Unlocking the AI potential of B2B marketing
What if the secret to next-level B2B marketing isn't a secret at all, but a different way of looking at what you've already got?
AI is reshaping the landscape, reframing solutions that were previously unimaginable. The CMO Show spoke to Duncan Egan, Vice President of Marketing for Adobe's Digital Experience business in APAC, on the transformative power of artificial intelligence in marketing.
To illustrate it, we also take a look at the 2025 Adobe Digital Trends report, and an amazing case study from the general manager at Casio, Naruhiko Miura.
Common marketing pitfalls - challenge and opportunity
Siloed data, inefficient workflows, and the complexity of targeting the right audience are challenges long faced by B2B marketers. "In the past, I might've had to go ask a business analyst, and depending on what they knew about my business, I may or might not get information that's going to help me inform a decision that I'm making," said Duncan.
This issue, particularly the difficulties in collaboration and communication within internal teams and across departments, often leads to fragmented marketing efforts, missed opportunities, and the weakening of customer trust and loyalty.
Case study: How Casio turned a product process into a brand story
Getting it right unlocks some extraordinary opportunity. Naruhiko Miura, general manager at Casio has been responsible for implementing the marketing technologies behind the customisable Casio G-Shock watch. The surprising secret? Collaboration between teams.
"You can customise eight different parts of a G-Shock... So there could be 10 billion combinations. I was involved in the project to make it possible both at the front end, and back end, including integrating with manufacturing systems and ERP," said Miura.
"The complexity is really on the manufacturing... and this type of integration we've never done before. So we really need to speak to different part of organisations, which we don't usually talk to. These projects really have to involve more people than ever."
AI expected to drive growth, according to AI and Digital Trends report
Artificial intelligence is key to addressing these challenges, from supporting customer-centric, personalised approaches improving efficiency, creativity and speed to market. The 2025 Adobe AI and Digital Trends Report - a global survey of 3,400 executives and 8,301 consumers - reveals 65% of executives expect the use of AI to drive growth in 2025.
Behind this data is a big challenge for leaders in APAC, said report producer Jim Clark, research director at Econsultancy. "Just 12% of executives in APAC actually have a generative AI in their organisation, which has proven results. The majority are either in the process of rolling out or evaluating it, or isolated use cases," said Jim.
"What we saw from the APAC results, that even though measurement is a challenge, visibly they can see improvements. Improved content volumes, improved engagement and quality of engagement."
This shift allows marketers to automate workflows, enhance decision-making, and improve efficiency. In recognition of this transformation, Adobe is focusing on the practical application of AI into marketing efforts. "Part of our AI strategy, as a company, is to embed it throughout our product suite, across our Creative Cloud, our Document Cloud, and our Experience Cloud," said Duncan.
"The idea behind it is it is a conversational interface. Think about texting, but you have a really, really smart something on the other side that is looking at your data, or looking at your past campaigns, or is looking at personas or segments, and you can ask it questions. And based on your historical performance or data, it's going to inform you to help make better decisions on your campaigns, either in real time or for future campaigns that you're doing."
Understanding buying groups
Duncan recommended a significant shift in B2B marketing from targeting individual leads to understanding and targeting buying groups. This strategy involves identifying the people who make the decision to spend money to solve big problems, such as the CFO, CMO, CEO, and CIO.
Duncan advised marketers to consider both the decision-makers and the practitioners within these buying groups. "There is a bottoms-up groundswell, and there's a top-down understanding of value and ROI… It's a broader conversation around customer life cycle, and how do you approach the customer?," he said.
Taking advantage of the tools available
Looking ahead, Duncan offered advice for CMOs navigating the changes in the industry. "My advice particularly around what's going on with the industry right now, there are marketing fundamentals you have to have in place in order to really be able to experiment well. Do you have your data layer in order, as best as you can? I don't think anybody has it 100%, but that do you have your content, your campaign strategy in order? And do you have an idea of the journey and journey orchestration?" he said.
By addressing common pitfalls, understanding buying groups, and getting those foundational elements are in place, marketers are ready to apply generative AI or agentic AI to their strategies - and tap into the extraordinary growth on offer.
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This episode of The CMO Show was brought to you by host Mark Jones, producers Kate Zadel and Kirsten Bables and audio engineers Ed Cheng and Daniel Marr. This is an edited excerpt of the podcast transcript.
