Has everyone ever thought about starting a cake shop? As a cake lover myself, I often find myself wondering, "What kind of cake would be perfect?" However, developing a concrete business strategy is a real challenge. That's why this time, I'd like to conduct a case study with the support of an "AI marketing-agency." Let's get started.

1. Selling Cakes in an Upscale Kansai Neighborhood

The business scenario I've prepared for this case is a simple one:

Goal: To sell premium fruit cakes in the Kansai region.

Cake Features: Premium shortcakes featuring strawberries, peaches, and muscat grapes.
Target Audience: Women in their 20s to 40s living in upscale residential areas.
Stores: 3 cafes near Yamate Dentetsu Ashiya Station, 1 cafe near Kaigan Dentetsu Ashiya Station.
Direct Sales Outlet: 1 store inside the Yamate Dentetsu Ashiya Station premises.
Branding: The brand's primary color will be blue, with the website and logo also unified in blue.
Current Plan: In the process of planning a sales promotion for the autumn season.

From here, what kind of concrete business strategy can we derive? First, I'll input the business scenario into the AI marketing-agency.

The first thing it does is automatically generate 10 cool domain names.

It's hard to choose, but for now, I'll proceed with branding using "PremiumAshiyaCake.com".

2. A Practical Business Strategy

Now, let's ask the AI marketing-agency to formulate a business strategy for selling our premium fruit cakes in Kansai. When prompted to input the necessary information, I re-entered the business scenario, and the following business strategy was generated in about two minutes. Amazing!

It's a long document, over five pages, so I can't share it all, but here is the "Core of the Marketing Strategy."

Overall Approach: Direct Response that Inspires Aspiration
- We will build an aspirational, luxury brand image through beautiful content, and then convert that desire into immediate store visits using precisely targeted calls-to-action (CTAs).
Core Message and Positioning:
- Positioning Statement: For the discerning women of Kansai, Premium Ashiya Cake is the patisserie that transforms a moment into a cherished memory with its exquisitely crafted seasonal shortcakes.
- Tagline / Core Message: "Premium Ashiya Cake: An exquisite moment, crafted for you."
Key Pillars of the Strategy:
- Visual Elegance and a "Blue" Signature: All visuals must be of professional, magazine-quality. The brand color "blue" will be used as a sophisticated accent in styling—such as on blue ribbons, parts of the tableware, or as background elements—to create a recognizable and unique visual signature.
- Hyper-local Exclusivity: Marketing efforts will be geographically and demographically laser-focused on the target audience residing in Ashiya and its surrounding affluent areas. This creates an "in-the-know" allure for locals.
- Seasonal Storytelling: Treat each season's campaign as a major event. We will build a narrative around the star ingredients, such as Shine Muscat grapes from a specific partner farm, to build anticipation and justify the premium price point.

This is wonderfully practical content. The keywords I provided—"blue," "Ashiya," and "muscat"—have been skillfully integrated into the strategy.

3. The Logo is Excellent, Too—This is Usable!

Because I specified in the initial business scenario that I wanted to "unify the color scheme based on blue," it created this cool logo for me. It really looks like something I could use right away. Google's image generation AI, Imagen 3.0, is used here. The quality of this AI is always highly rated, so it's no surprise that the logo generated this time is also of outstanding quality.

So, what did you think of the AI marketing-agency? The business strategy is professional, and it's amazing how it automatically created the domain names and logo with such excellent results. Although I couldn't introduce it this time, it also includes a website creation feature. It's surprising that a tool this high-performance is actually available for free. A development kit called "Google ADK" is provided as open-source, and the AI marketing-agency from this article can be downloaded and used for free as Sample (1). For those who can use Python, I think you'll get the hang of it with a little practice. The operational costs are also limited to the usage fees for Google Gemini 2.5 Pro, so the cost-effectiveness is outstanding. I encourage you all to give it a try.

Please note that this story is a work of fiction and does not represent anything that actually exists. That's all for today, stay tuned!

You can enjoy our video news ToshiStats-AI from this link, too!

1) Marketing Agency, Google, May 2025

Notice: ToshiStats Co., Ltd. and I do not accept any responsibility or liability for loss or damage occasioned to any person or property through using materials, instructions, methods, algorithms or ideas contained herein, or acting or refraining from acting as a result of such use. ToshiStats Co., Ltd. and I expressly disclaim all implied warranties, including merchantability or fitness for any particular purpose. There will be no duty on ToshiStats Co., Ltd. and me to correct any errors or defects in the codes and the software.

Have you ever found yourself in marketing, wanting to predict sales and gathering a ton of data? For example, let's say you have sticker sales data (1) like the set below. The num_sold column represents the number of units sold. This is actually a large dataset with over 200,000 entries. So, among these data columns (which we call "features"), which one is the most important for predicting sales? They all seem important, and it's impossible to check all 200,000 records one by one. So, let's try asking the generative AI, GPT-5.

1. Asking GPT-5 with a Prompt

To identify the important features for a prediction, you first have to create a predictive model. This is a task that data scientists perform all the time. However, they usually create these models by coding in Python, which can be a high barrier for the average business person. So, isn't there an easier way? Yes, and this is where prompts come in handy. If you can give instructions to GPT-5 with a prompt, no coding is necessary. Here is the prompt I created for this task.

Key points of the prompt:

Use HistGradientBoostingRegressor from sklearn.
Evaluate the error using mean_absolute_percentage_error.
Split the data into train-data and test-data at an 80:20 ratio.
Display the top 10 feature importances with their original variable names.
Print the results as numerical output.

By getting the top 10 feature importances, we can understand which data column is the most significant. I won't explain the predictive model itself this time, so for those who want to dive deeper, please refer to a machine learning textbook.

2. The Code Actually Being Executed

Based on the prompt above, GPT-5 generated the following Python code on its own. It might look complicated to non-specialists, but rest assured, we don't have to touch Python at all. However, we can review this code to see how the calculation is being done, so it's by no means a black box. I believe this transparency is very important when using GPT-5 in a business context.

GPT-5's code for building the prediction model

3. "Product" Was the Most Important!

Ultimately, we got the following result.

Feature Importance Ranking

A higher "importance" value in the table above means the feature is more significant. This analysis revealed that "product" was overwhelmingly important. It seems that thinking about "what is selling" is essential. This is followed by "store" and "country". This suggests that considering "in what kind of store" and "in which country" is also crucial.

So, what did you think? This time, we instructed GPT-5 with a prompt to calculate which features are most important for predicting sales. It's true that you might run into errors along the way that GPT-5 has to correct itself, so I felt that having some basic knowledge of machine learning is beneficial. However, we were able to get the result without the user having to write any Python, which means marketing professionals can start trying this out today. I hope you can use the method we introduced today in your own marketing work. That's all for now. Stay tuned!