Seamless customer experience from first contact to purchase.
How growth and expansion into new markets inspired MANN+HUMMEL to rethink its web presence.
Established
1941
Employees: > 21,000 at over 80 locations
Ludwigsburg, Germany
www.mann-hummel.com/de/
A central content management system
for seven brand websites
Produkte:
Objectives
A uniform content management system (CMS) for seven brands and their designs.
In the course of expanding into new business areas, MANN+HUMMEL had to adapt to new types of customers and forms of communication.
Results
With Adobe Experience Manager, MANN+HUMMEL introduces a uniform CMS for all brands. Thanks to the Digital Foundation Kickstart modular system, the complexity was significantly reduced.
A holistic approach to lead management: MANN+HUMMEL has traced the entire customer journey from the customer’s perspective in order to be able to react precisely to customer needs.
Filtering finds a perfect audience
While ‘filtering’ is an everyday concept in digital marketing, it is also quite literally the basis of MANN+HUMMEL’s multinational manufacturing business. Clean mobility, clean air and clean water is the raison d'être for this Ludwigsburg-based company.
Traditionally a supplier of filtration solutions to the automotive industry, in recent years MANN+HUMMEL has expanded its portfolio to include the Life Sciences & Environment sector. This includes air purifiers for the filtration of viruses, allergens and fine dust, as well as membrane technologies for use in water filtration and wastewater treatment, particularly in sensitive process applications such as food production and biotechnology.
The continuous organic and inorganic expansion has also been accompanied by an increase in complexity: the family-owned company now employs more than 21,000 people worldwide, operates in different markets with different brands and serves an extremely diverse clientele with a wide variety of needs. To satisfy them, MANN+HUMMEL needed to be able to serve each target group the right product straight away.
Where do we stand? Where do we want to go?
But with a broader customer base comes completely new challenges. The “everyone knows one another” characteristic of the automotive supplier industry is not so easy to transfer to a target group that appeals not only B2B but also B2C buyers and the general public.
For the team led by Julia Remmele, Manager Corporate Digital Solutions at MANN+HUMMEL, it was clear that the customer approach had to be fundamentally rethought. “Customer contact is the starting point of every business. Marketing is not at the end of the chain - it is the interface with the market. This applies to new customers as well as to long-time buyers. That’s why we first took a close look at the websites of our seven major brands from a customer’s perspective,” Remmele explains. “Where are the initial touchpoints? Which waypoints do prospective customers use to move forwards? What needs have they got? After we had analysed lead management and customer journeys, we started with the implementation.”
„Customer contact is the starting point of every business. Marketing is not at the end of the chain - it is the interface with the market.“
Julia Remmele
Manager Corporate Digital Solutions, MANN+HUMMEL
Once such a process is initiated, one change immediately leads to the next - after all, seven brands comprise not only seven different designs, but also different content management systems, analysis tools and workflows. Moreover, each website was subdivided into numerous microsites and linked to different backend systems.
To unpiece the puzzle, MANN+HUMMEL set out to build a central web presence for each brand as “One Face to the Customer”, containing all digital functionalities of this brand as integrative components. This would allow for a largely standardised structure across brands behind the scenes.
“You can think of our seven brands as individual drawers in a cabinet,” explains Remmele. “My team and I also sat in such a drawer. But it was clear to us very quickly that it didn’t make sense to just rebuild our own brand, because we were all facing similar challenges and wanted to learn from each other. In this project - in terms of a unified customer journey - everyone has to pull together.”
A strong partnership pays off
Initially, this was easier said than done. “At the beginning we thought we would never be able to reconcile the different interests and demands of all seven brands,” Remmele recalls. That’s when it is helpful to get a fresh perspective. Together with digital agency Merkle, the project team were able to conclude that all the brands and their managers have the same goal: customer-orientated websites, intuitive tools and efficient workflows.
“We wanted a content management system that offered us security and stability, but also a high degree of flexibility to meet our diverse requirements. Merkle compared various systems for us and in the end we decided on Adobe Experience Manager,” Remmele tells us. “Because we rely on Magento for our online shops, we can offer our customers a truly seamless customer journey from the first contact to the purchase - and our employees also benefit from the smooth processes behind the scenes.”
„We wanted a content management system that offered us security and stability, but also a high degree of flexibility. That’s why we chose Adobe Experience Manager.“
Julia Remmele
Manager Corporate Digital Solutions, MANN+HUMMEL
Smooth processes also help strengthen the cooperation between digital agency and company. Merkle supported MANN+HUMMEL during the entire roll-out process - and after three successfully launched projects, the partners are now a well-established team. Specialists at the digital agency have also developed an innovative white-label concept for MANN+HUMMEL that combines brand consistency and flexibility. “We are using a modular approach for the new websites,” explains Remmele. “Each brand has its own special characteristics that we want to maintain. Using the white-label concept, we can keep two thirds to three quarters of all components uniform across brands, while the rest can be individually adapted. This significantly reduces the required effort and allows us to work considerably faster and more efficiently.” By the end of 2021, all brands will have gone live with a new web presence.
Delegating tasks ensures greater efficiency
The use of Adobe Experience Manager has already had a positive effect on daily work. In particular, cross-functional and international cooperation - for example in the creation, maintenance, management and display of content - has become much easier and more transparent thanks to intelligent workflows. To further this effort, MANN+HUMMEL also relies on Adobe Experience Manager Managed Services. “We are a filter manufacturer, not an IT company,” Julia Remmele explains. “Over the years, each brand has developed its own solutions to meet challenges. With the relaunch, we wanted to establish a clear distribution of tasks so that we can fully concentrate on our strengths.”
„We are a filter manufacturer, not an IT company. With the relaunch, we wanted to establish a clear distribution of tasks so that we can fully concentrate on our strengths. Adobe Experience Manager Managed Services supports us in this.“
Julia Remmele
Manager Corporate Digital Solutions, MANN+HUMMEL
And what’s next?
This leaves more time for what is really important: getting to know the new target groups and being able to respond to customer needs in the best possible way. In order to be best positioned here, MANN+HUMMEL wants to integrate Adobe Analytics into its workflows next. “So far, we have concentrated on migrating the websites to Adobe Experience Manager,” Remmele explains. “In the next step, we will set up dashboards using Adobe Analytics in order to learn from user behaviour on our websites - and to be able to offer ever better and more individual solutions.”