An Interview with Our Executive Officer Daiki Yoshikawa Was Published in the July Issue of Monthly Sendenkaigi

The article covers the background of how Landscape focused on the corporate data business, as well as web digital marketing that supports B2C initiatives by leveraging corporate master data. For more details, please check the July issue of Monthly Sendenkaigi.
https://mag.sendenkaigi.com/senden/201707/challenge-venture/010992.php

■ Publication Overview

■ Focusing on Customer Data Maintenance and Integration: A Strength in a Difficult-to-Enter Market
B2B marketing that supports sales activities by utilizing SFA (Sales Force Automation) and marketing automation is gaining significant attention. However, simply introducing such tools does not immediately lead to results. In particular, Japanese company names often include trade names and abbreviations, and their notation—ranging from hiragana and katakana to kanji and Roman characters—is complex, frequently causing the same company to be recognized as different organizations within data systems.

Furthermore, address formats often suffer from a mix of kanji and alphanumeric characters, misspellings, or omissions. Therefore, to utilize these tools effectively, it is essential to first perform data cleansing on accumulated customer data.

Landscape is a company that specializes in such data integration and maintenance. Founded in 1990, the company began with a database marketing business supporting direct mail and telemarketing. Later, following a business alliance with the U.S. data management firm Acxiom in 2000, it strengthened its corporate data collection and launched a business focused on data integration and maintenance. The corporate master data, which serves as the dictionary (reference) necessary for data integration and maintenance, covers 8.2 million locations, including both listed companies and small-to-medium-sized business offices, and is constantly maintained to ensure information freshness.

The service that provides this data in the cloud for use in B2B marketing is uSonar. In addition to basic information such as revenue and industry, it records past changes in addresses and names. Furthermore, by assigning the company's proprietary 11-digit ID, the Linkage Business Code (LBC), it achieves high-precision data cleansing.

Daiki Yoshikawa, Executive Officer of the Corporate Strategy Team at Landscape, explains the reason for starting the customer data maintenance and integration business as follows: "Since our founding, we have discussed internally where we should expand our business domain. When expanding our data integration and maintenance business, we considered developing our own SFA. However, given the many existing SFA companies, we decided not to enter a 'red ocean' market, choosing instead to deepen our expertise in data maintenance and targeting. This meticulous work, which is difficult for other companies to enter, is our strength. We used the word 'Sonar' in our service name because we liken it to a submarine diving into the deep sea."

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