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The future of AI and B2B marketing with Adobe's Duncan Egan - Transcript
Mark Jones
Hello, and thanks for joining us. I'm Mark Jones. Welcome to The CMO Show. Joining me today is Duncan Egan. He is VP of marketing for Adobe's DX business in APAC in Japan. Good to see you.
Duncan Egan
Great to be here, Mark.
Mark Jones
Now first up, just give me your impression. What's top of mind for you?
Duncan Egan
Top of mind, it has to be AI. It has been top of mind for the last couple of years, but I think it's really coming together. And I think we can see the interest, excitement, and need from our customers that are here around AI and what's happening in that broader space. I mean, you have to be, as a marketer, using it, adopting it, and thinking about how you're going to leverage that in your playbook because everyone else is, and your competitors will.
Mark Jones
Last year was all about you need to be using AI, and CMOs are getting on board with AI. This year, the conversation has swung around in a really interesting way is that, with the rise of agents, there's this sense that a lot of the workflows, the tactical systems, the stuff that consumes time right across the entire marketing stack is and is going to be caught up in a lot of the automations that we get through AI. If you think about it, that's 12 months, an incredible shift.
Duncan Egan
The pace at which we're moving is incredible, which is also exciting. Also, I see the transition from a pull model, "Tell me this. How should I do that?" to a more push and automated model, so "Tell me this, tell me that, and go do it." That's where I think the next evolution of AI, generically speaking, is taking us to actually kick off workflows, to help efficiency, speed, and time to market, which we're all trying to achieve.
Mark Jones
Now, for the listener who is not as deeply embedded in the Adobe stack as it were, one of the things that really struck out for me is, when we think about the different product sets, the conversational AI, typing into a bar interface... That was quite clumsily expressed, by the way.
Duncan Egan
No, actually it's pretty good.
Mark Jones
Okay. Well, we don't really have jargon for that yet, but, you know, that search bar is now the defining feature in the demos that I've seen. Can you just maybe try and translate that into some words as to what it's like to use the product now?
Duncan Egan
Yeah. So, part of our AI strategy, as a company, is to embed it throughout our product suite, across our Creative Cloud, our Document Cloud, and our Experience Cloud, so whether you're a consumer using Photoshop, or you are a marketing operations person using Adobe Analytics.
The idea behind it is it is a conversational interface. Think about texting, but you have a really, really smart something on the other side that is looking at your data, or looking at your past campaigns, or is looking at personas or segments, and you can ask it questions. And based on your historical performance or data, it's going to inform you to help make better decisions on your campaigns, either in real time or for future campaigns that you're doing.
So, in Adobe Acrobat, you can ask it questions about a 400-page PDF research paper. And like I was saying, across the Digital Experience products, the same idea. You have a conversational element to how you can interact and learn and optimise what you're doing.
Mark Jones
It's actually a really big shift in mindset, I think, for a lot of marketers. Part of that is coming to the realisation that this chat interface now starts to do work for you. Now, in simple terms, this is where the agents start surfacing. But what was interesting is we don't see them labelled as like, "You're now using an agent." Just explain to me what's going on there.
Duncan Egan
Yeah, so I think it's we're embedding it across the products partially to lower the bar to entry.
Mark Jones
Yes.
Duncan Egan
As an example, I can go in and use it in Analytics. And I'll be honest. I don't go into Analytics. Maybe I did my first week, and I haven't been back since. But I can now go in, and I can actually ask it questions that are relevant to me, to understand what we're doing.
So, the way we're approaching the whole idea of the agents is, for the last year, it has been, "Give me information. Help inform me so I can make decisions." Now we're looking at, yes, let's inform, but then let's go take action. How do we make something better and kick off a workflow, that it's going to go optimise that segment or optimise that creative or that messaging to have a better outcome for the business?
Mark Jones
Yeah. It actually addresses a great unspoken truth in marketing is that we're all at different stages of the technical- or practitioner-level journey.
Duncan Egan
For sure. Right.
Mark Jones
And you just were sort of referring to that. One of the problem sets is, actually, how do I do this thing? I'm using this powerful enterprise software. Now it's actually starting to help me do it with very minimal training or input. Right?
Duncan Egan
Yeah.
