De Heus

Driving global business growth, without sacrificing brand identity

With a growing global population and the need for higher standards of living worldwide, De Heus has undergone explosive growth in recent years to meet the needs of increased agricultural activity and food production.

Growth at this scale presents unique challenges for the global marketing team and local business units. How can De Heus protect, manage, and grow their global brand image efficiently, while still encouraging local teams to collaborate on marketing efforts?

Fundamentally, De Heus needed to scale smoothly while maintaining a strong, on-brand identity as they expanded operations across the globe.

Expanding the family business: an international affair

Since its inception over 100 years ago, it’s been a priority for De Heus to maintain its roots as a family-owned business, with the same vision, values and culture that enabled the company to become a global top-12 feed supplier with over 6,000 employees worldwide.

Yet, its increasingly international focus during the last decade created new challenges for their global marketing team based in the Netherlands. With so many new business units coming under the De Heus brand in recent years, it’s made it challenging for the Dutch-based marketers to provide them with the latest brand materials, while ensuring their brand identity was communicated consistently—whether that’s in Serbia or South Africa.

From using old logos to repetitive requests, there were real challenges that De Heus needed fixing to make sure their branding was fit for the rapid global growth they were experiencing.

Pre-Bynder problems

The Dutch-based marketing team previously used a photography agency in an attempt to centralize an ever-growing number of assets, but as they expanded their business internationally, it was quickly becoming unfit for global use:

• They could only store images, so there was no way to centralize all brand assets—such as design templates, PDFs and video files—in one location
• Onboarding new business units was unstructured and sluggish: a lot of Skype meetings were needed, and even then the lack of brand guidelines about asset usage made it unclear how localization was being carried out

Put simply, their old system was not fit for global growth. The need for a future- proof brand management solution that could scale with a growing team—and growing number of assets—made De Heus a perfect match for Bynder.

The transformation with Bynder

Since implementing Bynder, De Heus have the peace of mind that collaboration and managing assets is centralized in one place, ensuring everything is on-brand, all the time. So what work processes have improved?

Less repetitive requests; more do-it-yourself
Before Bynder, marketing assets were stored locally, with many business units having their own methods of managing files. Without quality central storage options, it was a real challenge to coordinate with international colleagues.

Clear, easily accessible brand guidelines
Assets are uploaded by both the Dutch-based global marketing team and their local business units; the ability to customize usage rights for employees allows De Heus to have much-needed control over how their brand assets are used. For instance, colleagues in India can get specific access to only the content they need for their market. And with brand guidelines available directly in Bynder, everyone knows best practices for how the brand should be communicated.

Searching that makes sense
During implementation, the team were shown how to create a custom taxonomy for their exact needs. With the help of Bynder’s Onboarding experts, De Heus were able to structure the portal in a way that ensured all departments could find what they needed, when they needed it— without having to ask a colleague.

With content so easily accessible, employees are finding (and using) assets that they didn’t know existed—achieving a key goal that De Heus were striving for when implementing a DAM.

Global marketing enabled and tracked

The global marketing team out of the Netherlands have the complex task of overseeing brand activities for the many business units spread worldwide—further complicated by differing standards on how the brand should be communicated.

The Analytics functionality within Bynder has made it much easier to track asset usage within the wider De Heus team with crystal-clear, data-driven insights surrounding number of asset views, uploads, downloads, and user logins.

That way, they have the data they need to understand what assets are popular, and peace of mind that only the right people have access to the right assets at the right time.