ABOUT

About the project
Koyo has been a world leader in bearing technology since 1921, manufacturing over 100,000 variations of a ball and roller bearings in a wide range of sectors including automotive, aviation, agriculture and construction, marine and wind. As part of the Toyota group of companies, their focus is offering the highest quality, reliability and performance in their ball bearing products.

Challenge
As a challenger brand with smaller marketing budgets than some of its competitors, Koyo needed to raise awareness of its brand as well as highlighting the high quality of its world class products. After all, if the bearings are good enough for Jaguar Land Rover, Volkswagen Audi Group, Suzuki, Bosch, Triumph and BMW and many other world brands it should be good enough for most precision environments. It was critical that Koyo developed a marketing strategy to get more bangs for their buck. And with no in-house marketing resource to call upon marketing opportunities were being missed.

Our Solution
Initially, a brand and marketing audit was undertaken to get a true picture of where Koyo stood in the marketplace. As a Japanese company, they had a lot of marketing collateral that was not designed for the UK market as it focused on features of the bearings that shouted “I’m a me-too product”. To raise the profile of the quality of Koyo products we developed “The Benchmark in Bearings” as the central message for a UK 12-month advertising campaign that showcased the benefits of the product in a number of applications and sectors. This was also supported by a digital campaign to include email and landing pages to the target audience via trade press contacts such as engineers and specifiers together with online advertising.