Mark Jones
How significant is that? Because you've been around Adobe for a little while. You've also seen this in enterprise systems past. This is a big change in thinking that I'm not sure a lot of people are aware of.
Duncan Egan
Yeah, I think it's a big change in thinking, but I'd also say, from the outside looking in, it always looks awesome. Any company I've worked at, before I've went there, "Wow, they've got it all together. They're dialled." And you get inside, and you know what? We have data problems.
Mark Jones
Yeah.
Duncan Egan
We have teams working in silos. We have orchestration problems. We have similar challenges across our industries. Right?
Mark Jones
Yes.
Duncan Egan
What I think this next evolution that we're seeing happen right now is the ability to make it much easier for us to collaborate and communicate, exposing data to, I don't want to say the masses, but the masses that need to know. Right?
Mark Jones
Sure.
Duncan Egan
Where in the past I might've had to go ask a business analyst, and depending on what they knew about my business, I may or might not get information that's going to help me inform a decision that I'm making. Right?
Mark Jones
Yes.
Duncan Egan
So, I really see it bringing a whole new lens to how we operate as marketers and thinking more about the outcome of the customer, so becoming more customer-centric rather than account- or marketing-centric. Which I think is a big shift that we've talked about for many years, but I really think this is allowing us to do that much more so than we've ever been able to do.
Mark Jones
One of the speakers here talked about friction being the enemy of marketing. I actually love that line because, in this case, we're talking about systems, processes, the way we get stuff done as a marketing team actually slows us down in terms of being customer-centric.
If I can just pick up on that Customer Journey Orchestration piece. I've always loved the idea that you can do a drag-and-drop and create this beautiful workflow. Customer comes in one end and pops out the other as a sale. It always looks a lot easier than I think it is in practise. The difference here is now we're starting to have a system that's learning and actually creating it for us. How important do you think that will be in the context of reducing friction?
Duncan Egan
Yeah. So, massive, and I'm going to just step back a little bit and talk about our approach to marketing. Two years ago we embarked on a journey in Asia-Pacific and Japan looking at our AQL to SQL conversions.
Mark Jones
Which is? For those playing at home?
Duncan Egan
Automated qualified leads to sales qualified opportunities, so somebody who first engages with you to they're ready to talk to sales. How we were thinking about it, at the time, is Mark Jones at The CMO Company, he is the guy that we need to... He has come in and he has gone to our website. He might've gone to a webinar. He's the guy. So, now, we're going to feed him content, more on our terms than your terms. We're going to try and engage you.
And at some point in time, we might have a business development representative talk to you, and you say, "Yep. Well, actually I'm looking at updating my website. I've been kicking some tyres." You go to sales and you actually like, "Yeah, no, I don't buy. I'm not the CFO. I'm the CEO, but I'm not the CFO, and there's other people that are involved in the process."
So, we saw when we look at the funnel in a linear sense, so from one stage to the next, a lot of pipeline was attriting, and we found out we weren't talking to the right people. So, we have broadened our perspective to think about accounts and buying groups, not individuals.
Mark Jones
What's a buying group?
Duncan Egan
A buying group, now, ideally it is the people that make the decision to spend the money to solve their big problems. From an Adobe perspective, might be the CFO, the CMO, the CEO, the CIO, a layer down. We have to also consider the decision makers, and I also believe you have to consider the practitioners.
There is a bottoms-up groundswell, and there's a top-down understanding of value and ROI that it is massive, so that it's not a, "I'm going to buy this product to solve this solution. How much do you cost versus how much do they cost?" It's a broader conversation around customer life cycle, and how do you approach the customer? Right?
Mark Jones
Yes.
Duncan Egan
We have evolved from that, "How do we increase our conversion rate?" which was a good starting point, to say, "The money we spend is more effective when we get that conversion rate higher." So we are putting better quality in the beginning, the top of the funnel that is reaching the sales team.
So, then we said, "Great, and we need to look at the full buying group. This is where Customer Journey Orchestration comes in, where we have a defined set of accounts agreed with Sales that these are the accounts we really think are the right targets for us to go after. Everything we do, digital, an event, and everything in between is targeted at those accounts and certain personas in those accounts.
The next layer of that is we have a way to assess and score engagement. Again, I'm going to go back to The CMO Show. We know The CMO Show is a very large enterprise, with tens of thousands of people.
