Taking a top Indian brand global.
Apollo Tyres expands its global reach with websites built on Adobe Experience Manager.
34
Regional websites in 19 languages
Objectives
Increase brand awareness to support global expansion
Establish consistent experiences for growing international audiences
Deliver frequent updates and fast loading times to improve website experiences
Results
Manage 34 B2C websites representing 3 brands, 27 markets and 19 languages on one platform
Accelerate speed of content creation and site updates
Empower regional teams to take control of local websites
Reduce infrastructure costs and total cost of ownership by consolidating websites
Sandeep Singh Bhadwal has a first-row seat watching a brand turn international. For 45 years, Apollo Tyres has been a trusted name in India as a top tyre manufacturer. When Bhadwal began working for the company ten years ago, Apollo Tyres was taking major steps into international markets, including acquisition of the Netherlands-based Vredestein brand.
He contributed to the company’s rebranding efforts to find an identity that would fuel expansion around the world. Later, Bhadwal worked on global marketing out of the London office where he was exposed to the importance of having an integrated marketing and systems-driven approach to manage a growing organisation’s digital footprint across multiple teams, geographies, and brands at the same time.
“People and businesses are global today,” explains Bhadwal, now the Global Digital Manager at Apollo Tyres. “Someone might see an Apollo Tyres billboard in London and then see another sign as they step off the plane in Mumbai or Munich. We want their impression of our brand to be consistent. The same is true in the digital space. We want to create consistent, meaningful experiences that reinforce customer relationships anywhere in the world.”
While 65% the company’s revenue still comes from sales in India, Apollo Tyres continues to expand globally with operations in more than 30 markets across Europe and the Americas. When the chief marketing officer emphasised the importance of creating a strong digital foundation to support global expansion, Bhadwal knew that meant rethinking the company’s ability to operationally manage and deliver digital brand experiences. This required architechting new infrastructure, from underlying martech technology and tools to consumer facing websites.
The vast majority of customers buy tyres through dealers, but websites remain an essential part of the pre-purchase journey for many customers. In certain growing markets, as many as 70% of potential buyers survey the web to identify suitable tyres for their vehicles during their pre-purchase journey. A significant share of these users rely upon information provided by manufacturers on their websites as a source they can trust to make purchase and service related decisions throughout their life cycle.
“As our company continues to grow its international presence, we need to make sure that we have consistent branding, fast load times, are mobile first and are able to serve excellent customer experiences on our websites,” says Bhadwal. “We had multiple considerations and challenges, from integrations with legacy ERP systems to design customisations to suit multiple business categories, relative ease of adoption among geographically diverse marketing teams and a general reassurance around product roadmap and ease of use. After researching solutions, Adobe Experience Manager Sites and Adobe Experience Manager Assets Managed Services seemed like the right fit as an enterprise solution that supports global websites.”
“Once one site is set up, we can easily roll out changes across geographies. We’re reducing infrastructure costs and total cost of ownership by having a single platform for all of our websites.”
Sandeep Singh Bhadwal
Global Digital Manager, Apollo Tyres
Consistent experiences across regional websites
Apollo Tyres worked with partner Deloitte Digital to implement Experience Manager Sites for 34 websites in 19 languages. The Multi-Site Management capabilities improved control over the websites while giving regions the flexibility to make their own changes.
With the Multi-Site Management capabilities, all regional websites are now based on a single master site and content is stored in a common repository. Initial content for go live was authored by partner Tekno Point/DEPT and translations were managed by global partner RWS. Local teams now manage ongoing updates themselves, which allows for locally contextualised messaging to connect better with culturally diverse audiences and local marketing preferences. Changes to templates, logos, and other assets are pushed out centrally to maintain standardised and uniform branding everywhere in the world.
“Once one site is set up, we can easily roll out changes across geographies,” says Bhadwal. “We reduce infrastructure costs and total cost of ownership by having a single platform for all of our websites.”
The intuitive UI and drag-and-drop functionality is so easy to use that even small teams can quickly learn to manage their own content without extensive training. “Initial feedback from training has been very positive,” says Bhadwal. “After just a few hours of guidance, employees say that they feel confident working with Experience Manager Sites by themselves.”
Connecting with customers digitally
As the first touchpoint for many new Apollo Tyres customers, the new websites deliver a seamless experience for customers. Experience Manager Sites makes it easier to update content and most of the product information is pulled dynamically through API integrations, allowing the team to keep the websites up-to-date.
With limited technical and design interventions needed at a local market level and the latest product information synced directly, local/regional marketing teams have more bandwidth to create engaging content and scale up frequency of activations and digital campaigns, helping them draw in even more customers across India and around the world.
Experience Manager Assets includes Dynamic Media capabilities that will allow Apollo Tyres to automatically create renditions of images in the right size, format and properties for any display. This eliminates time spent creating and uploading multiple renditions of assets and will make any localisation efforts much more straightforward.
“We need to be visible, present and consistent with our brand across digital spaces. Experience Manager gives us the tools that we need to attract potential customers and grow our business internationally.”
Sandeep Singh Bhadwal
Global Digital Manager, Apollo Tyres
Digital foundation for the future
While Apollo Tyres primarily aims to use its websites to share information and improve brand awareness with customers, working with Experience Manager sets a strong digital foundation for future web experiences.
The company plans to integrate with other offerings from Adobe Experience Cloud, including tools like Adobe Target to better understand how to optimise experiences for digital customers. If the company decides to add features such as e-commerce, online bookings or marketing campaign functionality, Experience Manager supports these integrations as well.
“Digital is critical for the future of Apollo Tyres,” says Bhadwal. “We need to be visible, present and consistent with our brand across digital spaces. Experience Manager gives us the tools that we need to attract potential customers and grow our business internationally.”
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