A leading European multinational corporation, the client is a global point of excellence in designing, developing, manufacturing sports footwear, apparel, equipment, accessories, and services. Headquartered in Sweden, it is on the brink of becoming one of the largest suppliers of athletic shoes and apparel. As of 2018, it has the employee strength of 20000. Known for sponsoring major sporting events across the globe, the client has contracted with more than 700 shops around the world.
Client Challenges
- To boost the ongoing web initiatives, the client roped in a vendor at the very end of their development cycle
- This ad-hoc implementation failed to meet the client’s objectives of cost and time reduction, compliance of the digital marketing projects and result-oriented digital marketing tasks
Subsequently, the client ended up battling with few fiercest of the challenges, such as-
- Inability to reduce security, operational and compliance issues in the existing architecture of the last-minute vendor
- Existing architecture’s failure to prevent the spread of non-compliance issues
- Acute lack of data analytics made it difficult for the client to make proactive investments in solutions which would keep them ahead of the competitive curve
Our Solutions
- Since the client was running many marketing activities when it came to us, our immediate concern was to stabilize their existing brand marketing platform and create a foundation for future builds
- We then focused on finding out avenues for pre-investing in those future builds to reduce the boot-up time of digital marketing projects, improve governance, and ease the maintenance
- In the next phase, we zeroed in on areas that had scope for improvement. Compliance in the technology adoption process, user experience, data migration, outsourced solutions, and infrastructure migration were put in that category
Based on that, we proposed the following recommendations to have better and quantifiable functional metrics:
- Content Management: Transfer the content authoring process from developer mode to a business operated mode
- Content Distribution: Augment codebase and caching strategy
- Search Enhancement: Allow the site to have a wide search ability and implement image search optimization
- Organic SEO: Implant SEO keywords in pages, drive SEO optimization though CMS
- Web Analytics: Strengthen the tagging capabilities to capture and track user behavior
- Social Media: Use social profile information to track user behavior and drive segmentation and personalization
- Product Catalog: Build an adapter to automatically process catalog updates in PID and DW
Once metrics were set, we proposed the following implementations to improve the IT strategy of the client-
A) Brand Marketing Platform (BMP):
- It was implemented by keeping in mind the future web initiatives. It:
- Cut down the time taken to launch a site by 25-30%
- Reduced the efforts required to launch a site by at least 20%
- Expanded the compliance score on 22 points for every site launched
- Built a reusable widget library that can strive for 60% reuse whenever new properties are launched
B) Consumer Mobile Platform (CMP):
- This mobile development and validation ensured-
- Close to 100% mobile enablement of existing web properties by a shared platform
- Early involvement in web property development to accelerate launch on a channel that is growing at a rate higher than 10% every year
- Improved experience on mobile devices
- Enhanced mobile penetration with existing consumers
C) Consumer Engagement Platform (CEP):
- It was designed to bring a surge in consumer engagement and loyalty by tapping the behavior data and whereabouts of customers. It offered:
- Almost 100% compliance to CCD guidelines
- Heightened consumer experience and amplified cross-site reference with a single sign-on
- Centralized consumer intelligence into CRM to drive segmentation
- Personalization based on segmentation
- Bigger user engagement with integrated loyalty management solutions