Mark Jones
I wish.
Duncan Egan
And we know, based on prior data, that there was an opportunity for you to expand your footprint within Adobe. Yeah, and it might be Journey Orchestration and Analytics, as an example. And we noticed that your organisation is going to our website. They are looking at Analytics. They are looking at Journey Orchestration. A few of your senior members have gone to webinars. And we have a recipe that tells us what good looks like, based on past historic data.
Mark Jones
Data, yes.
Duncan Egan
That also helps inform not only the marketing team, you may have just masses of people going to our website. And that's it. We say, "Well, we need to engage you deeper. Can we entice you to come to maybe a CXO dinner? Can we entice your team to come to a webinar and learn more and invest that time?" You go spend 45 minutes on a webinar, that's a pretty big commitment.
Mark Jones
Sure is.
Duncan Egan
So, we're really thinking about not only the account, but the who, and within the account, how do we approach each one of those personas in the right manner and on your terms?
Mark Jones
Yes.
Duncan Egan
So, it isn't, "Hey, Mark, come buy our software." It might be, "Hey, come have dinner with your peers and learn about what other people are doing to try and solve personalisation at scale."
Mark Jones
And look, I've been around a long time in terms of seeing enterprises and how they play. What's interesting about the scenario that you just explained is that you've actually aligned your approach to business, your go-to-market strategy, around the human reality.
Duncan Egan
Yes.
Mark Jones
Right? And we've always had this idea, "We're going to target the CEO. We're going to target the CIO, the CFO, the CMO." We've had these little C-suite streams of marketing and sales, but when, in reality, they've always talked to each other. The difference I think, now, if I'm hearing you correctly is that we've got a better way of understanding the dynamics of those relationships.
I wanted to pick you up on that in terms of your work because it seems like you're doing a lot of strategic work around, how are we engaging with these people? If you like, and this is a bit meta, but you're orchestrating the orchestrators.
Duncan Egan
Well, I was just going to say. I was waiting for you to pause, but you were spot on. Part of it is the human side of it, internally, with our organisation. It is not a marketing motion, it's an organisational motion. So, it includes sales, pre-sales, post-sales, field marketing, digital and data teams, web to really come together and think about, how are we orchestrating the approach to these accounts, these cohorts, these individuals, ultimately? Right?
Mark Jones
Yes.
Duncan Egan
And what is the right thing to do? I often talk to our business development representatives, and their motion is, "We need to create pipeline," but it actually has evolved to, "We need to create value." If we create value, good things will happen. Whether it's a brand new customer or an existing customer, the value might be, "Come learn more about our products," it might be, like I said, event-based, it might be there's a white paper, all the traditional things. But we have the intent signals and the data to support what should that outreach look like, which I think is really game-changing.
Mark Jones
I'm also fascinated by the intent signals that you mention. In simple terms, I think of this as the shift from demographics to psychographics. What are you seeing in terms of the way marketers can more easily understand the patterns in the relationships between these different points of really psychographic data? I know that's a technical question, but-
Duncan Egan
Yeah. So, I'll start with your first-party data strategy. So, the people that engage with you and give you their information, super important. They are people that have said, "I will trust you with my information." Therefore, understanding them, their behaviours, ideally, wants and needs, allows us to engage with them in a much more customer and individual way. As opposed to, maybe four or five years ago, we're just going to go, "Here's a segment. Let's go send them and invite them all to this webinar and see what happens." Right?
Mark Jones
Yep.
Duncan Egan
So, today, we can actually go down to an individual and understand much more about them. Then you have your third-party data, which is other sources, might be LinkedIn, it might be from Demandbase, which gives us other signals around what people are doing. Again, I'll go back to that example around analytics. This account is spending a lot of time on other sites, and they are looking at white papers around analytics. It just helps better inform us around how we can approach and, again, add value to their experience.
The other shift we've seen in the last couple of years, and again, I don't think it's been groundbreaking, but really rethinking around our website, and that space, and how people should engage with us. We have been very much a demand-gen machine over the years. You come to our website, and you see something. You fill out a form, we give it to you.
Now, I've always been a believer, if I'm not ready to give you my information, you can go seven other places and probably get something very similar. So, why not create less friction? Give information out. Let the prospect or customer really engage with you how they want to, not how we want them to. So, "Here's the information. Go to our community. Ask other people what's going on. Download the white paper. And then when you're ready, come talk to us."
