Ti Sento Milano, the European based jewelry brand, is expanding our reach stateside. As marketing director, I’ve been challenged to market our jewelry in an efficient and cost effective manner because we don’t have a huge consumer market here or huge budgets to build awareness. To do so, we rely heavily on local retailers to market our jewelry in their store and to their already loyal customers.
In the jewelry industry, many brands rely on retailers to market their products on their behalf, and they realize it is essential to their success. Currently, most companies have a basic method for executing this strategy. Most are using email and FTPs or Dropbox to share content and material with their jewelry stores.
While this effort is sufficient, it isn’t ideal. It’s not trackable and it forces retailers to do a lot of work they don’t want to do. Can you imagine individually emailing every one of your retailers each time you have new content? Beyond that, it’s not fair to expect them to know how to process and produce your content files. We found that doing business this way is neither efficient, nor cost effective.
In an Attempt to Solve this Problem we Asked Ourselves 2 Questions :
1. For retailers, how do we make it easier for them to sell jewelry in their local market?
2. For Ti Sento, how does the brand manager distribute their content and keep the brand consistent with those retailers marketing on their behalf?
Our retailers have mastered selling jewelry, but normally aren’t marketing gurus. If they have customers in the store all day they may only have 10 minutes to spare, and it’s not likely that they’ll spend that time doing any marketing.
In our search to lighten the marketing load for our retailers we found Fision. We partnered with them to be our marketing asset management portal so we can distribute our marketing content and maintain the brand in a premium fashion.
Maintaining Brand Consistency Without Inhibiting Retailers
In the jewelry industry, you want to be able to control your brand and market it through all of the retail channels in a very consistent manner. Fision allows us to do that with ease. We load our branded materials into Fision, and then our retailers can login and use the materials in templates that allow them to add their own store name and information. In a few steps they have created a customized email or print piece that’s effective and reflects the brand that we want to bring to the market.
The other thing that’s essential in a marketing asset management tool is ease to use for the retailers. When we put our marketing materials in Fision, it’s very easy to use them, and very user friendly for somebody that may not be super technical. The step by step collateral builder enables them to customize the template and download their localized materials in just few clicks.
Since we’ve made it easy for our retailers to access and customize materials using Fision, we’ve found they do a lot more local marketing. By providing them with all of our branded content, they are going to be much more effective and much more likely to promote our jewelry in their stores. We’ve created a win win situation for Ti Sento and our retailers.
Quality Software Matched with Quality Service
We’ve been very pleased with the support that Fision has given us. We didn’t just sign up and never hear from them again. They check in regularly to make sure we are using the tool the way it was made to be used. They also help us find ways we could improve it. I remember early on, they came to us and said, “How do we increase adoption to get more retailers to market on your behalf?”. It was great to have them taking initiative in the partnership to make sure the tool was being used to it’s full potential.
We didn’t realize the technology existed to support our localized marketing strategy but, now that we have the right tools in place, our stateside retailer adoption rates and sales efforts are exceeding our projections.
Darren is a versatile marketing and brand management leader who has consistently developed/ implemented strategic plans for revenue generation and increased brand value for global brands