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Panasonic North America

For decades, Panasonic was known primarily as a leading consumer electronics manufacturer. But a not-so-subtle shift had been taking place in their North American business. While B2B revenue made up nearly half of their business in 2008, today (2017) it contributes a majority share of corporate revenue.

To reflect this shift, Panasonic North America needed to transition its online presence from an inflexible proprietary eCommerce platform for consumers to a more solutions-focused and modern website platform built within a robust digital ecosystem.

The Challenge

Panasonic North America’s online presence no longer reflected the evolving brand of Panasonic. The company website sat on a proprietary eCommerce platform (a legacy of the consumer products days), that wasn’t responsive nor integrated into any other digital ecosystem. The site simply looked and acted old and tired.

In addition to the platform, Panasonic was still working with an antiquated process for even simple copy updates on website pages. In the absence of a CMS (Content Management System), a small team within the IT department handled all changes through a cumbersome ticketing system. Making basic copy changes was highly inefficient, resulting in outdated content on their biggest digital touchpoint.

This challenge included several factors:

• Organizing 11 business units and five functional business areas, including Canada

• Managing 30 core project members, a community of over 100 project stakeholders, and nine technology partners

• Implementing an outside-in approach in all aspects of IA, design, and content

• Orchestrating other technology integrations, all within a tight timeline before the legacy eCommerce platform contract expired

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The Solution

Panasonic and FFW knew that if they wanted to improve the customer journey, it would require an API-first approach and placing the customer at the center of everything they set out to do. Integrations are key, and the team knew they’d need to lay a foundation for a strongly personalized customer experience.Because Panasonic wanted to build a foundation today for acceleration in the future, they planned and designed all of their APIs at the outset of the project. These were developed within the context of more than just one app, and focused on embedded and integrated tools and information. Planning and building APIs early in the process allowed development teams to more easily build purpose-driven components.Lastly, Panasonic and FFW worked together on no small amount of custom Google Analytics work which, when paired with Lift’s listening tools, is helping Panasonic gain a full 360 view of their customers.

The Results

After 18 months from inception to launch, Panasonic North America was able to successfully launch its digital transformation led by its corporate marketing team. With a new website platform at its core, Panasonic’s new digital ecosystem uses an API-first approach to connect other marketing technologies, to enhance our customer-facing decision making through data driven insights.

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Additional results:

• Atomic design system implemented across the platform

• Personalization and decision engine allows improved connections with users

• 5-fold internal adoption of the platform

• New, Panasonic-specific distribution of Drupal 8

• Improved search with cognitive services

• Transforming organizational users into publishers

• API-first with progressive decoupling

• Componentized back-end and front-end • Improved and continued brand governance

Consolidate 7 microsites, two blogs, three languages and two regions into one unified website platform

Establish an outside-in Information Architecture (IA) from the customers’ perspective and content-driven page design

Empower stakeholder marketing staff to be content publishers via a world-class Content Management System (CMS)

Integrate additional marketing technology platforms such as Acquia Lift, Marketo, Domo, and Salesforce

The new platform allowed Panasonic to: