Kao (4452) Status update summary

Marketing transformation and consumer dynamics in the AI era

• AI is reshaping the customer journey, shifting decision-making from consumer-driven search to AI agent recommendations, making the process shorter, less visible, and more personalized, with a 66.4% zero-click search rate.

• Rapid digitalization and AI proliferation are transforming consumer behavior and corporate marketing, with agentic commerce becoming central to purchasing decisions.

• Trusted quality and scientific evidence are now crucial for brands to be recommended by AI, not just consumer-facing communication.

Product and brand strategy

• Five principles—social significance, exclusive uniqueness, performance by cost, consumer quality, and marketing—guide product development and brand loyalty.

• Success is driven by a framework emphasizing exclusive uniqueness, consumer loyalty, and a learning loop that derives principles from field data through hypothesis, testing, and validation.

AI-powered marketing innovation and global expansion

• Global Marketing i-Kao visualizes and accumulates global data, enabling real-time monitoring of AI-driven brand recommendations and consumer feedback, and integrates AI tools for recommendation monitoring and consumer insight generation.

• The tool predicts sales performance, explains underlying causes, and allows global access to actionable insights.

• AI avatars and orchestration AI help rapidly validate hypotheses and extract unmet consumer needs, supporting market expansion.