The Tesco challenge: Managing marketing more efficiently

With an extensive and rapidly growing portfolio of own-label brands, Tesco recognized that greater control of their marketing activity was critical for improving their operational efficiency.

There were two key challenges:

1. Managing marketing collateral
2. Managing marketing operations, especially packaging and design

Tesco's own-label brands had hundreds of items of brand collateral associated with them – artwork, logos, photographs, pack shots, cutter guides, templates, guidelines, trademarks, regulatory information, and so on – all of which must be applied consistently and kept up to date across the business.

Launching hundreds of new products each month was a difficult and complex task because it was being done manually.

Multiple external organizations were involved in the process, including suppliers, design agencies, repro houses and printers. Designing and producing the packaging required crucial real-time collaboration. For operations on this scale, every day of cycle time improvement and every percentage point of cost saving could make a significant difference.

The solution: BrandDirector

The client selected Jam Warehouse's BrandDirector to centralize, store and track the usage and dissemination of its marketing, packaging and design collateral across the business. BrandDirector's workflow module was then used to automate and manage the thousands of concurrent packaging projects that were running throughout the business internationally.

Results

BrandDirector has delivered the following benefits:

• Improved efficiency in packaging development while maintaining brand integrity
• A single, central, easily searchable library of up-to-date versions of digital assets
• More efficient and effective communication between Tesco and its partners in the packaging design process
• Capability to brief, select and approve contributions from a broad base of suppliers
• Thorough tracking of projects as they evolve
• Facilitated management of tasks and critical paths
• Easier identification of cost-saving opportunities
• Significant savings in time and administrative effort

Jeremy Lindley, Tesco's Head of Design, says:

"By taking control of our marketing assets, we are driving out significant administration, distribution and agency costs. By automating our marketing processes, we are reducing time to market, further cutting costs and greatly improving efficiency.

"Within Tesco, BrandDirector is used across the business to centralise, store and control a wide and ever-increasing array of marketing collateral: packaging images, design templates, brand guidelines, point of sale templates and promotional material. Additionally, the end-to-end process tools allow us to manage hundreds of new product development and packaging projects concurrently, from initial conception, product and supplier selection, pack design and artwork creation, through to launch and beyond that to the evaluation stage."