HOW FOCUS BRANDS BROUGHT TOGETHER AND STREAMLINED 7 BRANDS
Summary
Focus Brands has 7 well-known global food service brands, including Auntie Anne’s, Cinnabon, Jamba and more. As the #4 Food & Beverage Global Brand Licensor with over 100 products and more than a $1B in annual retail sales from their 6,000+ worldwide franchise locations, Focus Brands serves more than 12 million customers, with their headquarters in Atlanta, GA, USA.
Who is Focus Brands?
A leading developer of global, multi-channel food service brands. With 7 global brands, they serve more than 12 million customers.
Enterprise Breakdown:
1,200+ employees, headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia.
Revenue:
$1 billion.
Challenge:
Bringing together different brands and streamlining their content operations and processes.
Solution:
Implemented Digizuite DAM to be able to centralize all their assets in one single platform.
Results:
Eliminated repetitive work across the content creation, approval and management processes
Built foundation for machine learning and continuously-improving automation practices
Significantly reduced the risk of human error across the business
The Challenge
Having been acquired over a period of years, each of the 7 brands within the Focus Brands umbrella had its own processes, needs and standards. In order to better serve franchisees and, ultimately, customers all over the world, their assets needed to be centralized in a single DAM. They needed to help their creative department eliminate bottlenecks, and wanted to know which assets truly resonated with customers, so creating a feedback loop was imperative. While getting assets into all relevant channels seamlessly was key, so was the ability to continue to improve customer experiences.
The Solution
Focus Brands put together an advisory group of stakeholders from across the business to select a DAM – they knew they needed to centralize assets that were stored across 15 systems. Focus Brands is unique – for now – in that their DAM is set within the Customer Engagement team, but it would need to be fully embedded across the organization. Aligning people to new ways of working was just as important as selecting new technology, but the first step was truly understanding the business goals, said Thomas Korthuis, who serves as the Manager, Digital Content, within the Customer Engagement team.
“You need to understand what problem you are solving first before you go and find a software or a solution for it, and that sounds obvious, but it’s not always as obvious as that sounds – you need to define exactly how you are going to solve it, otherwise the software you introduce into your stack is going to exacerbate the problem.”
Once clear ‘whys’ had been established, the task of defining and enabling automations and integrations began, and the Digizuite DAM’s in-built and extensible library of both made it easy to streamline those processes, eliminating much of the administrative work, and reduced the risk of human error. For example, automated image recognition could identify celebrities in photos, and those images were then routed via the Legal department to ensure the right agreements and information were attached to the images. In addition, keywords were easily validated, once again removing a layer of manual work.
“An automation is there to make sure that you eliminate repetitive work…that was the reasoning for tackling certain integrations.”
The Results
The team conducted a content audit before going live, ensuring that all the assets going into the Digizuite DAM were up-to-date, and they tested the experience with internal pilot groups, so that they could get fast feedback and make improvements on the fly. They stress-tested the system with stakeholders from PR and Creative, and an immediate example of that real-time feedback was the need to enable file extensions for users to view and filter – a quick and easy change that improved the user experience with a simple configuration change.
“We got up and running quickly, everything worked brilliantly,” continued Thomas.
But simply going live was just the beginning – Thomas and the team at Focus Brands are continuing to evolve beyond their initial footprint, with further investment in machine learning and automation capabilities that will enable them to think bigger, making the DAM a resource across the entire business, with enthusiastic ambassadors across Focus Brands helping to drive that transformation.
Watch this on-demand recording of Thomas Korthuis sharing how Focus Brands up their customer lifetime value.
“The group that I can’t fail to mention is the support team at Digizuite because I’ve had to rely on them a few times. Having a very knowledgeable support group to go back to can’t be underestimated...”
Thomas Korthuis
Manager, Digital Content
Focus Brands
The key takeaway
Eliminated repetitive work across the content creation, approval and management processes