Chervon was struggling with aligning product content beyond the different acquired brands and regions, establishing a “common language” and providing transparency throughout the commercial launch process. Due to a fragmented regionally driven commercial launch process as well as the diverse digital experience landscape (Shopify, Magento, Drupal) originating from acquisitions, the main focus of the project was to align on a global to local commercial launch process and utilize the gained transparency in communicating rich brand content via an intuitive Google-like marketing self-service portal towards the broader organization to have real-time access to approved brand and sales material.
Connecting the global marketing and engineering organization with the regional brand teams was a constant challenge due to product data issues and inaccuracies. The process heavily relied on Excel and Dropbox to share files and information across the whole enterprise. Teams within the company operated in silos, which meant that requests for product information triggered several rounds of back-and-forth communication, resulting in wasted time and increased frustration.
With rolling out a global PIM & PLM solution, an initial alignment was achieved. However, these solutions still fell short when providing all internal and external stakeholders with easy, intuitive access to product information and brand content.
Requirements
The system was also designed to allow the company to send product information directly to sales and retail partners in the future. Chervon’s primary requirement was to implement a single platform that would empower their marketing and sales and channel teams to find and access rich product information and digital assets effortlessly.
Additional requirements included:
- A central source for marketing and brand content for distributors as well as marketing and regional sales teams
- Multichannel publication capabilities
- Functionality that would lower localization costs for core marketing content
- Support the creation of datasheets and non-creative content such as catalogs and price lists
Chervon ultimately selected Contentserv’s marketing portal to serve as a business solution for marketing teams to meet these needs across all brands and region.
Implementation
Contentserv partnered with RG.Experience, a leading Asia product experience partner, for building a digital content strategy and roadmap and implementing and rolling out the Contentserv solution throughout the three regions and more than four global brands. With the Contentserv cloud-based offering, the team was able to offer an MVP prototype to the regional organizations within a few weeks.
As a result, the SKIL EMEA team decided to replace their legacy solution. During this four-month base implementation, the solution team helped Chervon shift several core data enrichment activities. From the purely regional onboarding process towards the HQ team reducing local workload, freeing up the regional marketing organization to focus instead on marketing messaging and benefits and upsell potential via bundles and sets.
The global rollout
The SKIL EMEA template was used to roll out a similar experience towards the US subsidiaries, which before did not have any PIM / portal solution. They were now able to benefit from the rich experience and best practices of their European colleagues. With different GTMs and channel partners, the US organization, in return, could extend and further professionalize the way Chervon approached the commercial launch process.
Within 2020 the US brands Ego, SKIL US, SKIL and Flex onboarded their product content, established a new process with the Nanjing back office team and went live with their sales portal utilizing and expanding the existing solution template.
Results that matter
By adopting Contentserv’s marketing portal globally, Chervon centralized rich product content and brand assets for every region and established product experience management standards for all current and future brands. Together with Contentserv’s intuitive Google-like self-service portal, the marketing team enabled all of Chervon’s stakeholders to easily find and access product, marketing and regional sales content at all times.
The self-service portal enabled the sales teams to download about six different layouts of point-of-sale collateral from labels to a personalized basic product catalog in real-time over 35 languages. In addition, they integrated in real-time into their Magento brand.com setup reducing error-prone manual onboarding of content.
- POS material is generated in over 35 languages in real-time with the Contentserv print capabilities
- Chervon aligned four brands and two regions (NA & EMEA) shifting data enrichment efforts to the global team while freeing up channel teams to focus on more personalized content
- Over 500 sales and channel sales employees have access to the distributor and sales marketing portal