Mark Jones
Yes.
Duncan Egan
Like buying a car, the shift that's happened there. You don't go to a car dealer and say, "What do you have that's new?" You know before you walk in.
Mark Jones
Well, the parallel in B2B marketing in particular is very similar to the car experience, is that you're dealing with very educated, highly informed, well-connected buyers across multiple C-suite titles.
Duncan Egan
Yes. Yes, and the other exciting and scary thing is how quickly things are changing. When I talk to CMOs across Asia-Pacific and Japan, we're all excited and challenged with AI. There are regulatory requirements for some industries, of course, and there's, also, is it this kind of shiny object, fun thing that's going to go away? I believe it's a fundamental shift and it's going to have massive impact on our industry and many industries and allow us to do things that have been not possible in the past.
Mark Jones
Right, right. So, where's it going? What's next? What's your advice for CMOs who are thinking, “this this is moving so fast, by the way, so how do I stay up?"
Duncan Egan
Yeah, I think, my advice particularly around what's going on with the industry right now, there are marketing fundamentals you have to have in place in order to really be able to experiment well. Do you have your data layer in order, as best as you can? I don't think anybody has it 100%, but that do you have your content, your campaign strategy in order? And do you have an idea of the journey and journey orchestration?
Once you have the foundation layer, and I'd say, you don't have to have this, but I think it helps, then you can start thinking about what are the use cases that I can apply, from a generative AI or an agentic AI perspective?
Just some customer examples, and this was a couple of years ago, there was a big telco in Asia-Pacific, that they were using generative AI in their call centre for what they called Level 1 Support. This was somebody who was on some type of machine that has a cellular chip in it, and if that goes down, it could be life-threatening.
Mark Jones
Okay.
Duncan Egan
These agents would be working with the individual, and they would be typing up the notes, and problem solving and typing at the same time. So, very early days, they leveraged AI to listen, to type up the notes so that agent can be 100% dedicated to solving that problem or reassuring that customer that we have backup or whatever it might be, which is fantastic. You're taking the burden off of both of those things because there are legal liabilities, et cetera.
Mark Jones
It's allowing you to really focus on high-value tasks. The last topic I wanted to touch on was this interface that you referred to between marketing and sales, and I think even product development. There's really a blurred line that I've picked up here at Summit, in a number of interviews. I wondered what that might look like for you in your role.
Duncan Egan
Yeah, you bet. One thing that I love about Adobe is we get to try all of our products first. When we were first launching Firefly, which is our generative product, it was released to all employees internally. There were Slack channels and team channels, like, "Hey, this isn't working right. Well, let us know."
It gave our engineers and our product team confidence in what we were doing, how we were going, and that we were putting out to market a product that was going to be valued. And if there were areas that weren't 100%, we were aware of it, and we could work to fix that. Same thing goes from our MarTech stack, where we get to try and give feedback to the product teams around things that we like or things that are maybe not quite where we would like them to be.
I think the convergence of Adobe, as we are the marketers marketing to marketers, which is fantastic, and also being able to have a direct line into product development. Because we have been predominantly consumer, B2C, and now really a big strategic push into B2B, because I think it is the next evolution, and so needed, around helping enterprise marketers with the tools. I know, I'm sure many of people you've talked to, we've always aspired to do what B2C has done. I mean, it's, "Here's the next viable product. Here's the Intel- and the Amazon-like approach."
I do think I am seeing for the first time, with particularly the technology and the advancements, that that is here. And it's the ability for us to really think strategically about how we take that. Test and learn, test and learn.
Mark Jones
Duncan, if you were to summarise the greatest opportunity for marketers right now, what would that be?
Duncan Egan
I think the biggest opportunities for marketers would be, one, challenge the status quo. When you look at your funnel, I think you have to look broader, and you have to think about buying group, the complexity of the buying group.Number two, I would say AI, generative AI, agentic AI, and whatever AI comes next. But you have to learn. You have to try. You have to test. You have to experiment.
And then the last thing I think is, from a people and organisational perspective, you have to think different. There are new skill sets that we need. There are new paradigms that are shifting around how we're operating and how we're going to be operating in the future.
