About KitchenAid
KitchenAid is an American brand owned by the Whirlpool Corporation selling small and major kitchen appliances since 1919. They are known for their excellent performance and iconic timeless design.
Summary
As the number of online purchases continues to increase and consumers, more than ever, seek digital marketplaces that will provide remarkable shopping experiences, KitchenAid, the American kitchen appliances brand owned by Whirlpool Corporation had to step up to create a more suitable online experience for their customers. One that would meet the company’s business goals of facilitating and optimizing content creation.
For its team of editors to more quickly create and publish content, a completely new architecture was needed based on combinable and adaptable content modules. KitchenAid’s implementation of the latest version of Ibexa allowed them to overcome the complexity of a multi-site structure, which also brought a significant improvement to how quickly developers could integrate old and new features, such as the product catalog, newsletter, contact form, eCommerce and account sign-in.
With the continued use and version upgrade of Ibexa as KitchenAid’s content management solution, in just over a year it became possible to roll out 17 KitchenAid websites in 14 languages.
Challenges
As the need to provide better customer experiences to its website visitors grew, KitchenAid devised a strategy that involved product storytelling. Their marketing initiatives included an intense calendar of activities for more than 15 countries, with the goal of engaging it’s visitors with stories about the products and food-related articles. For such a dynamic content environment they needed a solution that would simplify and speed up processes, while also meeting the overall digital demands of a large enterprise.
The previous version of Ibexa they were using did accomplish all of the developing functions needed, but with less ease. Plus it presented a few limitation, such as: - System integration with APIs was not smooth. Third-party APIs, especially in an enterprise environment, such as KitchenAid’s, were complicated to integrate (i.e. catalog) and required time from the development team.
- Complexity of the multi-site architecture slowed things down. Content creation on the previous Ibexa version was not easy to replicate for other countries.
- Ever-increasing number of websites hosted on the same Ibexa installation was proving to be too complex. In fact, KitchenAid was not the only Whirlpool brand using Ibexa.
Solution
In addition to helping them achieve their overall business goals, the main reason KitchenAid chose to remain with Ibexa and upgrade to the latest version was their need for a highly customizable enterprise CMS that lends itself very well to multi-site architectures.
A secondary reason for remaining with Ibexa was that the CMS is based on the Symfony framework, which offers numerous third-party integrations. For instance, the KitchenAid event calendar is automatically updated thanks to integrations with Google APIs. Editors upload data on Google spreadsheets which is then queried by Ibexa.
In addition to system integrations, another beneficial feature is the ability to create modular content that can be easily and indistinctly related within the platform and between other Ibexa content. Once the master content has been created, rolling it out for other countries is simpler. For example, product pages combine enterprise information coming from catalog integrations with editorial content managed through the CMS. As a result, the duplication of editorial content items to other countries became very quick.
The simplicity with which objects in the CMS can be shifted and mixed allows for extreme flexibility in terms of page layout creation.
For example, the Serious About Food section, an online magazine that offers weekly cooking inspirations and food trends, was created after the website’s roll out by reusing the available objects and arranging them in order to have different and personalized page designs. The result was optimization in terms of time and costs.
Lastly, the ease of use of Ibexa is another important advantage and also a fundamental reason for why KitchenAid chose to continue to use the platform, especially when content update is done by different stakeholders, from the both the brand and other agencies.
Results
In a little over a year, at the beginning of 2017 KitchenAid rolled out 17 websites in 14 languages. With the release of their new websites, the sale of small domestic appliances has been enabled on all countries. Today there is a solid increase in worldwide sales as a result of the effectiveness of their chosen solution, Ibexa.
The Journey Continues
KitchenAid is committed to guaranteeing an ever-better content experience that makes their customers’ journeys unique. Next step in their strategy is continued improvements to content marketing, with a focus on personalization.
