Charging up the Panasonic Batteries' Brand Store

When a long term client asks you to help them expand their e-commerce game, you obviously say yes. And when that client isn’t convinced by your first design proposal? You ask them for carte blanche and blow them away with a buzzing new design for their Amazon Brand Store. Obviously.

Panasonic Batteries

Panasonic Batteries is a well-known household name. You might even have a couple of their products around your house as they produce high quality batteries for all different kinds of devices and needs.

Panasonic and WAX started collaborating a couple of years ago when we developed a social media strategy for their online presence. We’ve been managing their Facebook page, and the one of their sister brand eneloop ever since. We’ve also set up and managed the eneloop Instagram account where we host a monthly photography challenge. On top of that, earlier this year we organised an Evolta NEO influencer campaign with a very successful TikTok challenge. Just to say that Panasonic and WAX might as well be sitting in a tree: we love working with them!

Image showing the 3 Evolta Batteries with their USP's in the newly designed look for the brandstore

How it all started

It became painfully clear during the past couple of months (#helloquarantine) that e-commerce is ridiculously important. So when Panasonic decided to step up their e-commerce game in 2020, it didn’t come as a surprise.

Panasonic has been a discount battery brand in bricks and mortar stores for years. With the release of their new EVOLTA range they want to stand out as a premium, long-lasting battery brand. Panasonic was already using Amazon as an important point of sales online. Now, they wanted to make their products stand out more on the popular website and elevate their position by creating an Amazon Brand Store.

Amazon What Store?

A couple of years ago, Amazon introduced the concept of brand stores on their website. Stores on Amazon give companies the opportunity to showcase their products in a multi-page, immersive shopping experience at no cost.

You can use dynamic content such as best sellers and recommended content to help shoppers find the products they’re looking for. You also create the opportunity for repeat purchases as brand stores push the discovery of related products by the brand. With a tailor-made store your brand is more consistent and recognisable on the Amazon website, leading to more customer loyalty.

Honestly: we had a bit of a slow start with this project. Initially we created a design for Panasonic based on the existing brand store for eneloop. They weren’t convinced. After explaining the importance of the e-commerce growth they wanted, we asked them if we could start from scratch. Having been collaborating for years, they gave us complete carte blanche to design a custom brandstore, completely tailored to their needs.

What we did

We started out by doing a lot of research into existing brand stores, the Panasonic competition and the possibilities of the brand store environment. To our surprise we discovered that we could actually push the concept of the Store way further than what we initially had in mind.

The Brand Store has a lot of options, from background videos that start playing automatically to showing personalised products to returning customers. And everything is available on both desktop and mobile.

Most brands use a predesigned template to create their Store and then add some of their own visuals to make it more on brand. But you can actually do much more! By designing cleverly around the restrictions of the Store it can become an extension of a brand’s current webshop or website. This way you give your customers a similar experience as on your own website, but with a wider reach and an audience that’s used to one-click shopping on Amazon.

An example of the A+ content created for the Panasonic Batteries Amazon Brandstore

The EVOLTA NEO battery range didn’t have a lot of visual elements yet, so we decided to start by designing a look and feel for this part of the Brand Store first. The rest of the Store would be an adaptation of this theme. This way we would make sure the EVOLTA range got the attention it deserves.
To help attract extra attention we created 3 different background videos for each of the EVOLTA batteries in the range, explaining the value of these batteries. Because the audience for the EVOLTA range is a bit younger than the general Panasonic Batteries audience, we could be more experimental with the design.
Afterwards we created product pages for each of the EVOLTA batteries, the Panasonic Everyday battery, the specialties batteries and their range of batteries for hearing aids.
We added interactive buttons, so people can add the product to their cart with less clicks. We also made sure there was space for product galleries for specific ranges (to add extra focus on these and make checking out easier) as well as tiles to click through to the different specific product pages. In short: we made optimal use of all different elements the Amazon Brand Store has in stock.
One of the exercises we did was making the Panasonic presence on Amazon more human. In the past they focused very heavily on their technological superiority, but less on the human factor. We made sure to show people using batteries in all different kinds of settings, balancing technology with people.
We also gave their existing A+ content (- extra information you can place on every detailed product page on Amazon, giving you the chance to explain your product in depth) a make-over in the new Brand Store style.

Results?

We designed a complete brandstore for Panasonic, featuring a home page , six detailed product pages and nine pages of A+ content, bringing their presence on Amazon to the next level. All pages are also being translated to Italian, German, Spanisch, French and Dutch to make them available on every local Amazon Store in Europe.

As we’re still in the process of setting up the different European versions of the Brand Store we don’t have any numbers yet, but Panasonic Batteries Europe was extremely happy with our second take on the design. They’ve already showcased the redesign during their yearly European event.