Digital Asset Management - Branding - Ideascape
Building a House of Brands: Whirlpool Corporation’s Blueprint for success, from Gilbane Report - Content, Computing, and Commerce - Technology & Trends, August, 2005, Leonor Ciarlone
Whirlpool’s digital asset management architecture provides the enterprise pillar to protect and expand brand value.
Recognizing the Problem
What were the symptoms in your organization that brought this need to your attention?
Manual, laborious processes prone to human error increased the potential for distributing incorrect product images or model numbers. Irritating our trade customers or confusing our consumers is not an option for a leader in the industry.” – Bill Langbehn, Director of Creative Works
“We were responding to an average of 10 or more phone requests per day for images and burning anywhere from 10-40 CDs per week, some with only one file. – Tanyia Coleman, Digital Content Coordinator
How did you identify what specific content technologies were appropriate?
“We wanted a totally digital environment. Before the DAM implementation, the best-case scenario for fulfilling image requests was one day, assuming we could find it; three days was more the average. Speed to market was not the message we were sending to our customers.” – Jennifer Knapp, Manager of Photo Services
“Internally we have multiple agencies working on behalf of our brand. Externally, we have thousands of trade customers that advertise our products. Presenting a consistent brand image is of utmost importance and a robust digital asset management system is a critical tool to ensure it happens.” – Angie Seger, Marketing Communications Manager, Whirlpool Brand Marketing
“We have a constant churn of licensed products on shopkitchenaid.com whose availability depends on the nature and duration of branding agreements. We can’t afford Web site updating processes that are time-consuming. Having centralized and accessible repository of images for licensed products images is critical to our business processes. Greg Raklovits, Brand Manager, KitchenAid Portables and Licensed Goods.
The Opportunity
What did you want to be able to do by using content technologies for brand management?
"Creative Works is committed to our ‘anytime, anywhere, anyway’ mission for meeting internal and external customer needs. To do so, we need to manage brand messaging by ensuring that accurate images are delivered in the correct manner to the correct channel. This level of knowledge was anecdotal and centralized by product line and brand before the implementation of our enterprise DAM strategy. We set out to fix it.” – Gregg Crandall, Content and Solutions Consultant
“Trade customer relationships are critical to Whirlpool’s market success. We want to consistently serve and showcase our trade customers with quality images for branded co-promotions and product demonstrations to ensure global brand consistency for all parties across all mediums.” – Jennifer Knapp, Manager of Photo Services
Product Selection
What considerations shaped your choice of an enterprise solution?
“We knew that the scalability, extensibility, and manageability of the DAM system would be critical to our success. We estimated 600 users in Year 2 and topped 5,000 by Year 2.”
– Arsalan Siddiqui; Technical Analyst, Creative Works
“Usability, security and the flexibility to support multiple user levels – from the casual business user to brand Webmasters to external advertising agency and trade customer representatives – was paramount.” Gregg Crandall, Content and Solutions Consultant
Which vendors did you select and what were the overriding considerations?
“Artesia was clearly a winner. Creating the CWDL self-service Web site was out of the box for the most part; any customization was straightforward. The product is expandable, accessible and has a strong Java API. I give the product 4 out of 5 stars.”
– Arsalan Siddiqui; Technical Analyst, Creative Works
Why not Open Source?
I'm curious, I read the study and it seemed that there were no feedback loops for customers? In other words, it was a push system and not interactive. I would think since Whirlpool is a big consumer brand, they would be interested in open innovation (Why Can't Business Learn From Open Source And Blogging? ).
I also wonder why Whirlpool did not use open source since some of the biggest net businesses: google, yahoo, and amazon as well as non-profits: the mozilla foundation, and ourmedia.org use it. I wonder what Whirlpool knows about software that google, amazon, etc. do not? I tossed in ourmedia.org because they and the mozilla foundation use Drupal, which is the core of our Ideascape tool.
Bonus: User Created Content, Business Blogging, Ideas.
On the other hand, As Seth says, The problem with lawyers (part of an ongoing series). Why is it that big companies always seem to approach problems from the wrong side?