I look at the organisation and how we're operating, and I'm thinking, "What does the future look like?" I don't have the answer, I'm sorry to say, but I do think it's a conversation we, as leaders, need to be having, and within our teams, and skilling them up and making them feel good about where we're going.
Mark Jones
How is AI changing your role?
Duncan Egan
AI has changed my role massively in that there are no typos anymore in my emails. But, also, it is an efficiency play, absolutely, for me, and also the ability for Adobe and our internal marketers to leverage the latest and greatest technology. We are on the front lines of testing and using and putting the things that you will see in market into play now and being able to give feedback on that.
That is truly inspiring and also really exciting for my team to be able to get their hands on the latest and greatest technology. So, we're seeing massive strides in how we can approach and be very customer-centric in our activities and strategic approach to the different markets that we play in, across Asia-Pacific and Japan.
Mark Jones
Duncan, I love your energy and I love the thinking between connecting all these different moving parts, applying it in real time, and then also thinking ahead. There's certainly a lot on your plate, and I really appreciate you personally sharing your time.
Duncan Egan
No, you bet. I am very passionate about what I do and what we do. And I think, as marketers, the fun is in the unknown. The fun is in testing. The fun is really trying to not do what we did last year. Let's do something new, and let's go try it, and having the confidence in the organisation to say, "If it doesn't work, that's okay. We're going to learn from it. We're going to move on." So, thank you. I really appreciate the opportunity to talk to you today.
Mark Jones
It's a pleasure.
BONUS EP: Turning product process into brand story with Casio's Naruhiko Miura - Transcript
Mark Jones
Hello, and thanks for joining us. I'm Mark Jones. Welcome to The CMO Show.
Miura San, can you introduce yourself?
Naruhiko Miura
I'm Naruhiko Miura. I'm general manager at Casio Computer and I'm in charge of implementing marketing technologies.
Mark Jones
Thank you for joining me on the show.
Mark Jones
So tell me about the G-Shock, My G-Shock campaign, and how you've been able to integrate manufacturing and your marketing systems?
Naruhiko Miura
Right. So My G-Shock is a customised G-Shock. So you can customise eight different parts of a G-Shock, So there could be 10 billion combinations or something like that. So I involved in the project to... Well, technically made it possible both at the front end, and back end. Back end includes integrating with manufacturing systems, ERP and everything.
Mark Jones
That's a lot of combinations, how complex is this project?
Naruhiko Miura
Well, it's super complex. So both in terms of front end, we need to show the clear beautiful image according to the user's customisation. So every time the part is picked, the image needs to be changed dynamically, and also in the back end we need to manage the inventory of each part. And also, we need to send up manufacturing requests, because it's custom made. So only one unique watch will be manufactured.
Mark Jones
It's amazing. So a unique Casio G-Shock watch of your very own, supported by an integrated marketing solution.
Naruhiko Miura
Mm-hmm.
Mark Jones
I think the key here is, creating a personalised product experience and supporting that with a personalised marketing experience.
Naruhiko Miura
Yeah, so the products you can basically customise, you can change the colour, you can pick your colour for eight different parts of a G-Shock. And then that's all basically powered by Adobe Solutions, both Creative Cloud and Experience Cloud.
Mark Jones
I can see you're wearing a G-Shock?
Naruhiko Miura
Yeah.
Mark Jones
It's a gold one with a black band.
Naruhiko Miura
Yeah.
Mark Jones
Can you tell me from a product and brand perspective, how has Casio been doing in the last decade or so, in terms of brand awareness? Because you are in a highly competitive market, obviously, I mean watches, there's an incredible scale from the very low end to the very high end?
Naruhiko Miura
Yeah. I think in terms of brand awareness, it's pretty good. I travel everywhere, and we always see person like you, who loves G-Shock or Casio. So awareness, brand recognition is fairly good, I think. It's been good I guess, but in terms of technologies or leveraging new digital solutions, and stuff like that, maybe 10 years ago, we're not doing pretty well. Well, we're doing something, but doing it maybe locally, a smaller scale where you cannot really put much investment on.
So what we have been trying to do in the past five years, is really integrate everything. We have global platform now, powered by Adobe and now we have this economy of scale. Things roll out quickly in one market to another, sharing best practises and all that. So we’re pretty much improving operational efficiency, tech investment. And also we are now wanting to do more customer engagement on our digital platforms.
