows the behaviors and emotions of each of them in real-time.
KARTE’s strong point is in immediately sensing changes in the behavior, emotions, or preferences of users who are accessing web or app content and in turn implementing user-customized product recommendations, counseling, communications, and surveys in real-time. If KARTE is linked up with a brand’s customer database, it can also simultaneously visualize data such as products previously purchased from stores or other offline channels and their prices, allowing brands to communicate with customers in a manner more individually suited to them.
The control screen allows several ways for interacting with users depending on the scenario. You can “show” (for example, display popups or embedded sections), “talk” (communicate with users online and offline using chat, email or push notifications), and “listen” (run surveys in popups or obtain information such as email addresses or permissions).
Beauty companies are also using KARTE to further their OMO plans
As a part of KOSÉ’s OMO strategy, the company has integrated KARTE with its e-commerce online site Maison KOSÉ, which launched in November 2019.
Having just recently been implemented, they’re currently visualizing their customers based on the number of visits and PV (page views). Using this data, they’re distributing content accordingly as well as taking in customer reactions to the site and feedback through surveys and using them in personalized communications with customers.
KOSÉ is currently building its “KOSÉ Beauty Platform” that collects and uses both online and offline customer data. In the next phase of this project, they plan to link KOSÉ-owned customer data with KARTE to visualize purchase data and in-store behavior from their Tokyo hands-on concept store Maison KOSÉ and enable higher levels of customer visualization and more personalized experiences.
KARTE operator PLAID Inc. is working with Google in the fields of machine learning and AI, having received funding from them in late 2019. They’re also conducting research on implementing functions into KARTE that make use of machine learning technology, such as using the data of all 6.8 billion UU (unique users) visualized through KARTE to calculate LTV and predict demand.
Text: Ching Li Tor
Original text (Japanese): Mina Shimizu
