Asahi Breweries, Ltd.

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Direct Communication with Consumers with a Smart Web Marketing System

More and more organizations are seeking advanced uses of their investment on the Web facilities. In line with this new trend, Asahi Breweries, Ltd., one of Japan's leading beer makes, deployed its one-to-one Web marketing system that was built with Fujitsu's Symfoware family of business intelligence products including Symfoware Navigator and Symfoware Parallel Mining Server, together with the Web server management system, Systemwalker WebMGR. The main focus of this system is to establish and maintain direct communications with consumers by utilizing the analysis of questionnaire results and visitors' clickstreams collected through the ClubDRY membership site.

The Internet Enables Traditional Maker-Consumer Communications

"The main purpose of our Web sites used to be to introduce our corporate profile and our products. Considering the new market trends, however, we decided it was necessary to put more effort into the utilization of the Web for the marketing purposes. In February 2001, we deployed a new web based marketing system," says Mr. Kazayuki Yokoyama, Deputy Section Manager of Brand Promotion Section, Marketing Department, Asahi Breweries, Ltd.

As the section in charge of Asahi's B2C marketing, Mr. Yokoyama's section has two major roles: sales promotion activity towards retail stores such as liquor shops, and direct communication activity with consumers using the Internet.

Mr. Yokoyama says, "Before the Industrial Revolution, those who manufactured goods used to communicate directly with their consumers of their goods, and thus were able to create new products through continuous improvement taking advantage of consumers direct feedback.

As a result of the emergence of mass markets and the increased size and complexity of large corporations, however, it became more and more difficult and impractical for us to meet with our ultimate customers."

"As the Internet was becoming available to more and more people, we started to realize that the Internet had the key to the removal of the barriers between us and our ultimate customers. And we came up with an idea of building a new Web marketing system that would enable us to communicate directly with the consumers of our products via the Internet," explains Mr. Yokoyama.

The clubDRY site and the Business Intelligence Power of Symfoware tools

ClubDRY, the official Web site for its popular beer product Super Dry, is the result of putting this idea into reality. Although the ClubDRY Web site is for members only, any adult can become its member free of charge by obtaining a user ID and a password after providing his or her personal details such as name, address, age, occupation, and so on.

This site has a substantial amount of rich Web contents. It carries not only Asahi Breweries' up-to-date product information, but also popular entertainment facilities such as a fortune teller, games, photos, the Senryu corner for satires and short poems, and other fun items. The top page has a calendar feature with which members can enter their own appointments and schedules. In addition, there is a daily questionnaire on beer and Sake. The clubDRY Web site provides a variety of avenues for Asahi Breweries to obtain valuable data for analyzing consumers' buying trends and the market psychology. In order to encourage the members to visit the site more frequently on a regular basis, the site introduced a membership reward program called the DRY Points that the members can earn each time they answer a questionnaire or submit a contribution to the forums. The members who have accumulated a large number of points can redeem their points to receive prizes depending on the level.

Fujitsu's Symfoware family of business intelligence products shown below forms the smart engines behind the Web marketing system for analyzing the results of questionnaires and the clickstreams by the members during clubDRY sessions:

• Symfoware Navigator, the advanced relational database query tool for multidimensional analysis and business reporting.
• Symfoware Parallel Mining Server, the high-speed data mining tool with the power of parallel processing
• Symfoware Text Mining Server, the mining engine for unstructured text documents.

When asked why Asahi Breweries had chosen the Symfoware family, Mr. Yokoyama said, "We short-listed the products of a few vendors and investigated them thoroughly, but we soon realized that Fujitsu's proposal met our requirements more closely than that of any other vendor."

The company also uses Systemwalker WebMGR for managing the Web site and analyzing the utilization status.

Mr. Yokoyama continues, "We gave high marks to Fujitsu for enabling us to make use of theses various types of analysis tools in a seamless manner."

Towards a Corporate-Wide Web Marketing System

One of the two main objectives of the Web marketing system is customer segmentation. Using the mining engine, the accumulated customer data is segmented based on a number of selected attributes, and the segmentation result is fed into the process of log data analysis and one-to-one marketing.

The second objective is the analysis of access streams on the Web which can help the company to understand customers' behavior patterns and the market psychology through numerical means.

When there are requests received from many different customers, furthermore, it is now possible to extract those items that are likely to be related to one another. The enabling technology is the text mining feature built into the system. Mr. Yokoyama emphasizes, "When it comes to the process of quantifying qualitative data such as customer opinions, there was no other way but to do it manually in the past. However, the new system helps us to automate this process to a very high degree of accuracy." Even from questionnaire survey results written in natural language, it is now possible to easily obtain what percentage of people are observed to hold a specific impression on a certain product.

The results from these analyses are used for enhancing the Web content, creating marketing campaigns, and establishing brand image strategies. These tools help the company to decide on what approach it needs to take for which customer segment. Thus Asahi Breweries can develop its products and services more closely-aligned with actual customer needs.

The Web marketing system has been in operation for some time now, but it is still continuously being enhanced. "It was originally developed to use only the data from the clubDRY site. However, we have realized that instead of analyzing customer data in relation to one specific product line only, we need to establish corporate-wide communications with our ultimate customers. We are now building a Web marketing system to be linked with the Asahi Breweries corporate portal." Mr. Yokoyama explains. By expanding web-based communications with customers across the entire company, Asahi Breweries is aiming to provide better products and services.

An Integrated System with Unified Data for Customer-Oriented Business

The new Asahi Breweries system is located at Fujitsu's outsourcing center in Tatebayashi. "In the past, many advertising agencies used to install a dedicated system for each of their specific events and campaigns, and there was no link between the data-sets from these different systems. The data is now unified on one new integrated system. Once a campaign is developed, therefore, it has now become easy to apply that same campaign to other products, and to our other group companies," Mr. Yokoyama tells with satisfaction. It is also said that costs have been drastically reduced as a result of implementing one integrated system.

One very important point to be noted is that when services are provided on the Internet, the amounts of system access may suddenly grow explosively on a particular day without a warning. As the system is operated in Fujitsu's outsourcing center, however, such a volatile situation can be easily and painlessly dealt with. Mr. Yokoyama says, "Fujitsu was the only vendor who responded positively to our requirements for the provision of flexible bandwidths."

"Our ultimate goal is to provide the most appropriate and appealing products and services for our customers. This system enables us to achieve our goal under our company policy of 'Everything we do is for our customers'," Mr. Yokoyama reiterates his company's vision.

Symfoware Navigator, Symfoware Parallel Mining Server, and the other Symfoware family products form the foundation of this system.

User Profile
Company Name: Asahi Breweries, Ltd.
Head office: 3-7-1 Kyobashi, Chuo-Ku, Tokyo 104
Date Founded: September 1, 1949
Paid-in-capital: 177,665 million Yen (as of December 31, 2000)
Employees: 4,103 (as of December 2000)
Revenue: 1,054,649 million Yen (Year 2000 Actual)
Web site: http://www.asahibeer.co.jp/glish/