The world-famous natural cosmetics company Weleda recently unveiled its new global online environment, built with Hippo CMS in collaboration with Hamburg-based implementation partner Satzmedia. Founded 90 years ago, the Swiss company with a presence in more than 50 countries faced the challenge of managing a multitude of regional web environments while building better lines of communication with their diverse target audiences.
“Because most of our regional offices had implemented their own web solutions, no less than 30 different CMS systems were being used within the Weleda group,” says Daniel Kugler, International Digital Marketing Manager at Weleda. “Beside that, the look and feel of these web pages was completely different.”
The main objective at the start of the project was therefore to achieve a uniform brand identity across all countries and channels. In addition, Weleda wanted to be able to serve its customers with personalized offers in the future. “Our audiences are very diverse,” says Kugler: “Personalization therefore was an important consideration for us when choosing a new content management system. This was one of the reasons we decided to choose Hippo.”
Different markets require different approaches: Whereas in Germany almost every single person in the relevant target groups knows Weleda, the brand is still fairly unknown in the US. On the other hand, Weleda doesn’t offer online sales on its own platform on the German market, while this is already an important sales channel in the US and the UK. “And we haven’t even talked about the legal differences yet”, says Kugler: “For our pharmaceutical products – which form the second most important pillar for our company – there are loads of different and locally varying legal regulations.”
The solution, therefore, was to find a platform that would allow for national website-launches on an international framework. By doing so, Weleda can profit from an international strategy while at the same time taking into account the specifics of regional markets. Because in Hippo CMS content is created in a modular way, websites can be put together flexibly depending on regional needs and requirements. This enables Weleda to design each national website individually.
Weleda seminar at dmexco in Cologne
On Thursday, September 15, 2016, 11: 00-11: 45 pm, Daniel Kugler (Weleda) and Filip Groß (Satzmedia) will talk about this project in detail during a seminar at the Digital Marketing Fair dmexco in Cologne. More information
