Philips crafts a new digital identity.
Global manufacturer uses Adobe solutions to simplify, standardise and formalise digital marketing.
90%
Cost reduction
while accelerating translation
Objectives
Standardise digital experiences across local and global properties
Support collaboration among teams to better respond to customer and business needs
Create a data-driven marketing culture
Results
Transformed properties that receive 1.4 billion annual views
Accelerates translation and cuts costs by 90%
Automates daily updates, including product images and videos
Encourages a data-driven, test-and-learn culture
Remodeling, brick by brick
The mind of Joost van Dun is always creating. In his role as .Com Manager within the Corporate Experience department at Philips, he and his team are tasked with responding to the company’s most complex digital needs with elegant, imaginative solutions. At the end of every day, he’s already thinking about the challenges he’ll face tomorrow.
When Philips, one of the world’s most respected technology and manufacturing companies, wanted to build a new digital platform from the ground up and empower its more than 500 content authors stretched across regions, van Dun jumped at the opportunity. “Transforming digital marketing was a natural next step for Philips and one of the most exciting assignments of my career,” says van Dun.
The company wanted to standardise how dynamic content was created, delivered and localised to promote its products and brand. At the same time, Philips wanted more controls in place to help ensure that communications are compliant with brand standards and are of the highest quality.
Adding to the challenge was the scope of the project. Philips’ digital presence reaches customers in 79 markets and 38 languages and its 1 million pages receive over 260 million visits and 1.4 billion views annually. The company also wanted to measure, manage, update and enhance all of its properties—as well as make them available across mobile devices. To achieve this, Philips needed a fully integrated platform to bring everything together.
“When we started the project in 2013, mobile and tablet represented 15% of traffic,” says van Dun. “Since then, we’ve seen nearly 50% of our traffic from mobile or tablet. In hindsight, our choice to adopt technologies that supported responsive design capabilities, like those in Adobe Marketing Cloud, was the smartest choice we made, especially as we work to serve diverse customers worldwide.”
“Adobe Experience Manager Managed Services is a smart solution that enables us to deliver new information and experiences faster, as well as helps ensure that every page a customer visits is true to the Philips brand.”
Joost van Dun
Com Manager, Corporate Experience, Philips
Snapping everything together
Using Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Analytics and Adobe Target, Philips built the backbone of its new digital marketing platform to deliver continuous, personal experiences tailored to the context of each customer. The mix of solutions was hand-picked to enable the company to seamlessly test, measure and deploy modular content across global sites. Additionally, working with one solution partner helped to provide a single point of support from the platform’s initial implementation to going live and then to the present day.
“Integration among Adobe solutions provides authors, marketers and brand teams all of the capabilities to get enhanced content and experiences to market quickly,” says van Dun. Integrations with third-party solutions were also used to help authenticate platform users and capture audience data.
At the front-end of its creative workflows, Philips uses templates built with Adobe Experience Manager as the framework for each page. Now focused on a mobile-first approach to design, combined with a steady regiment of AB tests, the company created a common look and feel across the pages that customers navigate. The Assets capability within Experience Manager also helps to manage and standardise page elements so, as new pages are developed, authors can simply drag and drop them into existing templates.
In addition, using dynamic media capabilities within Adobe Experience Manager, product images are delivered on-demand and are optimised according to screen size and bandwidth. Video is also streamed to web and mobile properties, driving consumer engagement. Overall, Philips is eliminating barriers to sale from any screen.
“It helps us pre-build page elements so sites have consistency and content can be reuse across several pages,” says van Dun. “Adobe Experience Manager Managed Services is a smart solution that enables us to deliver new information and experiences faster, as well as helps ensure that every page a customer visits stays true to the Philips brand. It’s like building blocks for adults.”
By also integrating Adobe Experience Manager with its product information management (PIM) system and automating product updates, Philips has saved significant time and resources. The PIM system contains more than one million product descriptions, images and videos imported into Experience Manager. These descriptions and visuals automatically generate product detail pages. Now, more than 30,000 product descriptions are updated daily.
The decision to go with Adobe Experience Manager Managed Services supports the Philips team as they look to take its cloud-based IT strategy further. This model enables the company to implement the latest features for development and service delivery, while reducing total cost of ownership.
