Iconic American Retailer

This internationally recognized outdoor retailer with $1.6 billion in sales and over 5000 employees has steadily built its business by combining direct-to-consumer sales with exceptional customer service. Based in the United States, the company initially sold its patented hunting boots and other outdoor gear through mail order catalogs, and later expanded to include brick-and-mortar stores. Over the years, it has pioneered using state-of-the-art technologies to deliver great customer experiences.

The company became a category leader in the era of call center commerce in the last third of the twentieth century. It created and mailed seasonal and specialty catalogs to its ever-expanding customer lists. It then offered seamless customer experiences over the telephone, around-the-clock. Few competitors could match the firm’s know-how for catalog marketing, call center sales, product support and supply chain management.

Not surprisingly, this retailer became a technology innovator and had a strong IT culture. With no off-the-shelf systems available, the company developed its own enterprise applications to support its unique business processes. The retailer was also one of the early adopters for doing business over the web.

Leveraging its cataloging and call center expertise, it launched its first e-commerce site in the late 1990s. Since then, the company has steadily enhanced its online capabilities by adopting IBM WebSphere Commerce as its e-commerce platform, and by integrating with various existing applications. But still, it struggled with the important task of managing commerce content, and lacked the capabilities needed to deliver the experiences the company is known for, online.

Challenges: Simplifying content management for digital marketers

Simply focusing on e-commerce through digital cataloging and customer service had its limits. The e-commerce platform enabled a site where customers could “buy” but not “shop”. While the retailer excelled in merchandising its products over the web for thousands of SKUs, it lagged in its capabilities to market them with promotional text, shoppable videos, etc.

Once published, web pages were difficult to modify. In fact, marketers and graphic designers had to contend with time-consuming steps for updating content on the site, and lengthy processes involving working with IT development teams for launching promotional campaigns. They produced marketing messages and related images, replicating the content development activities for printed catalogs. Then IT staffers manually created and modified individual web pages.

Any changes marketers or designers wanted, IT had to implement. Not surprisingly, there were multiple review and approval steps as well as frequent hand offs among marketers, graphic designers, and IT staffers. This led to drawn-out schedules and added costs.

As the web became an ever-more essential channel for connecting with customers, the retailer realized that it needed to enhance its content management and digital experience capabilities. Needed was a hybrid web content management (WCM) system that would shift the company to a more experience-driven commerce model while putting marketers in control of content creation and campaign management. To remain competitive in the fast-changing outdoor-recreational sector, marketers sought to accelerate their digital marketing initiatives.