Hitachi’s Branding Campaign Highlights Tech Strength
Hitachi America, Ltd., has embarked on a multi-year, multi-million dollar campaign to help boost the company’s revenues and build brand awareness for its lesser-known technology products.
The campaign, entitled Hitachi | True Stories, broke yesterday and chronicles real-life towns with real people from across North America via a series of short films that showcase how Hitachi is affecting and enhancing their lives.
Five five-minute movies are available on Hitachi.com/TrueStories, which can be downloaded, shared with friends or added to blogs for others to watch.
“The stories themselves are primarily people and story driven, rather than focused strictly on the company’s core products and services,” said Gerard F. Corbett, VP-branding and corporate communications group, Hitachi America. “Our goal was to begin communicating the effect of Hitachi’s products and services on people. Because so much of what the company does is largely hidden from the public, this style of communications represents an out-of-the-box strategy to better connect with the company’s many constituencies.”
In each story, Hitachi profiles people who hail from various industries, including advanced medical technology, information and telecommunications systems, power and industrial infrastructure and consumer electronics technologies.
“Hitachi is known for its consumer electronics business but we wanted consumers to know about our other [technologies],” said Dash Hisanaga, spokesperson, San Francisco-based Hitachi. The campaign will help establish the connection that the company is more than just consumer electronics, he added.
To that end, movies feature a cancer patient who flies to Houston for treatment sessions involving Hitachi’s proton beam therapy system installed at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center; a power plant that uses the company’s coal-fired technology to produce clean energy from coal and a story about how Hitachi’s plasma screen technology migrated from college laboratories to family living rooms.
“In a world dominated by digital recorders, social networking sites and user-generated video, Hitachi and other leading brands are boldly stepping forward to re-evaluate their approach to traditional advertising,” said Andrew Scott, VP and group account director at McCann-Erickson, which created the movies. “Hitachi is able to break through the clutter of sound-bites and 30-second spots to share the types of rich interactive stories that attract consumers looking for a more meaningful engagement.”
Hitachi’s Japan-based parent hopes the campaign will boost U.S. revenues to account for more than half of the company’s revenues ($80.9 billion in 2005).
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