NEC Corporation announced on September 12 that it has provided its marketing strategy planning solution "BestMove" to Ito En, Ltd. (Shibuya City, Tokyo Prefecture). Ito En has begun full-scale utilization of the solution in its marketing activities. Prior to this, Ito En conducted verification by using the solution in marketing activities for green tea beverages, and deployed promotions based on new target customer segments, catchphrases, storyboards and other elements proposed by BestMove. As a result, certain effects were confirmed, including increases in advertising video viewing numbers and improved consumer response rates, leading to full-scale adoption. Going forward, Ito En plans to use the solution for marketing activities for the "Oi Ocha" brand and various other product categories.
Ito En has been working to improve brand recognition and corporate value through various channels including television, web, and social media in its marketing activities. However, the company faced challenges in the field regarding the rapid planning and execution of strategies and the accuracy of predicting promotional effectiveness.
"BestMove" is a cloud service (SaaS) that proposes the best next move to marketers in corporate marketing activities and supports confident decision-making. By combining NEC's proprietary AI technologies, including generative AI, with purchase trend analysis data such as credit card and ID-POS data, the system performs advanced extraction of only those customers showing interest in specific products or services, which was previously difficult. Also, the system instantly formulates strategies estimated to show high consumer response rates for those customers.
The solution also has knowledge-sharing functions for planning processes and past strategies, supporting operational efficiency, human resource development, and productivity improvement. Ito En introduced BestMove on a trial basis for marketing activity verification starting in April of this year.
In the same month, the company began selling the "matcha LOVE" powder series, an experiential matcha beverage that allows consumers to easily enjoy freshly made matcha anytime, anywhere by dropping matcha powder sealed in the bottle cap into the water and mixing when opened. As a promotional strategy for this product, the company produced and distributed a video to increase awareness.
To further increase awareness of this product and respond to inbound demand, Ito En utilized BestMove with the requirements of producing a new video while keeping costs down by using the same filming location and performers as the previous video.
Through this analysis, the characteristics of customer segments who prefer the product and latent needs were extracted, and Ito En input what it wanted to achieve and the direction of strategies. As a result, catchphrases that would be difficult for humans to come up with, such as "O-temae shaka shaka de gozaimasu" (a playful phrase suggesting ceremonial tea preparation with a shaking motion), key points for creating videos targeting inbound tourists, and ideas for multilingual support were proposed.
Furthermore, AI-generated images resembling the performers' photos were used to provide advice on facial expressions and posing, and storyboards for the video reflecting these elements were also created. When the video produced based on these elements was published on the social media platform X, viewing numbers reached 31,000 views within 24 hours, a 125% increase compared with the previous video, contributing to expanded product sales. Additionally, the production period was shortened from three days to two days.
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