Can technology help
to solve eco issues?

www.sony.co.uk/eco - launch the site

Project overview

Sony asked Hugo & Cat to bring their eco innovation story to life and redesign the Eco area for their European websites.

Sony has been working hard to ensure its ground-breaking and imaginative ‘eco thinking’ touches every part of the business. From product design, use of materials, manufacturing processes and a commitment to reduce the environmental impact of its products, Sony believes technology can play a positive role in helping solve issues affecting the environment.

Our brief was to raise awareness of Sony’s eco initiatives and their results.

The challenges

Why should I care about Sony’s green initiatives?

The existing Eco area on the Sony website was underperforming. The content was not engaging the audience and dwell times were short. Sony had interesting things to say but the message wasn’t getting through. How could we get visitors to look beyond a corporate social responsibility message? How could we show them that Sony technology helps save energy and money at home? And that eco thinking has a wider role to play in solving environmental issues?

What we did

Our response was a comprehensive content strategy for meeting this communication challenge and bringing the wealth of eco initiatives to life.

We worked closely with the European marketing team to focus on the target audience and how we could re-architect the site, develop a new look and feel and create content to engage people to explore further and discover more.

After a thorough analysis which mapped existing content to audience needs, we identified key content types to help the site meet its objectives. New content ideas were prioritised according to importance for audience groups and their ease of delivery. This helped to create a focused and phased development for the site.

As part of the first phase, Hugo & Cat delivered:

• Exploration of audience profiles
• Audit of current site content
• Content strategy for site development
• Creation of content to meet audience needs
• Complete refresh of design look and feel

The results

Meeting audience needs in no time

The initial phase of the content strategy and re-design took less than two months to deliver, including translation into 28 languages.

The site now includes a section focusing on the energy saving capabilities of current Sony products as well as those in development for the future. Eco initiatives are also given a clearer presentation in terms of design and copy. They reinforce the message that Sony is helping to apply technology to solve eco issues (such as helping the Forest Guard project to prevent forest fires in California).

Roll-out of the next phase is currently underway and will help to deliver further on the content strategy and increase in audience engagement.