Data and AI-driven marketing transformation: the engine that drives value creation management

If you ask a marketing professional about their mission in an organization, they are likely to respond that the essence of marketing is to create customers. Philip Kotler, a marketing scholar known as the ‘father of modern marketing,’ coauthored “Marketing Management“, in which he defined marketing as “identifying and satisfying a target market's needs and desires while making a profit.”

As the speed of change accelerates, the role of marketers in responding to needs becomes even more vital. Fujitsu's own marketing transformation has also progressed significantly over the past few years. It all started around 2020 when we began trying to understand the relationship between our purpose, Fujitsu Uvance, and marketing transformation.

To that end, we codified our purpose in 2020, pledging to ”make the world more sustainable by building trust in society through innovation.” Following that, Fujitsu Uvance was established in 2021 as a new business model to put our purpose into practice. We have identified seven key focus areas, and by combining technology with knowledge from diverse industries, we are driving business growth while solving societal issues across industry lines (Figure 1).

To build the new Fujitsu Uvance business model from the ground up, we had to create a virtuous cycle of business growth in which all our customers feel a connection with our purpose, while we demonstrate a deep understanding of their needs and accept their feedback to improve solutions and services. As the engine of this virtuous cycle, marketing needed to take a completely different approach to increase market awareness and develop new customer segments.

Data and branding are key

There were two main issues that needed to be addressed to encourage a virtuous cycle. First is data utilization. When developing a new business, it’s important to make marketing efforts as data-driven as possible by gathering information about everything from solutions and services to customers and markets. The second is branding. In Fujitsu’s case, when we announced Fujitsu Uvance in 2021, we didn't have a complete portfolio. We needed that structuring data in a way that builds the foundation for a mechanism leading to the development of new solutions by steadily accumulating results would be necessary for broadening the framework of cooperation with partner companies.

Many companies are likely taking on similar challenges to turn this era of change into an opportunity for growth; the more companies there are taking on the challenge of driving growth, the more essential marketing becomes. Partial change is not enough—only constant change will bring us one step closer to creating customers and achieving our purpose.

In this era of change, the key to transforming marketing to grow new businesses is data and branding. These measures not only improve the quality of marketing, but also serve as an important barometer for determining a company's competitiveness and corporate value.

We are looking to expand Fujitsu Uvance globally, leading us to develop a data-driven marketing mechanism and refine our brand strategy. We are halfway through our marketing transformation, but we are already beginning to see the effects.