True Data : Data Marketing at its Best

The retail industry is constantly changing as per customer demands. To remain the retailer of choice for customers, retailers need to understand their changing lifestyles and the market dynamism leveraging data. Here, Tokyo- based True Data, since its founding in 2000, is offering services to help retailers understand their customers. As a leading company, it supports data marketing for retailers such as drugstores and food supermarkets throughout Japan. “We support retailers from a variety of perspectives, including our extensive knowledge in the use of consumer big data, high-performance analytical technology, and educational programs to promote its use in the field,” says Hiroyuki Yonekura, president and CEO, True Data.

The retailer's ID-POS/POS customer purchase data is transmitted to True Data's data marketing platform on a daily basis, where it undergoes some processing for analysis and then integrated into its SaaS tool Shopping Scan. This means that with Shopping Scan, retailers have access to daily updated purchase data with just a few simple operations. True Data statistically processes each retailer's purchasing data, prepares standard product masters, and creates a standard database that allows daily tracking of consumers' purchasing behavior in the entire market and in each area. This means that retailers can compare their store's purchases by product category with those of the same area in the standard database and thus visualize the categories their stores have captured enough demand in an area and the categories they could still capture.

At the same time, retailers need to provide purchasing data to manufacturers in order to stay on the same page when it comes to products to be offered to customers. However, this can be high hurdle for some retailers to attempt to achieve. With Truedata's shopping scan, retailers have the ability to analyze their own data and disclose it to manufacturers at the same time.

Of course, manufacturers can also analyze their retail data with just a few clicks. “True data is committed to be the best partner for retailers in their data marketing efforts, providing ongoing and multifaceted support, including beneficial outsourcing services and holding joint study sessions with manufacturers,” says Yonekura.

In addition, True Data is also focused on aspects like human resource development. In recent years, the focus of human resource development has been on training data scientists on the big data front. However, it is necessary to train not only data scientists but also marketing professionals who utilize data to improve operations and optimize sales measures in the retail industry. Aligning with this philosophy, True Data has developed an educational program for employees working in the retail industry and also to the educational institutions that deal with information and business-related issues throughout Japan. “In this way, we aim to create a world in which everyone, not only large corporations in urban areas but also small and medium-sized companies in rural areas, can use retail technology in their business,” says Takeshi Nakatsu, director and CSO, True Data.

Over the past few years, there has been a growing trend in the field of marketing towards the concept of "OMO-Online Merges with Offline", and attention has been focused on the ID-POS data held by retailers. True Data has recently released a solution called KURASHI360 to better understand consumers across all industries with multifaceted Big Data. KURASHI360 combines ID-POS data that is based on people's purchasing behavior with other data such as consumer attributes, preferences, values, automobiles, housing, and education. KURASHI360 is a service that quantifies regional trends at the fine granularity of postcode units or municipal unitswithout using any personal information. The format is safe, secure, and easy to use, and it is being used in AI tools to increase the loyalty of existing customers and improve targeting accuracy for acquiring new customers. Furthermore, connecting with external media to use for promotion is underway.