Bringing a fresh wind to a company with no digital marketing foundation. What decided it was the people.

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Comprehensive staffing services (temporary staffing, contracted work, recruitment, placement of highly skilled foreign nationals and registered support for specified skilled workers, engineer dispatch and contract design, translation and interpreting)
People development (tiered training for new employees and others, specialist training)
Improving operations on the ground
IP (research and filing of intellectual property and patents)
Green services (landscaping and flowers)

Sunstaff Inc., part of the Toyota Industries group, runs comprehensive staffing services including temporary staffing, recruitment and contracted work, alongside people development, improving operations, IP work and landscaping and flowers. We began working together in April 2023.

Behind that was a wish to build a foundation for digital marketing inside the company, and through it to open up new customers and services. About six months in, how have things changed? We asked Mr Masuda, a director of Sunstaff Inc., who was in the management reform division at the time and now heads the comprehensive staffing services division, about why they came to NowVillage, what it achieved, and what they expect next.

A company with no ground for digital marketing. How do you make it part of the culture?

Could you tell us your role and division?

I am Masuda, head of the comprehensive staffing services division at Sunstaff Inc. The division runs temporary staffing, recruitment and contracted work.

At the time of the engagement I was in the management reform division, overseeing revenue management, PR, IT and a sales oversight function, and running various projects.

What is your division’s goal?

We are a profit centre now, so the main measure is operating profit, which is to say revenue.

What marketing problems did you have before coming to us?

Marketing problems, yes, but we also had no one with digital marketing experience, and even when we wanted to build that ground, the definition of marketing itself was vague.

In our business strategy too, the basics of marketing – to whom, what, how – were very weak. In that situation we could not take a concrete first step towards getting people to understand why digital marketing matters.

How did you hear about us?

Around January 2020 I happened to meet Mr Imamura at a gathering of business owners. We exchanged details but did not speak for about two years.

Then in February 2022 Mr Imamura got in touch to say he had started a digital marketing company.

One of our people went along to a NowVillage seminar to see what it was like. From their impressions I understood NowVillage as a company strong in digital marketing using social media.

What decided it: the ability to read what we needed, and the people

And you came to us in November 2022.

At the time, looking across the whole company from corporate planning, the problems gradually came into view. Your company was what came to mind.

Because our business model centres on serving our parent company and group companies, some parts of the business rely on selling through relationships. That matters too, but it does mean they tend to call on the same companies. That had been a problem for some time.

When those teams tried to work with customers outside the group, they had neither the marketing knowledge nor the methods, and had done almost no competitor analysis.
We believe our own products are good, but whether we have established a clear advantage in the market, looked at coolly, was another matter. We kept finding far stronger competitors and lost sight of our own strengths.

And because we had outsourced most of our advertising and promotion, we had little know-how internally. So when it came to doing digital marketing seriously, the conversation started from which supplier should we ask.

I felt we would never become genuinely strong that way. We wanted more people inside the company who are good at digital marketing, or at least studying it, and that is partly why we came to NowVillage.

What decided you on us? 　

I can say it now, but at the time I was asking five or six people whether they knew a good digital marketing firm. I spoke to several companies. Some did not grasp what we meant, and the larger ones quoted figures we could not pay.

Among them, Mr Imamura listened properly and read what we needed. As I mentioned, we ultimately want to raise our own people’s skills and bring digital marketing and promotion in-house. I see that as an unavoidable stage in making the business stronger, and as an important part of developing people.

We have met many times with Mr Imamura to work things through, and the conversation is constructive. The picture of what the company’s problems actually are has sharpened considerably. We are developing our people together with an outside partner, so the content and the pace of communication matter.

And as you talk, you start to see what someone values in their work, how they live, what kind of person they are. It is a little awkward to say with him here, but in the end what decided it was the person.

For smaller companies looking for a reason to change

What has our in-house enablement achieved?

At our annual medium-term planning meeting we agreed to make time to find our own strengths and think about how to use them, and ran frameworks with group leaders and above. We did 3C and PEST analysis and then a cross-SWOT. Quite a few people had not come across them, and it was well received as a chance to see the company differently.
NowVillage’s training then started at just the right time and is becoming the engine for spreading it to others.

Hard numbers are difficult at this stage, but if I had to name something, it would be the training service. The USP analysis we did as part of bringing things in-house led us to try selling outside Aichi, and from there we held meetings online and had the conversations needed to win the work. Gaining the confidence that this is how to sell outside the group, and finding it works in other regions, was a big step for the sales team.

Finally, which companies would you recommend us to?

In a word, any company wanting to widen what it can do. We are discussing which adjacent services to expand into and which new services to create, and consulting you on how to make that happen. Being able to raise small things easily, and work through them together, is a great help.

Among smaller companies there are those whose way of selling and of conveying value is one-directional, still relying only on salespeople visiting. But the world is changing at great speed.

We have to accept that it is no longer only about salespeople making the rounds, and change direction. If even one person in a company wants to do DX or digital marketing, things move quickly, but many companies do not have that person. I think there are a great many companies wanting change who would welcome a company like NowVillage that gets inside and drives it.