Objective
Volvo Car Corporation (VCC) has always been a significant player in a competitive global market. But with the reinvention of the brand and product portfolio in the late 1990’s, Volvo transformed into a truly aspirational lifestyle car company. This kind of success is only achieved through hard work and tight control of the brand.
Yet how do you begin to exercise this control and consistency when you have marketing activity spanning more than 50 national sales companies and thousands of dealerships worldwide? Further, with so many assets, and so many global users, how can VCC achieve substantial cost benefits along the way?
Solution
Working with the global marketing team in Gothenburg as a retained agency since 2005, we’ve made a huge impact on the way Volvo handles its brand. Through the use of Freestyle’s ‘Partners’ asset management system, VCC is able to store, distribute and collate all of its marketing collateral, enabling the company to control assets through their vast agency network. More than 2,000 VCC and agency staff now have access to tens of thousands of marketing assets, 13,000 of which are downloaded each month! Partners is a highly evolved offering and the scale at which it is implemented within VCC is enormous, touching every element of the corporation’s marketing collateral.
Partners stores a wide range of content: images, video, audio, documents, as well as complete artwork files. A sophisticated set of search functions and security permissions means that authorised users can quickly and easily access the assets they need through a secure online environment. So whether you’re a print agency in New York working on the latest XC60 billboard in Times Square, or a VCC Marketing Manager in Germany building a PowerPoint presentation, you can instantly access the assets you need in the exact format for your requirements.
As well as the practical business of building marketing campaigns, Volvo Partners is a powerful planning tool and knowledge store. Vehicle launch schedules are planned and communicated around the world using an online Project Planning tool, where risks, actions, alerts and business intelligence can be communicated and acted upon in real time across the globe.
Freestyle manages the entire service for VCC, providing training, customer support and account management to ensure optimum performance of the system for Volvo’s technical and business objectives.