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Industry: Electronics Solution: Asset Management, Dynamic Imaging  Challenges:
Philips is one of the world's largest consumer electronics companies, selling everything from television sets and MP3 players to electric razors and baby monitors. Based in The Netherlands, Philips operates web sites in 57 countries that require mastery of 37 languages to present products in 28 main product categories. The company has extensively overhauled its online presence in the last three years, aiming to create competitive advantage by generating brand preference, simplifying the buying experience and building customer relationships. Best Practices:
Branded manufacturers have historically trailed retailers in developing sophisticated web sites, but that’s rapidly changing – especially at Philips. According to research cited by Philips, 45% of offline purchases are now influenced by online searches conducted before customers go into the store, making Philips global web sites critical to the success of the company’s many retail partners. Gilles Domartini, Vice President and General Manager for Online at Philips Consumer Lifestyle, has set a clear goal: Create competitive advantage for Philips by delivering a rich and immersive online experience that generates brand preference, simplifies the buying experience and builds consumer relationships. He has encouraged his team to design web solutions for Philips and key retailers that meet those goals, without regard to technical limitations, and then challenged the Philips IT staff to make those designs come to life. Domartini describes Scene7 as "the easiest sell ever" and said he decided to test Scene7 after hearing a single 45-minute presentation in early 2008. The immediate benefit would be simplifying asset management for product images, lifestyle images and visual "connectors" on the web sites Philips maintains in 57 countries. Philips product managers could upload a single master image, instead of having to laboriously pre-master images for every required size and resolution. Scene7 could serve master images on demand as a thumbnail on product selection pages, a medium-resolution image for product gallery and feature pages, or a high-resolution image in printable PDFs. Philips ran a three-month test of Scene7 in the summer of 2008. The test showed that Scene7 could easily integrate with Philips existing online structure, so the company rolled out Scene7 to all 57 countries at once in November 2008. Philips is now using Scene7 to support dynamic galleries where images grow larger as the shopper narrows the number of products on the page, image zoom, 360-degree image spin, localized pop-up tool tips, and even real-time rendering of images in product spec sheets. Although Philips has extensive internal IT resources, and could have worked on similar functionality in-house, Domartini said the clarity of Scene7's cost structure – and the comfort factor of going with a proven solution – made it easy for Philips to budget for the implementation and ongoing operation of advanced image management. Results: Implementing Scene7, along with other changes that enriched and simplified the online shopping experience at Philips, has directly contributed to ROI. At the end of 2008, page views per visit on Philips web sites had jumped 15 percent for the year, and site design satisfaction scores from users jumped to 86 percent from 74 percent. Brand advocacy scores moved up to 38 percent from 32 percent, and topped 40 percent in some countries. Most important: Click-through to the "buy" button now stands at a stellar 7 percent of unique visitors. Philips is continuing to explore new ways of utilizing the Scene7 feature set. Just recently, for example, Philips started placing photos on the screens of LCD televisions, instead of showing a blank display. These images can be customized for each market, and easily updated so that repeat shoppers see Philips TVs in a fresh way. The solution has already been deployed on Philips online shops in key markets. In the near future, Philips intends to add text overlays in photos, as well as hot spots. Scene7 functionality will also be extended to the tech support section of Philips web sites. One potential application: Customers trying to distinguish between the USB and HDMI ports (which look similar) on the back of their TV sets could zoom on a high-resolution image, and then hover with a mouse to get hot-spot pop-ups with the names for each port. "As you improve the online shopping experience, you get to a threshold of user satisfaction that is hard to quantify, but is a tipping point," said Domartini. "That tipping point is where shoppers feel they are getting enough knowledge of products – on both the emotional and rational levels – to make a purchase without physically viewing or touching the product. Scene7 is a powerful tool for creating this type of rich user experience. And because Scene7 is easy to implement and use, our team can spend less time on technical issues and more time developing new ways for Philips to connect with customers." |