Mark Jones
With the G-Shock campaign from a product point of view, I just saw some images before we spoke, but you can customise the colour of the band, or the face, but I also saw multiple colours. It's very, very detailed customsation? Is that right?
Naruhiko Miura
Yeah, yeah.
Mark Jones
So can you explain how that works from a Casio point of view?
Naruhiko Miura
Yeah. So basically there are eight different parts. So this is bezel and the face, and also bands and then these loops and stuff. And each of them have a different designs that you pick. So it depends on the parts, but with the bezel you've got, I don't know how many, so many different colours and patterns as well? And I think we have, how many? 10, 20, 10 billion or something, combinations.
Mark Jones
Amazing. So in my mind I'm thinking about a Lego kit where from a manufacturing point of view, you produce, I don't know, a million red bands and a million white bands, and so on. Is that sort of what happens, and then you just assemble it on the fly? Because I think this is an interesting idea, is that... That's right?
Naruhiko Miura
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, for each design it's basically a bit by hand, one by one, shipped to the customer.
Mark Jones
So the interesting thing from a marketing and brand point of view is, you've taken that idea and then you've applied the idea of personalisation at a customer experience level, right? How have you done that in your marketing teams, and how have you been able to create an experience that matches the product itself?
Naruhiko Miura
Well, the idea itself is coming from the business side, and I think it's been very difficult to really make it possible. But then we started Adobe partnership, then we basically discuss how we can actually achieve it as a digital experience. So yeah, we came up with the architecture that involves Creative Cloud, Substance 3D and AEM, and then we sell it on commerce. So yeah, I think basically all technology is just getting better and better, that achieve more things that probably wasn't possible before.
Mark Jones
Great. And can you tell me about the numbers? How is this going, in terms of sales and any of the performance metrics you're happy to share, from the marketing side?
Naruhiko Miura
I don't have exact number, but well, interesting thing is, it's selling pretty well in Japan. And also great thing is, most of the My G-Shock, is the customised G-Shock purchases, they're new to our DTC site. So their first purchase, is a My G-Shock I think, that's like 80, 90% of them, first DTC purchase.
Mark Jones
What are you learning as a leader about this whole process? What have been the hard things and what have been the good things? Maybe what's surprising you about the process of doing something so creative?
Naruhiko Miura
I think, well for My G-Shock, I think complexity is really on the manufacturing... Well, it's complex in the web fronts as well, because when you pick the colour, you need to show that thing-
Mark Jones
Of course.
Naruhiko Miura
... on the website, that that is a 3D image and all that. There is complexity there as well, but in the back ends we also need to look at those, each parts, we need to manage the inventory for each parts. And then also send that request to manufacturing side. And that almost never happens, because that's a completely new thing.
Mark Jones
So you're teaching people? And you have to explain very clearly what you want?
Naruhiko Miura
Yeah.
Mark Jones
For the manufacturers?
Naruhiko Miura
Yeah. For manufacturers... Well, for them this is a first thing as well and this type of integration we've never done before. So we really need to speak to different part of organisations, which we don't usually talk to.
Mark Jones
Yeah.
Naruhiko Miura
Those digital team don't talk to manufacturing people all the time, right? But this projects really have to involve more people than ever, like other projects.
Mark Jones
And it sounds like you've been able to get executive alignment? You know, buy-in? Everybody understands what needs to be done? Is there any advice for getting people to work together, on a new fun and creative project?
Naruhiko Miura
Well, I think what we really need, like strong leadership on that. Who can really involve people, engage with different part of organisations. Without that strong leadership or person, it's very, very difficult.
Mark Jones
What's your advice for CMOs who would want to do what you are doing?
Naruhiko Miura
Well, I mean personalised experience is really something that engages your customers very well, and then create a really fun experience. So yeah, I would recommend one, to do it as well?
Mark Jones
So have fun?
Naruhiko Miura
Yeah, have fun. Yes.
Mark Jones
Thanks for your time.
Naruhiko Miura
Yeah. Thank you.
BONUS EP: Adobe 2025 AI and Digital Trends Report with Jim Clark - Transcript
Mark Jones
Hello, and thanks for joining us. I'm Mark Jones. Welcome to The CMO Show.
