■Company Overview and Business Overview
1. Company Overview
Neo Marketing ＜4196＞ is a marketing support company established in October 2000. The company is listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange Standard Market, and since its establishment, Hashimoto Mitsunobu (Hashimoto Mitsunobu) has led the company group as representative director. The number of employees on a consolidated basis is 165 (as of the end of March 2024). The company group's business concept is a “consumer-centered marketing support company,” and a major characteristic is that the subject is consumers (= consumers). Starting with research to gain a deep understanding of consumers, manufacturer companies that are clients are carrying out a series of activities to create a “system to keep consumers buying” through “dialogue with consumers.” In particular, it excels at developing new products and ideas, and providing services to expand sales and improve existing products. It has two consolidated subsidiaries: Pile-up Co., Ltd., which develops panel organizations and crowdsourcing for use in research and promotions, etc., and Zero Co., Ltd. It also operates unique services such as “i Research (i Research)” and “SOLPANE (SOLPANEL).”
2. Sources of competitiveness
The company cites three sources of competitiveness: “comprehensive marketing support,” “establishment of inbound project inflow routes,” and “accumulation of knowledge.” “Comprehensive marketing support” means that consulting (problem solving) corresponding to issues at each stage in the customer's marketing process is carried out in-house. The company group is one of the few companies that manufacture in-house marketing support services and provide them in one stop. “Establishing an inbound project inflow route” indicates that customer acquisition has been realized through the operation of in-house owned media by utilizing superiority and rules of experience as a marketing company. Unique research reports play an important role as an excellent lead customer acquisition tool. Also, participants and registrants for the company's seminars and webinars are also prospective customers. “Knowledge accumulation” means that project results are stored as a marketing knowledge database. Utilizing a database with a cumulative total of 40,000 or more projects since the establishment of the company, in-house experts form project teams to solve customer marketing issues, and accumulate and utilize high-quality knowledge.
3. Management sites/services
(1) iResearch
The company group operates its own marketing platform “iResearch” as infrastructure to realize “consumer-centered marketing support.” “iResearch” is a system that utilizes consumer panels* and allows respondents to obtain rewards by cooperating with research work using their own PCs, tablets, and smartphones while staying at home. “iResearch” strives to have a panel structure that eliminates attribute bias as much as possible by constructing consumer panels in consideration that the ratio of attribute information such as gender, age, and place of residence of all registrants is similar to the ratio in the internet population. “iResearch” is the basic service infrastructure for the company to develop marketing support businesses starting from consumers, and is characterized by the fact that marketing targets required for each project can be extracted from a database based on demographic information (age, income, occupation) and geographic information (residence, work location). For example, it is possible to extract target persons under conditions such as male nurses who live in Saitama prefecture and have an annual income of 5 million yen. Currently, external panels can also be used, and 28.89 million consumer panels can be used, including “iResearch.”
* A general consumer respondent network that has agreed to cooperate with marketing activities such as market surveys conducted by companies and is registered. Rewards are paid to registrants by companies according to their degree of cooperation.
(2) solpane
Services utilizing the member organization platform “Solpane,” operated by the subsidiary Pile-up, are a type of outsourcing where operations are outsourced to an unspecified number of people via the internet. Client companies provide services that allow members to outsource tasks such as storefront surveys, purchasing experiences, event experiences, various questionnaires, and data input.
(Written by FISCO Visiting Analyst Shigeki Kuni)