One Canon for all of Asia Pacific
As Canon grew into every market, each built and ran its own website. They differed in structure, tone and design, most of the content was static HTML, and with thousands of products that meant an inconsistent brand and heavy internal operations.
Canon wanted one URL, one landing page and one experience across the region, and it wanted the change faster than a relaunch of that size normally allows.
What was wrong
Each APAC market had built its own website, with its own structure, tone and design, most of it static HTML.
Thousands of products looked like a different company in every country.
Consumers, professionals, enterprise, medical and press all wanted different things from the same landing page.
Canon wanted only one.
Canon needed the change faster than a 20,000-page relaunch normally takes, and nothing could go dark while it happened.
It meant to build the plane in the air.
How we solved it
The goal was one experience with minimal friction on every device, standardised across the whole region. We planned it as four phases with early prototyping cycles in each, so the change arrived fast while every function stayed available.
Four phases instead of one launch
All 20,000 pages into a dynamic CMS; research on early design solutions
Landing page and the first two levels of content pages
Every other page
Localisation and sequential rollout to all APAC markets
Every function stayed available between phases, and each phase ran early prototyping cycles before build.
One landing page for five audiences
- New products 50%
- Support 10%
- Business solutions 20%
- Mixed content 20%
The share of the page each content type received, set by research across consumers, professionals, enterprise, medical and press, so all five found their entry point on one URL.
Built for finding, not browsing
People came to Canon for the details of products they already knew: specs, compatibilities, downloads, so that’s where most the effort went.
My role
At Interone/BBDO in China I unified the traditional and digital departments across Beijing and Shanghai into one team of 40, centralised the creative services for BMW China and Japan, and tripled the client portfolio. Canon Asia was one of those accounts. This work ran from 2011 to 2014, alongside BMW, MINI, Intel and Castrol.