TOTO USA

Tackling America with its High-Tech Toilets

Summary

Toto USA manufactures plumbing products. It offers a range of commercial and decorative plumbing fixtures and fittings, faucets, accessories, and shower and flush valves. The company also provides lavatories, toilets, sinks, air baths, and urinals. It serves residential and commercial sectors, as well as industrial professionals.

TOTO USA needed an improved online presence that would engage their prospective customers, while updating their technology and make online content management easier and more streamlined. With DotNetNuke and SharePoint, they’ve been able to create an interactive experience that engages prospective customers, and encourages them to locate a local dealer.

Challenge

TOTO is the leading toilet manufacturer in Japan but trails in market share compared to Kohler and American Standard. They needed to rethink their web strategy by encouraging visitors to search for local dealers and providing more content about their products.

Compared to their competition, TOTO sells technologically advanced products. Their marketing challenge is communicating those advantages and convincing people there’s a better way to go. The website needed to be engaging, educational, and encourage visitors to find a local dealer.

Previously, TOTO USA had a custom built Classic ASP website that was an amalgam of applications built by different agencies and consultants. Each section of the website communicated with different databases that had a high degree of overlap in the data they contained. Managing the existing content was expensive and time consuming. Their technology was preventing them achieving their website goals such as publishing new content and encouraging dealer searches.

Solution

Ultimately, the solution was more than creating a website. TOTO USA had to consolidate several databases, convert legacy applications, and design a product architecture that supported all of their product lines.

The website technology TOTO USA chose was a DotNetNuke content management system combined with Windows SharePoint Services to manage their structured content such as their product catalog.

Over a nine month period, a combined team of Arke Systems developers, TOTO USA product managers and marketing managers, and their marketing agency partner, worked quickly to reengineer the website.

The extensibility of DotNetNuke and the availability of third party modules allowed TOTO USA to easily deploy new features such as a visual map and dealer locator search. By surfacing content from SharePoint, it was possible to provide an advanced product search that let visitors find products by feature.

Results

The TOTO USA website launched with success and they can now quickly publish new content and new products without worrying about breaking the website. In addition to the content management capabilities, the website features:

• Product Finder – Similar to eCommerce sites that sell technical products, the product search allows visitors to find products by feature. As the visitor adds more features to their search criteria, the website displays the product results in real time.
• Dealer Locator –The locator allows visitors to find local dealers that match their criteria for products and location. It finds dealers closest to the visitor’s zip code and shows them a list of products available at each dealer.
• Product Downloads – TOTO USA can now publish any kind of media about their products as they need. They are providing visitors with videos, specification sheets, architectural drawings, installation manuals, and more. Managing this content is possible with their SharePoint solution and the content is surfaced to the website.
• Educational Content – TOTO USA provides their visitors with a lot of educational content about their products from product testing videos to gorgeous photography. The DotNetNuke solution gives TOTO USA’s marketing managers the ability to quickly publish new content.
• Content Search – Their website is rich in content pages and product details. The global search lets visitors search both and view the results side-by-side.
• Content Managed Flash – The home page features an elegant Flash movie integrated with the site’s overall navigation structure. The Flash displays wonderful photography and slideshows of their products but TOTO USA needed the ability to change these pictures easily. We built an administrative backend to the Flash that let’s TOTO USA change out any dynamic piece of the Flash through a simple web interface.