Digital Brand Content Supply Chain

Rise of Digital Brand Touchpoints

Technology driven fragmentation of media landscape caused a proliferation of digital brand touchpoints and digital screens through which brands must reach customer. However, the size of change in marketing environment hasn't been met with adequate change in internal resources of companies. Ballooning number of digital touchpoints exponentially outnumbered internally assigned personnel to manage them.

Branding Global Value Chain

As it is based on a single global creative that needs to be replicated across markets, global brand campaign execution is a geographically dispersed organisational activity whose success requires brilliant implementation of materials conforming to established brand guideline. Execution brings together countries, vendors and partners working as virtual teams that span both geographical and time zones in intense time sensitive coordination and communication tasks.

Feeding The Feed

In a world of perpetuating fragmenting environment of digital brand touch-points with continuously refreshing algorithm driven feeds and disappearing messages, keeping brands alive in customers’ minds is harder then ever. Online fans expect new brand content each time they refresh their feeds, so keeping brands alive in their minds, means keeping brands constantly present in their newsfeeds. Constant communication stream requires accelerated brand content creation and distribution capability.

Organisational Complexity

All global organisations are built around combinations of global products, brands, or customer groups; regional or local geographic market units; and global operating and support functions. Global organisations that mostly are the owners and creators of global brands, in the process of 'going global' have became so complex that, their organisational structure itself creates complexity costs in term of time lost, loss of agility and speed.

Brand Consistency Imperative

One of the pillars of global brand and global branding execution is brand consistency – consistent application of brand materials across touchpoints and geographies. Consistency in communication towards consumers is critical to maintaining the strength and favourability of consumers' brand associations. Consistency in global branding comes down to making sure that your brand is communicated consistently across all channels and touchpoints between your brand and your consumer.

Global to Local Execution

Centralized digital brand management and execution creates at least two types of problems : lack of capacity at headquarters - for example in digital production or digital brand content creation and lack of process - ways of working both within headquarters but more importantly with countries and markets that these central teams are supposed to serve

Digital Brand Content Supply Chain

To make sure that your brand content is at the right place at the right time along the digital customer journey across your network of countries, retail partners, vendors and their physical and digital properties you need a high performing digitalised and digitised brand content supply chain in place. We can help you design, architect, optimise or operate it.

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Who is it for?

Global organisations and members of the global brand and global creative function who are in charge of ensuring brand presentation, activation and brand consistency across the web of digital brand touchpoints in multiple geographies. Global brand and global brand creative professionals who are embroiled in ambiguous global brand execution, spending days in email chains, asset chases and late nights at the office.

Global brands with centralised brand management and execution experiencing delays, frustrations and arguments in regards to headquarter level fulfilment of country brand request. Brand professionals in countries who are missing out on market opportunities due to HQ inability to timely provide requested brand content materials.

When is it needed?

In case of global brands with centralised brand management and execution, flows of digital assets and campaign information between headquarters and countries are in most cases scattered across chain of emails. If you're spending days email micromanaging and 'firefighting' just to provide your account or retail partner with brand approved instagram post or banners for the scheduled global launch you need our help.

Getting digital brand assets on time and on brand shouldn't be a rocket science. However, for large corporates and global brands with global-to-local execution model, last minute changes of global creative, missed emails, wrong files, platforms without access credentials and many other problems - it becomes just that.

What do we do?

We take a top-level view of the way(s) your brand content is created and managed throughout your organisation until it reaches the screens of the consumer. Seeking out inefficiencies and problems, we take a deep dive into locations where its created, how and where is it initially stored in terms of formats and solutions, how it is distributed further and what happens to it across all organisational levels until it ends up being implemented.

Working our way up from channels and digital touchpoints you currently use, mapping out potential missed opportunities, we work our way up, talking to all stakeholders involved to root out problems, challenges and perspectives on the organisational performance of brand content creation and management. We propose improvements in processes and resources.

How it works?

Your organisation is already somehow (mis)managing brand content. Based on our analysis and whether you accept our proposal, we'll go to re-design and re-architect how you manage brand content where and if needed by introducing new tailored digital technology solutions, processes and digital brand production resources. Our main mission is to save time, money and on frustration, while enabling better brand presence across the web of digital brand touchpoints.

Based on the optimal path between creation and implementation across different channels while taking into account different roles and stakeholders our solutions design will create accelerated brand content capability for the organisation, enabling faster deployment of brand content and continuous improvement of the supply chain. Successful implementation ensures scalability of operations to handle future increase of content needs.

How long it takes?

Depending on the size of the organisation, current state of brand content operations as well as collaboration dynamics and stakeholders' readiness for active participation complete project of analysis, design, architecture, implementation and optimization can last anywhere from six months to two years. Our engagement not necessarily ends with implementation of the new model as for some clients we continue to operate and monitor the new brand content supply chain.

In case only a certain part of the brand content operations needs improvement - for example creating a more price competitive and economically sustainable outsourced digital brand design resources for tier 2 and tier 3 content (adaptation and localisation) and integrating them into existing way of working, our engagement can be shorter - from three to twelve months. Our team can be hired for smaller, shorter type projects as well.

How much it cost?

Our full day of consulting work on projects of digital brand content supply chain optimization starts at 800 EUR. Based on the initial briefing of your needs or our initial research we'll provide you with milestone based cost estimate including clear success metrics. In case of hiring of digital brand production our average hour cost for digital brand production ranges between 50-70 EUR. However, depending on volume of work our hour rates for digital brand design can go down to 35 EUR / hour.

In case of total brand content supply chain redesign and management where considerable investments into tailored technology solutions are needed, pricing structure can be adapted to reflect both success or milestone achievement and long term time perspective of the investments. In this case costs will be spread throughout several years in for of subscription while any production costs can be set up as percentage of total budget.

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Architecting a digital brand content supply chain

SO DIGITAL architects, implements and optimizes a digital brand content supply chain for Nike EMEA Wholesale.com Digital Brand department to enable scalable brand growth across 14 WE markets e-retail network

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Transforming global brand marketing, creative and eCommerce function into a competitive advantage

(EMEA) 14 markets

brand digital wholesale. com team / brand creative team / digital supply chain team

(EMEA) 47 markets

in-house marketing / creative agency

(EMEA) 17 markets

in-house creative agency / HBO Max EMEA CS / marketing department teams (11 teams) / WarnerBros IT team

(WHQ)

CRM / Internal Comms team

Europe (10 markets)

media / integrated marketing / UGC / creative / local marketing team

WHQ

European D2C eCommerce Team

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Resource & Process Gap : Centralising Global Digital Brand Management & Execution

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Testimonials

"Having your brand represented well on a big retailer such as Foot Locker is a key priority. To deliver such a project, we needed a partner who would understand the needs both of the consumer and the brand. We’ve achieved a great end result: a brand page that serves as the authentic sport destination for the consumer, on and off the field of play, aligned with both Nike and Foot Locker business visions."

Gregory Pek

WE Digital Brand Manager Nike EMEA