Modern consumers value digital brand experiences, with 86 percent of buyers willing to pay more for personal, meaningful, and tailored interactions. Businesses will need to satisfy the growing demand for more engaging online content and brand experiences to maintain a competitive edge. Mars, Incorporated, the world’s leading manufacturer of chocolate, chewing gum, mints, and fruity confections, wanted the ability to develop new online experiences for its customers quickly while being mindful of consistency, maintenance, and costs. Moreover, it needed to unify all its disjointed, one-off website implementations into a single approach for the entire corporation. With the help of EPAM, a leader in digital transformation services and product engineering, Mars chose Acquia Site Factory to realize its vision of the “starter kit.” Together, EPAM and Mars earned the 2021 Acquia Engage Award for “Leader of the Pack: Retail” by demonstrating an advanced level of functionality, integration, performance, and user experience.
What is a “Starter Kit?
A starter kit is an ever-growing toolkit of templates, front-end display components such as carousels, accordions, newsletters, and reviews, and a library of pre-built integrations. These features offer a quick and easy starting point for marketers, developers, and IT operations teams to create and deploy digital products and services. By using the shared, configurable themes and consistent structures of a starter kit, site builders can effortlessly apply brand-specific design guidelines to web pages while preserving the individual identity of pages when needed. Additionally, all the sites will benefit from shared third-party services such as the “where-to-buy” functionality, CRM integrations, and social media integrations. With Acquia Site Factory’s infrastructure and tools, internal teams and third-party agencies can conveniently launch, manage, and enhance sites, and easily create online experiences that are accessible, performant, and device agnostic.
Benefits of Using a Starter Kit
A starter kit is invaluable for enterprises like Mars, which has diverse brands, as it can promote a more consistent and engaging customer experience across those brands. Just as someone ordering a latte at a global coffee chain would hope to enjoy the same quality regardless of location, users of digital brand experiences expect and benefit from consistency and uniformity across their digital interactions. Mars leveraged its starter kit to help its brands easily create, populate, and scale new sites with individual brand identities but recognizable experiences, independently and without the need for developer intervention. This uniformity of digital systems, processes, and experiences allowed Mars to deploy new sites across multiple markets rapidly while ensuring its world-class brand standards were maintained. Consumers responded with increased engagement, boosting organizational performance and revenue.
Starter kits also foster technology-sharing across the organization, streamlining efforts and reducing duplicate work. This approach brought Mars considerable savings, including a 40 percent drop in ongoing maintenance costs across all sites on the platform, as well as a 50 percent decrease in development time since new brand sites no longer required assembly from scratch. Ultimately, these savings will increase over time, because the efficiency scales with each new website deployed on the platform.
Leveraging the Right Partner
Businesses today need robust digital systems that can offer customers compelling and consistent brand experiences at scale. However, manually working to achieve brand consistency across sites and markets can be almost impossible for larger organizations, especially global ones. Many businesses suffer from siloed teams, but for Fortune 500 companies, inconsistency between departments or business units can result in losses of up to $31.5 billion per year. By working with a qualified partner and combining digital transformation and engineering experience with Acquia’s Site Factory infrastructure, companies won’t have to micromanage their teams for adherence to the minutiae of site-creation processes.
The author, Seth Gregory, is Director of Software Engineering and Head of Acquia and Drupal Practice, EPAM Systems.
