Technology strategy
An online clothing retailer specializing in green clothing had a significant problem. The leading green rating agency had analyzed their practices, done some internal investigations and had listed them as the worst “green branded” company in their industry. In this market niche, the rating was devastating: blogs popped up decrying the company, eight of the top ten Google results were negative, resellers stopped pushing the product and end customers abandoned the organization.
The company hired new leadership to clean up their practices and they instituted rigorous controls to ensure that they were in fact, behaving in a manner equivalent to their marketing. They rebranded many of their products, they launched in person road shows and the CEO went on a speaking tour. But, when the prospective green customers went online and searched for them, they got droves of negative information. This was made worse by an out of date, ugly, unsearchable website that did nothing to improve customer’s views.
The head of Marketing and the CIO jointly hired us to create a comprehensive technology plan for the organization. This plan had to enable a complete revamp of their customer facing websites and had to take on the significant challenge of changing their online image on blogs and search engines.
Our approach was a bit different. We knew immediately that changing results on Google was going to take time, probably months. There was no reason to wait for the final strategy to begin working to change this critical barrier to their success. We immediately kicked of a selection project to find a reputable SEO (Search Engine Optimization) firm to do the heavy lifting on changing Google’s results. We picked the firm in two weeks (which is extraordinarily fast for these kinds of projects) and within 6 weeks from selection, only 4 of the top 10 results were negative. Today, there is only one negative result in the top 10.
Simultaneously we kicked off a redesign of the company’s primary website as well as a series of “microsites” that would help with search engine optimization and branding. Since these sites included e-commerce capabilities, we had to ensure that we interacted (as inexpensively as possible) with the organization’s existing ERP and call center systems. We completed the project in six weeks including a complete redesign of the entire customer facing architecture for the company. Due to the importance of this project, the client also asked us to manage the go live of their core system. We agreed to take it on and, with a lot of effort from everyone on the team, went live two days before the planned date.
Note*: The details of the industry and size have been changed, but the kinds of deliverables created and the results are real.