Coolblue
How Coolblue delivers unique, on-brand customer experiences with Bynder
7.3k
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Their business goals of making money and becoming the leading company in consumer-centric entrepreneurship —first scribbled on the back of a beer coaster 20 years ago—still underpins Coolblue’s day-to-day operations and growth strategy.
Achieving customer satisfaction is part of everything they do. In support of this, Coolblue has built a strong, recognizable and evolving brand and visual language over time, which is managed entirely in-house.
To live up to the motto ‘Anything for a smile’, Bynder’s digital asset management (DAM) solution facilitates access to the brand and marketing assets that drive memorable and omnichannel brand experiences.
The following quotes may be attributed to ‘Coolbluers’ Thierry van Keeken, Visual Brand Boss and Ottelien van Pelt, Storyteller.
Nowadays, every single brand expression is pulled from Bynder.
The opportunity for Coolblue
Coolblue’s business goal of making customers happy rests on conveying their brand consistently and authentically at each and every customer touchpoint.
The Coolblue brand is a strategic asset, and the solutions they invest in to manage and grow the same must be equally modern, scalable and dynamic. The team saw an opportunity to streamline workflows/operations related to digital asset management, which triggered the hunt for a DAM.
Prior to implementing Bynder, Coolblue stored and managed company content via Google Drive and external hard drives, with the challenges being:
- Searching for assets: imagery was hard to find within a folder structure, due in part to limited tagging possibilities
- IT supporting users licenses and access: IT spent more time doing “manual work” with individual users
- Setting permissions and user rights: permission rights had to be granted for specific files, which was time-consuming (and prone to human error) for a large, and rapidly growing company
We had a lot of assets, and they were all located in single access folders with one-click paths. You only knew where an asset was if you were close to the creator or project.
The use case
The Coolblue team is proud of managing their branding in-house. They do not work with stock photography and a key component of their visual identity is ‘specialist’ images: photographs of employees, who are also experts in the product categories, posing with the products.
Bynder’s DAM provides Coolblue with a centralized, feature-rich hub for:
- Storing, organizing and safeguarding all brand assets, such as proprietary brand lifestyle imagery and product shots
- Managing marketing and campaign materials, including: banner ads for online and offline marketing, product demo and culture videos, and advertising creative for busses and bikes
Bynder boasts usability and is easy to maintain. We know that all the assets in there are up-to-date, and everyone has access to them.
Benefits for Coolblue
It is imperative for the Coolblue team to have brand assets on hand so that anyone who needs them within the company can communicate the brand consistently across all channels, and in a unified voice.
Since Bynder’s digital asset management solution was rolled out at Coolblue, the team has experienced the following:
Increased operational efficiencies
A streamlined DAM and related workflows allows for time savings and higher productivity.
Improved findability and oversight
A single, highly visual interface gives the team full and immediate access to all assets; so, for example, it’s easy to see what’s missing to complete a brand image portfolio.
Faster time-to-value of their investment
Implementation took 6-8 weeks in total, compared to the initially estimated 2-3 months. Coolblue found the onboarding process “smooth and quick”; in particular, the taxonomy was simple to set up as the team was already accustomed to categorizing products in a specific manner for their webshop.
Easier promotion of brand authenticity
The easy deployment of up-to-date assets across multiple channels allows for consistent, controlled communication of the Coolblue brand, helping strengthen and build on brand equity over time.
Bynder is always the starting point. Every image we need, we get it from our brand portal.
