The experience unfolds at the company's website, where visitors will be greeted by a host who welcomes them into either of two kitchen environments that represent the company's "Masterpiece" and "Professional" kitchens. A split screen depicts a loft in New York City adjacent to a home facing the ocean in Malibu. The concept revolves around items being prepared for "virtual parties" held in each of the two homes. Visitors get the feeling that they’re in the kitchen helping the host while guests are mingling in the next room.

Via the virtual environment, visitors explore each kitchen, observing recipes being prepared and obtaining more details about specific appliances. As visitors navigate around the kitchens, they can see the ingredients used in recipes, learn how to prepare dishes, and find out how Thermador appliances aid in the food preparation.

Beatriz Sandoval, Thermador's senior marketing manager, tells Marketing Daily, "We kept coming back around to real innovations, and there was no better way to embody what we wanted to say than showing home chefs in action in an interactive way. It’s meant to be indicative of what would happen where the kitchen is the hub of a home. To get that message and positioning across it was important to launch with an experiential center and everything will reflect that tonality and passion.”

Jonathan Brown, creative director of DGWB, the agency that created the campaign, adds, “It's like watching a cooking show with a friend. It's less sales than entertainment." Brown says the new site is an attempt to "bottle the Scottsdale experience and serve it on the Web. We can't fly everyone to Scottsdale but the site lets us entertain and inform them in an immersive way.”

The “experiential center,” as Sandoval calls it, will include the ability for visitors to save recipes and appliance specifications and send this information to family and friends. Brown says, “Typically, people are remodeling the whole kitchen as they do research. They will spend time on this site because it is an engaging way to experience information, and send it to your spouse.”

It turns out that this isn’t the first time Thermador has done something worthy of note in the online world. In 2009, the company won a “Best in Class Award” in the Consumer Goods category at the Interactive Media Awards competition for its “Thermador Kitchen Design & Planning Guide.” This 300-page online booklet was a compilation of kitchen design suggestions, photos, celebrity tastemaster tips and product specs and guides residing in the Thermador Design Center, a comprehensive online resource.

Social Media

Thermador will utilize its Facebook page to drive traffic to the “Real Innovations for Real Cooks” experience. Thermador currently uses Facebook to engage customers; for example, the company recently offered the opportunity to win a free Thermador Sapphire Dishwasher to anyone who clicked the “Like” button on its Facebook page. It posts recipes on Facebook as well. Thermador is also an active user of Twitter.

The “Thermador Home” channel on YouTube is a nice blend of product promotion and informational content. It features three types of videos:

1. Product oriented
These videos highlight Thermador’s products in general or focus on a particular product line, such as the Sapphire Dishwashers.

2. Design oriented
This series, featuring designer Candice Olson, host of HGTV’s “Divine Design,” includes clips from Olson’s show, as well as videos that focus on design ideas incorporating Thermador products.

3. Food or chef oriented
Thermador relies on both its own Executive Chef, Kyle Jakobi, as well as celebrity chefs, to demonstrate how to cook various dishes using Thermador appliances. For example, Tim Love, a chef who owns three restaurants in Forth Worth, Texas, shows how to cook Fried Spinach and Braised Lamb Shanks. Bradley Ogden, a James Beard Foundation-recognized chef who runs Bradley Ogden’s restaurant at Cesar’s Palace in Las Vegas, talks about his cookbook and shows consumers around his restaurant’s kitchen.

For a kitchen appliance company that’s been around for over seven decades, Thermador is hardly old-fashioned in its approach to digital marketing.