We help people get to Toshiba

Toshiba wanted to ensure that its new website would be found for all the right reasons.

Despite search engine optimization (SEO) being in place, some search engine marketing (SEM) support during the first year would help kickstart the site’s discoverability and its support long-term goals. Toshiba not only wanted a strategy that would satisfy multiple consumer targets across varying needs, but also needed to understand traffic volume for its products and their respective categories.

The "Who"

Toshiba is a historic brand that traces its roots back to 1875 and is a household name in the electronics and appliance industry. Over the years, Toshiba has been responsible for numerous pioneering innovations in technology, including world-first products. In 2016, Midea Group acquired Toshiba’s home appliances division, continuing the legacy of the brand but under a new ownership structure. While the brand was recognized globally, within specific categories, it had limited presence in some markets like Canada. This left a significant opportunity to introduce Toshiba’s home appliance products to a new audience in a competitive, crowded space.

The "Why"

Our clients had a critical challenge: How could globally recognized Toshiba Appliances, introduce themselves as an unknown brand into the Canadian home appliance category. While Toshiba had a rich history and international recognition, it was largely unknown within the specific appliance market in Canada. This created a unique set of hurdles. The question wasn’t just how to launch a new brand, but how to introduce a brand with no local market presence in an industry already saturated with competitors. How could we make Toshiba’s appliances stand out in a competitive landscape, educate potential customers, and build meaningful connections that would drive sales?

The "What"

Our mission was clear: we had to establish Toshiba as a key player in the Canadian appliance market, and do so in a way that built awareness, trust, and customer engagement. The challenges we faced were multi-faceted:

Market Saturation: The Canadian market was already flooded with well-known consumer appliance brands, making it difficult for a new entrant to cut through the noise.
‍
Brand Awareness: While Toshiba was a globally recognized name, it wasn’t associated with the specific appliance categories they were now looking to promote in Canada.
‍
Digital Presence: We needed to launch a compelling digital presence for Toshiba in Canada, educate consumers about their product offerings, and ultimately convert this awareness into sales.
‍
Measuring Success: Every campaign needed to be not only impactful but also measurable. We had to tie digital efforts to actual conversions and revenue.
‍
Business Conversion: Because Toshiba does not sell directly to consumers, their end client proof was retailers. So mapping our success online to the end clients at conversion was key.

The "How"

Our strategy was built around three key pillars: Presence, Definition, and Education.

Presence: The first step was establishing Toshiba’s presence in the Canadian market. Since much of the brand recognition was tied to the broader “Toshiba” umbrella, which covered a range of unrelated product categories, it was important to separate and redefine the brand’s presence in the context of home appliances.
‍
Brand and Product Definition: The next task was clearly defining Toshiba’s appliance offerings for the Canadian market. This meant introducing and promoting their products as distinct and valuable, in a market that wasn’t familiar with their appliance products.
‍
Education: Finally, we had to educate Canadian consumers about Toshiba’s value proposition in this category. We discovered that the existing global platform was not optimized for this purpose, and gaps in the user experience needed to be addressed. The global platform lacked clear product structures and categories, which needed to be redefined for the Canadian market.

The "It"

To tackle these challenges, Insurgency worked closely with Toshiba’s global and regional teams to introduce structural and content improvements to their global digital platform. Our team focused on enhancing the user experience by implementing a more intuitive structure, categorizing products in a way that aligned with consumer expectations in Canada. This new structure—brand > category > sub-category > product—made it easier for customers to navigate and understand the full range of Toshiba’s appliance offerings. The site was a WordPress site, so our team needed to go into the template themes to adjust all content and information architecture. Last, our analytics team mapped the user journeys so reporting the user flow through the various phases could be done.

With the foundational updates in place, we executed a targeted media plan designed around search campaigns by product category. The goal was to drive awareness in the right categories, optimize search visibility, and ultimately lead to conversions. Our team worked in tandem with the Toshiba global IT team to ensure that these changes were successfully implemented, bringing a clearer vision to the platform and setting a new global standard for how Toshiba’s appliance brand would be represented online.

The decision to migrate the Global site from Wordpress over to AEM was made once the campaign was well underway. We continued managing the campaign while simultaneously migrating the site from WP to AEMM. At the same time we also set up all user journeys, content, and analytics protocols.

The "Results"

Our efforts paid off with tangible results. Over the first eight months of the campaign, we saw significant improvements:

Search Results: There was a marked improvement in month-over-month search performance, making Toshiba more visible in relevant searches.
‍
Cost Efficiency: We successfully reduced media costs, driving better efficiency across the campaign.
‍
Increased Effectiveness: Our strategic adjustments resulted in a more effective media spend, driving better performance in terms of engagement and conversion.

‍

These results not only demonstrated the success of the launch but also highlighted the potential for Toshiba’s continued growth in the Canadian market. The combination of an optimized digital experience, targeted search campaigns, and effective media spending proved to be a winning formula.‍

‍

Next project