Fez, a retail tech, officially launches "Urumo OMO", a one-stop platform that links advertising, sales promotion, and storefront measures
Advertising/marketing and sales/sales promotion are often implemented separately. Evidence over theory, departments responsible for each of these roles often exist separately within a company. However, this situation may change. With the rise of D2C (direct-to-consumer) platforms, brands and influencers without manufacturing know-how are now able to sell goods. As symbolized by in-house TV shopping programs that are aired late at night, the media are starting to sell their own products instead of advertising.
Fez, which I will introduce today, is a platform that can cross-sectionally and centrally manage measures taken by multiple departments for one goal of increasing sales. On the 14th, the company officially launched "Urumo OMO", an inverse OMO (Online merges with Offline) platform. I think BRIDGE readers are familiar with OMO, but what is inverse calculation?
In conventional mass marketing, the goal is to start by making potential customers aware of the existence of the product, and eventually to have them visit the store and make a purchase. Television commercials reign supreme in this method, but as consumer behavior diversifies, mass marketing is not necessarily cost-effective. On the other hand, OMO-style marketing encourages the first visit and purchase, which becomes the customer's first touch point with the product and deepens recognition.
In the background of the demand for OMO-type marketing, there is a large gap in needs among manufacturers, retailers, and consumers. Manufacturers want their products to be on the shelves in large quantities at the highest prices possible, retailers want to select only the best-selling products from multiple manufacturers, and consumers are at the mercy of advertising and want to buy what they want. An unobtainable information overload is happening here as well.
Urumo OMO combines purchase data represented by ID-POS, storefront data, and user location data for analysis and strategy planning. A system will be established in which online advertisements are shown to potential customers in the commercial area of each store, and customers who visit the store after seeing the advertisements can pick up the products at the store. We take the approach of finding out the optimal solution by comparing which user actually purchased which product and how much with the purchase data and running a series of these PDCA cycles.
Fez chose to bring this retail tech to FMCG (fast-moving consumer goods), particularly in areas such as toiletries and cosmetics. Before founding Fez, Junpei Itami, CEO of P&G, was in charge of major distribution in Japan, and then in charge of consumer goods manufacturers and the retail industry at Google. It is said that the experience of both the needs of FMCG manufacturers and the challenges faced by retailers led to the establishment of this business. Multiple drugstores are participating in a grand experiment of sales lift (purchasing improvement) using Urumo OMO.
According to the data released by the Labor Policy Research and Training Organization under the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, as of 2018, 10.72 million out of 66.42 million workers are engaged in the retail industry. Despite the spread of the Internet, the ratio of EC to total retail sales remains at 6.76% (Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry data). Mr. Itami expressed his hope that the growth of offline retail through sales lift using data will greatly contribute to improving the productivity of society as a whole in these days when the working population is declining and work style reforms are being called for.
Fez announced in August that it had raised 630 million yen from Nissay Capital and Incubate Fund US.
In this field, the target vertical is not FMCG, but Styler, which operates the fashion proposal O2O service "FACY", has announced that it will enter the OMO area in partnership with Chinese tech giant Tencent. ing.
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