KEMET Launching a digital transformation for an electronics leader

Starmark helped launch a new digital experience for engineers and a new intranet for employees in partnership with KEMET Electronics. The comprehensive internal and external launch strategy ensured that the entire KEMET team and its engineering customers were excited about the next steps in the transformation roadmap.

Overcoming Resistance

KEMET Electronics is a worldwide B2B provider of electronic components for technology companies. Their products are used in products that shape the future of healthcare, computing, automotive, telecommunications and consumer electronics.

The company approached Starmark to develop an Agile project roadmap to launch its digital transformation initiative — designed to overhaul the entire digital experience engineers have with investigating, sourcing, evaluating and working with KEMET components. With more than 12,000 worldwide employees and multiple autonomous product teams, launching a company-wide initiative at KEMET would be a challenge. The goal was to involve a broad swatch of KEMET employees with three new offerings: the new KEMET.com, K-SIM and KEMET World.

KEMET.com and K-SIM offered overhauled user experiences to make it easier for engineers to explore applications, find the right parts and examine performance specifications. The new KEMET World was designed to provide a company intranet with more collaboration, sharing and utility.

Further complicating the three-product launch was a staggered timeline where different products were scheduled to go live at different times.

Amping up the Approach

Starmark created a high engagement launch program that spanned multiple social networks, email marketing, as well as presentation content and a manifesto for company-wide town hall meetings and internal communications. In addition to inspiring early product adoption, the approach also solidified the visual and verbal approach for social media and the new KEMET.com.

The Starmark team really made this launch a success for us. Making a great first impression and engaging our audiences from the start with our new digital experience was paramount. This is just the first part of our digital transformation journey and we look forward to making the experience with KEMET best in class. — Jennifer Escobar, Director of Branding and Communications, KEMET Electronics

Starmark started this effort by developing manifestos, campaign concepts and a design language to help tie the digital transformation to the overall company position Built Into Tomorrow. The objective was to further develop the position into a visual language and tone of voice to keep all launch communications cohesive, regardless of what product launch they related to.

Using these building blocks, the team created a series of teaser graphics for each launch to build excitement. Following launch, each product was supported by infographics, animated videos and posts tying into popular social holidays. These assets were used across channels, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, the KEMET World intranet, internal presentations and customer emails.

To manage staggered go-live timelines and multiple media channels, the Starmark team created a shared rollout calendar so that activities, post dates and changes stayed in sync between the two companies.

Charging Forward

After the success of this initial launch, the next phase of this effort is to roll out optimizations across all of KEMET’s digital properties and throughout its main site. This includes creating visual, verbal and experience consistency across all application sections of KEMET.com, rolling out new user features, migrating Engineering Center tools to the new platform — and communicating all of it using the internal/external launch framework Starmark created.

We look forward to adapting the work to mesh with the Yageo family of brands as the acquisition of KEMET as part of an even larger global enterprise proceeds.