SUCCESS STORY
How Argentinian supermarket chain – La Anonima – accelerates their marketing strategy with DAM
Benefits
- Increased productivity in an extremely fast-moving product landscape.
- Improved collaboration with external agencies, delivering time-savings and faster time-to-market.
- Enhanced ability to deliver localized marketing strategy and materials.
About the customer
La Anonima is Argentina’s fourth-largest supermarket by market share. Boasting a proud 113-year history, the business has 165 stores in 85 cities, from Goya in the north to the world’s most southerly city, Ushuaia. Traditionally found in small and medium-sized towns, La Anonima serves local customers from neighborhood stores.
Six years ago, La Anonima started an e-commerce site for non-grocery items like tech and homeware. In 2020, they expanded this to include their full product range, including groceries.
Today, La Anonima promote their products through a combination of their e-commerce site, localized printed catalogs in-store, and via social media. This content is delivered by an in-house team, working in partnership with several external agencies.
“Before WoodWing, we had manual processes for catalog production and assets weren’t well managed. Everything we needed, we had to ask the agency for. I knew that represented an opportunity for improvement.”
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Challenge
Like many large supermarkets, La Anonima has efficient processes and IT solutions to manage the logistics of running a national chain of stores.
However, their marketing and e-commerce processes weren’t so streamlined. They were using outdated, inefficient systems within a complex, manual workflow. This was costing the business productivity, money, and speed-to-market.
This problem was exacerbated by Argentina’s highly regulated FMCG landscape, which often sees suppliers developing new versions of old products. This created a high turnover of products and their related assets, such as imagery, product descriptions, and prices.
Furthermore, the chain has different offers in different regions of the country, requiring localization of marketing materials like flyers and POS. La Anonmia was working with external agencies to manually produce five localized catalogs per week.
This is in addition to national campaign materials, and managing the timely processing of product information, imagery, and promotional artwork to their e-commerce store.
Stakeholders involved in this process include the ten-person central marketing team, store managers, merchandisers, and 20-30 agency staff.
Without a centralized repository for the storage, search, retrieval, and reuse of assets, staff were frustrated. It was harder than it should be to track down and identify the right assets for each job.
Additionally, collaborating with external agencies was more time-consuming than necessary, using outdated email and file transfer to sign-off artwork.
“We needed a single source of truth for our product imagery and artwork. We were very good at managing transactional data but not so good with creative assets.”
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Evaluation
When Santiago Passeron joined the business as Marketing Director, he spotted immediate room for improvement in the way they manage their assets.
Like most of the retail sector, supermarkets are realizing that assets need to be managed more strategically in the new era of e-commerce and multi-channel marketing.
However, not many supermarkets have solved this problem yet and there are few comparator organizations to benchmark against. So Santiago had to look outside the sector for inspiration.
On the recommendation of one of La Anonima’s creative agencies, Santiago reached out to a local software consultant with expertise in the publishing industry.
With the need to regularly produce complex, time-sensitive content across web and print, supermarket marketing workflows share similarities with publishing. So it made sense to draw on best practices from that sector.
Their consultant was able to present various software options for consideration - including WoodWing Assets – as well as recommending integrations to create a more streamlined creative workflow.
After considering 10-12 products, La Anonima decided WoodWing best met their needs for:
- A secure, scalable, and intuitive way to manage their assets.
- Integration with project management software and Adobe Creative Suite for collaborative content creation.
- Integrations with other software – such as PIM – to build automated workflows in the future.
- Creating a shared workspace for internal and external collaborators.
“Now we have WoodWing Assets, everyone knows where to get the assets they need and they know they’re the correct version. This is especially important with colleagues working remotely at the moment.”
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Results & benefits
- Increased productivity in an extremely fast-moving product landscape.
- Less time and energy wasted on frustrating tasks like tracking down images, version control, and file transfer.
- Improved collaboration with external agencies, delivering time-savings and faster time-to-market.
- Enhanced ability to deliver localized marketing strategy and materials.
- Capacity for further integrations to deliver more efficiencies and automation in the future.
- Invaluable centralized resource and single-source-of-truth for dispersed staff working from home during the pandemic.
- Improved locally produced marketing collateral thanks to access to approved and up-to-date marketing assets.
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