Overall, the company has migrated 1.4 million pages and 350 users to the new service through a smooth 30-minute transition.
“Our choice to adopt technologies that supported responsive design capabilities, like those in Adobe Marketing Cloud, was the smartest choice we made, especially as we work to serve diverse customers worldwide.”
Joost van Dun
Com Manager, Corporate Experience, Philips
Hub of everything
Central management helps provide marketing and brand managers governance over what gets incorporated into pages and who has authoring rights. This also helps ensure that everyone who is adding content to pages is appropriately trained on company and content standards, proper approval procedures are followed and that any issues can be tracked back to a single user so he can receive further training.
Philips has applied this rigour everywhere it operates digitally. “Whether we’re looking at a specific region, product page or the global site, we follow the same process,” says van Dun. “Experience Manager also dramatically simplified localising content. We can feed them an image or article, they can quickly customise it to boost relevance and then the new information is posted.” In addition, van Dun has calculated that content translations through Experience Manager and integration with the Clay Table connector, have cut translation times by up to 75% and reduced translation management costs by up to 90%.
Better responsiveness and faster localisation has also helped the company connect with customers beyond its landing and product pages. For example, when the King of Thailand died in 2016, it was customised among local businesses to present webpages in black and white to show respect. After it happened, marketers in Amsterdam collaborated with Philips’ Thai office to transform the entire site to express sympathy to the country’s people within a day.
“Technology is about creating a personal connection and showing that we care,” says van Dun. “Adobe Experience Manager enabled us to change the local site quickly to connect with our audience.”
“Having Adobe Marketing Cloud, a disciplined testing strategy and the right people in place to initiate change have all been key components to make the leap to becoming a more data-driven organisation.”
Joost van Dun
Com Manager, Corporate Experience, Philips
Test everything, test often
Critical components to the company’s new deployment model include Adobe Analytics and Target. “It’s wonderful that we can put out all of this new content quickly, but what makes it really special is that we can see exactly how customers respond and refine experiences accordingly,” says van Dun.
Using Analytics, marketers within Philips can tag content and measure how customers interact with pages, as well as gather a complete picture of customer journeys. Measuring KPIs, such as buy lead conversion and self-service interactions, helps clarify how customer journeys are driving revenues. These learnings are then fed back into its testing strategy using Target to drive site improvements.
For example, testing ‘Buy’ buttons on its United States property revealed that one variation increased clicks by 20%. Once the improvement was uncovered, buttons were quickly updated on the site and across global pages. Similar updates previously took eight to nine weeks to complete—with Adobe solutions, it only takes days or hours.
Testing also helps marketers balance complex design decisions to achieve specific results across markets. For example, a slide-in call to action increased newsletter signups by 635% in tested markets. However other tests have shown that removing distractions can also benefit the bottom line. Eliminating auto-play on video increased product views by 15.85% while replacing a banner carousel with navigation cards on mobile increased product views by 24.46% and purchases at Philips by 27.97%. Adobe solutions allow marketers to more easily weigh the benefits of different changes and deploy variations without relying on IT.
At the helm of the digital platform is a hybrid team of Product Owners, Optimisation Managers and Analytics Specialists—internally known as POOMA. It’s now their job to use the information collected with testing and analytics to optimise sites, as well as push back on site changes driven by opinion, not data. No new page or experience on Philips properties now goes live without being validated by testing and analytics.
“As a company built on innovation, it’s easy for us to get excited about a new idea,” says van Dun. “Having Adobe Marketing Cloud, a disciplined testing strategy and the right people in place to initiate change have all been key components to make the leap to becoming a more data-driven organisation.” Already, the company has trained nearly 3,000 employees on the basics of Adobe Analytics—including defining KPIs and understanding success metrics—helping to build a common language and awareness for data.
“We have a strong foundation to empower our employees to reach our customers worldwide with rich, relevant experiences on mobile and other devices,” says van Dun.
“It’s wonderful that we can put out all of this new content quickly, but what makes it really special is that we can see exactly how customers respond and refine experiences accordingly.”
Joost van Dun
Com Manager, Corporate Experience, Philips
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