Toshiba

At my time with local creative agency 8traordinary, I had the chance to work on a project for Toshiba's YouMe range of air conditioners.

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The challenge posed to us was that the brand had many strong competitors with higher budgets, vying for the same audience attention.

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The question was then:

“How can we use the most effective creative, strategy, platform and media to cut through the clutter?"

While everyone was shouting about 5-tick energy efficiency, we crafted a campaign called “The World’s Best Friend” to break the monotony. Based on an environmental angle, the campaign was centered around Toshiba’s newest product, the Toshiba YouMe, which houses its latest innovation – an environmentally-friendly R32 refrigerant that gives it a low Global Warming Potential (GWP).

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The tagline which boasts the YouMe’s two-pronged benefits communicates how it is the earth’s best friend given it’s environmentally-friendliness, and how it is everyone’s best friend given that it is high energy-saving and wallet-friendly too.

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Tapping on influencer marketing, we also decided to introduce brand ambassadors to improve brand association and recall. Punny, lighthearted and all in the name of building a more fun and personal household brand name, we introduced our ambassadors Tosh and Shiba – and when you put them together what do you get? Toshiba! This was aligned with the “World’s Best Friend” tagline as dogs (the Shiba Inu in our case) are often seen as “man’s best friend”.

The team then created lots of content for Toshiba’s social channels, amplifying it with programmatic ads and media buy. This included Facebook and Instagram content, as well as a 3-part street interview YouTube series, in line with World Environment Day. A press event was also held to introduce the brand’s product and its ambassadors to the media.

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As part of the awareness campaign, we even developed a microsite and partnered up with SingTel to distribute bill inserts to 200,000 recipients.

In just 6 months, Toshiba's Facebook page has grown by more than 5,000% and Instagram account by more than 300%. The brand’s Google Display banners saw a total of 3,239,754 impressions while the microsite garnered more than 12,000 page views and 3,000 clicks.

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The press event also generated coverage that saw an estimated reach of 6,981,900. All of which have ultimately contributed to a 20% sales growth for the year.