Challenges
- A fragmented digital infrastructure where each market had its own website design and CMS
- The designs were mostly very outdated
- medac leadership was unable to monitor site activity or content, which meant the brand message was getting lost
- Shared content across medac’s markets was almost impossible, further blurring the narrative
Project Summary
- A consolidated vision for the company would be impossible without a technical consolidation on a modern platform
- A selection and demo process resulted in the choice of Ibexa DXP
- Implementation took around 6 months. Eleven out of 12 country sites have been integrated
- Ibexa’s native PIM solution was implemented to create a single source of truth for medac products across all its markets
Business Benefits
- medac country sites and a new corporate site run on a single future-proof system
- All editorial activity across the group can be monitored from the Ibexa backend
- Ibexa’s PIM means sites can easily share the same image or the same piece of content
- Ibexa’s intuitive ease-of-use means adoption was smooth, and markets are now confidently improving their sites leveraging Ibexa functionality
- Traffic to the websites has increased substantially
medac, the global pharmaceutical company headquartered in Germany, implemented Ibexa DXP to consolidate its country websites and orchestrate a cohesive brand message across all its markets.
Since 1996, Fork has been a competitive and 'sympathisch' partner for businesses, brands, shops, cultural institutions and nonprofits alike. It is part of the fischerAppelt group, Germany's agency of the year 2019, honored by W&V.
As part of a root-and-branch rebrand, the pharmaceutical company medac developed a global website and consolidated 12 disparate country websites and one new global website to a single platform, Ibexa DXP. Because Ibexa is flexible and easy to use, individual countries retain their autonomy in how they manage their sites, while giving the medac messaging team the oversight to ensure that the integrity of its brand is maintained.
About medac
Headquartered in Germany, medac operates in 91 countries, employing over 2,000 people. Its pharmaceuticals, produced to the highest standards in Germany and Europe, are distributed worldwide. The company focuses on improving authorized medicines and supplies innovative therapies. Committed to safety and quality, medac offers original products, generics, and biosimilars, ensuring vital treatments are available around the globe. On an international scale, medac had a very fragmented digital landscape, and different stakeholders were not getting a consistent brand message. As part of a huge rebranding medac needed to consolidate its disparate country sites on a single platform. In the summer of 2023, the company approached its digital partner Fork to help it in the search for the right DXP.
The reasons behind the rebranding
medac is a globally active pharmaceutical company, headquartered in Germany. It provides high-quality medical treatments for patients worldwide in 91 countries, and is constantly working to improve authorized medicines and to develop innovative therapies in the fields of rheumatology, urology, hematology, and oncology.
“Our subsidiaries worldwide have to be autonomous,” explains Laura Doms, Manager Global Communications at medac, “because only they have the detailed local knowledge you need to operate in a highly regulated environment.”
The websites serve two distinct audiences: the network of medac partners, and applicants to the career opportunities available within the company. Both groups require – and want – a clear and consistent narrative about what the medac brand represents.
medac decided to rebrand and launched an extensive phase of reputational analysis and partner feedback to reboot its brand narrative. It became clear early in the process that a cohesive brand vision would need to be supported by a modern technology platform. One voice, one system – that was the challenge medac set itself.
“Each subsidiary was using its own CMS,” says Thomas Kuster, Technical Director at Fork Unstable Media, medac’s trusted digital partner. “You would get Typo3 and WordPress, but also much older and more exotic systems.”
Fork knew that a Digital Experience Platform would be the right future-proof choice of technology, and that for medac’s aims and intentions, Ibexa DXP would be the ideal fit.
“But it was very important to us that medac owned this decision,” says Kuster, “so first of all we explained the difference between a CMS and a DXP to them, and in which ways a DXP offers many more possibilities. We then demoed two systems, one of which was Ibexa’s.”
A flawless implementation
The Ibexa DXP project consisted of consolidating all the 12 country sites into a single instance in the backend and also adding a group website. “In the past, the German site had doubled as the corporate site, but we wanted a distinct site to speak for the group, for all of medac,” says Doms.
The project took fewer than six months and go-live in March 2023 was flawless. “I think it was really a matter of 30 minutes to one hour when each country changed their domain name to the new system we were live with our new design, the new content, and the new system in Ibexa,” Kuster says.
Doms is delighted with the outcome of the project.
“As I said, the countries can do what they want, yet they have to follow certain rules and a certain structure. And Ibexa makes all that possible because without a unified platform, you cannot create any kind of structure.”
With the implementation of Ibexa PIM the medac database has also been consolidated.
Not all markets have the requirement or regulatory freedom to describe every product in great detail, and in most markets, regular users will not have access to the same product information as registered healthcare professionals with a DocCheck log-in. The permissioning of product information is defined in the backend for each market.
“For example, for the German market a DocCheck log-in is a regulatory requirement which is not the case for the UK,” explains Doms. “So the home page of our German site will have a DocCheck link in the banner, which you don’t get on the UK site. But all this is set in the same backend, that’s the point.”
Conclusion
Feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, both from the medac subsidiaries who manage the sites and the medac partners who visit them for information. The relaunch has led to a “substantial” increase in traffic across the sites.
With Ibexa DXP, medac has the navigational clarity and functional power it needs to reinforce its vision and values and tell a clear story to its partners and job applicants. “The technical aspect of our rebranding was mission-critical,” Doms concludes, “and the contributions of Ibexa DXP and Fork have been invaluable.”