Joining me is Jim Clark from Econsultancy, the producers with Adobe of the AI and Digital Trends Report. Thanks for joining me. What is this thing?
Jim Clark
What is this thing? Well, I question it myself. No, I know all about it. It's research we've been doing with Adobe for 15 years. It's one of the longest-running digital trends series of its kind. We estimate, over the 15 years, we've probably surveyed over 120, 130,000 executives globally, and this year was an equally chunky sample size of 3,400 executives and 8,000 consumers, so it really gives us a chance to pressure-check, gauge trends and challenge assumptions.
Mark Jones
Hit me up with the top four trends.
Jim Clark
The first is looking where organisations see the greatest growth drivers for 2025, and we discuss technology investments and human input there and talent. The second is in terms of closing the experience gaps. We explore that through consumer research, which showed some significant gaps in terms of what customers expect brands to deliver and what brands actually do deliver, and the third was operationalizing generative AI, moving beyond efficiency games to actually significant customer engagement, and that's something that was a key growth driver in section one.Finally, looking at the cultural and organisational shifts required to make all this work.
Mark Jones
Interestingly, when you think about the teams, this really does require greater collaboration, innovation, and a lot of test and learn type work between teams, and particularly the CIO and the CMO and other executives who have their hands on a lot of these tools.
Mark Jones
What did the research tell us about some of that dynamic?
Jim Clark
Well, in terms of the research, we asked executives if they thought they owned the customer journey. We then split that by different types of executives, so we looked at those that work in tech teams, those that work in marketing, those that work in CX, and we found those who work in tech teams think they own it, giving very little credit to marketers, and alternatively, marketers give a little credit to tech and think they own it with with CX teams' input. It was an interesting one there. It's competing teams, in some respect.
Mark Jones
But at the same time, you would've seen in the last few years this incredible rise in interest in AI more broadly, how well are CMOs and marketing teams adopting AI?
Jim Clark
Yeah, I think the big challenge, from our research, is that just 12% of executives in APAC actually have a generative AI in their organisation, which has proven results. The majority are either in the process of rolling out or evaluating it, or it's isolated use cases. There's even a rump of those that haven't even moved forward at all, and that's a challenge, but I think even though that there are issues with measuring ROI, those have seen significant benefits. I think that what we saw from the APAC results, that even though measurement is an issue, visibly they can see improvements. Improved content volumes, improved engagement and quality of engagement, because that's something that came out as a big focus when it came to using generative AI. It's not about just increasing volume, it's improving engagement, and that was one of the key growth drivers for 2025.
Mark Jones
Well, speaking of growth, that was your number-one trend. Was there anything that particularly surprised you out of the research there?
Jim Clark
Yeah, what we're seeing is, obviously, when it comes to the key growth drivers, predictive analytics and AI came out top along with improving customer engagement. AI is definitely centre course for a lot of executives and they're looking to increase investments in those areas. We saw that budgets are going up, in some cases for organisations, by more than 10% to invest in these areas, but what we also found was that when it comes to people and talent, and that's not going down, that's going up. In fact, more so than the global average.
Mark Jones
The gap between our current perception of whether or not content is generated by AI and whether it was produced, if you like, in more traditional means, that gap is narrowing and narrowing. We're heading into a world where, very soon, we won't actually be able to tell.
Mark Jones
What are your reflections on that dynamic and the responsibility that marketers have to engage with customers in the right way?
Jim Clark
Well, I think that, yeah, we're definitely entering a period where there's a risk of it being creepy versus cool, because it can be so one way or the other, I think, in stream ways if you get it wrong.
Mark Jones
Yeah.
Jim Clark
Probably that's one of the reasons why there's some reticence, particularly in certain parts of APAC, when it comes to the adoption, particularly when it comes to externally-facing content, when you're engaging with customers. I think that one of the things that we covered off in the research was asking customers about their attitudes towards generative AI when it comes to brands labelling their content as such.
I think that, when it comes to being upfront and being clear with customers, that's something that will go a long way into building trust and reassurance as well, but it's also making sure that customers are aware of just how the data is used to create those experiences. It can't be just a black box, you have to be able to communicate that.
Mark Jones
Well, on that note, Jim Clark, thanks for being my guest. Great conversation.
Jim Clark
I really enjoyed it, thank you.