In December 2013, Toshiba announced the acquisition of OCZ Technology, Inc. for $35 million. Several weeks later, Japanese giant completed the acquisition and rebranded the company “OCZ Storage Solutions – A Toshiba Group Company”. This brand continued to exist until recently, when Toshiba moved to streamline its branding position on the market.
We got in touch with the OCZ PR team to learn that “OCZ Storage Solutions – A Toshiba Group Company” is no more, with the parent company positioning “OCZ” as its sub-brand, similar to the branding segmentation between Kingston and HyperX, or Micron and Crucial. OCZ will continue to exist as an independent brand, wholly owned by Toshiba. In a way, we view this as a natural progression of integration between the two company, and also a reaction to the recently announced deal between Western Digital and SanDisk. Toshiba will push both brands to the market in order to achieve higher brand presence.
After all, this was the strategy created originally by the Japanese companies, such as Panasonic and Technics, and Sony and Aiwa in the late 1970s, and eatly 1980s (with the brand separation continuing to this date).
This example was given by the newly incorporated 360 Service Agency PR team:
- Old branding:
- Company: OCZ Storage Solutions – A Toshiba Group Company
- Series: Vector 180
- New branding:
- Company: Toshiba
- Series: OCZ Vector 180
Furthermore, the SKUs (Stock Keeping Units) are going to change in order to simplify the product codes:
- Vector 180 -> VT180
- Trion 150 -> TR150
- RevoDrive 400 -> RD400
OCZ RD400, formerly known as ‘RevoDrive 400’ marks Toshiba’s entrance into the fast-growing NVMe / M.2 market.
Given the surprising initial performance results by the RevoDrive 400, i.e. ‘OCZ RD400’, we look forward to completion of the rebranding process and bringing the RD400 to market. Expect a new OCZ website to launch soon, and that should drive the unified messaging going further, with OCZ focusing on the consumer market, with the high end enterprise storage relying on the stronger brand name.
