Brief: The Martell brand had initiated a new brand position in 2018 to ‘Be Unapologetic and Audacious’ which required a new brand look and feel across all comms. A large part of the new brand position was to showcase people in the world that emulated the new brand position with what they do for a living. New editorial content across all digital outputs globally was core to this initiative and a large part of the new website brief, with the requirement of new content being promoted on all digital outputs on a monthly basis minimum.
Challenge: Aside from the brand positioning evolving and a new look and feel for the brand being developed, Pernod Ricard mandated new technical specifications to be respected by all brands in all markets across all their websites due to a large IT audit they were working on in parallel. This meant that we had to move all 17 Martell websites from Drupal to WordPress regardless. In terms of content variation, it was critical that the UX worked for best practices for all markets as well as their language not breaking the site’s structure during localisations in the roadmap.
Result: The key result was to ensure market team buy-in of the new design of the site. We received a strong investment from markets to utilise the website due to the ability for them to add their own market specific editorial content to their site as well as the CMS being way more user friendly than Drupal’s previously. Successful launch of key markets China and US in the first year which was key in the roadmap rollout. Continuous evolutions of the international site act as a portfolio for markets to encourage evolutions to be incorporated to their sites using the international site as a test & learn showcase platform.
Work: The website was bench tested in development in multiple languages to ensure no breakage during build before localisation. The site was split in access enabling markets to control content in the editorial sections of the site, whereas Product, History were managed by Brand HQ only. This enabled the HQ team to ensure key information about the brand’s legacy and product information were not tampered with. The localisation of the version for China was scoped and tested with a prototype site in UX phase prior to development to ensure the site’s development for China didn’t impact the roadmap deadlines.
This is a key example of a feature on the website we incorporated to gain market insight from consumers in that market about which cognacs they’d be interested in consuming. It enabled us to curate site content around those products and re-evaluate the correct content hierarchy for that market, based on actual data along with sales results and market team knowledge of their market.