Santa Cruz Bicycles

Santa Cruz Bicycles X Bynder Webdam: Highlights and benefits

Background: Renowned for their bikes and Reserve carbon wheels, Santa Cruz Bicycles reaches cycling enthusiasts around the world with a network of retailers. Working closely with the retail marketing team in California, they help Santa Cruz Bicycles to promote their brand and distribute their bikes to daredevils everywhere.

Challenge: With such a widespread network to oversee, it was vital for the marketing teams at Santa Cruz Bicycles to streamline processes and communication with their 200+ partners. What they needed was a way to empower distributors and retailers to promote the brand independently by giving them easy access to the latest assets and guidelines.

Solution: The Bynder Webdam solution centralizes all company assets in a single portal and makes them available to authorized internal and external teams everywhere. With Brand Connect as an additional module, Santa Cruz Bicycles knows partners are empowered to always stay on-brand.

Results: Distributors and retailers working in partnership with Santa Cruz Bicycles can now independently pull out the latest assets from the DAM portal to fit the marketing needs of their area and to better engage with the local customer base. The retail marketing team now enjoys smoother asset delivery to retailers and distributors and uses permissions to make the right assets accessible to the right people.

Situation

With their ongoing promotion and distribution system, the retail marketing team enjoyed personal contact with retailers and distributors worldwide, but this made scaling the promotion of larger product launches and events a challenge.

The creative and marketing teams lacked a branded central repository in which to store and distribute approved assets.

With hundreds of retailers catering to different regional markets, it was challenging for the marketing team to coordinate phased launches and keep promotion on-brand.

“We used a number of different systems before and it wasn’t always easy to get people what they needed.”

Since many small retailers needed support as they lacked the resources to create their own assets, the team had to always stay on top of what assets were made available to which retailers through shared folders and email threads. This resulted in time-consuming processes and bottlenecks.

Challenges + previous system

“Using a mix of sharing systems, we had to create that common sharing environment for ourselves.”

Santa Cruz Bicycles used to rely on a combination of a different DAM and Dropbox. Without a centralized asset portal to connect the creative and marketing teams directly with retailers, the teams had to create custom sharing environments to provide each partner with the assets and level of support needed.

With such a vast network of retailers across different markets, it was vital for the retail marketing team to find an effective way to coordinate promotion based on the needs and possibilities of individual distributors.

Santa Cruz Bicycles found it difficult to:

• Phase new product launches based on geography and retailer size
• Make custom assets readily available to retailers
• Empower partners to independently find and use assets based on their needs
• Report on asset use across retailers, media, and other partners

Solution

Santa Cruz Bicycles needed a way to streamline communication and empower partners by making approved assets easily available to them at any time.

With Bynder Webdam, the creative team easily manages assets to always fit the company branding, while the digital team can set permissions to seamlessly phase retailers into groups based on size and geography to coordinate promotional activities.

Retailers now access the assets they need to promote Santa Cruz Bicycles independently, based on their market needs.

Key benefits

With Bynder Webdam, Santa Cruz Bicycles enables internal, external teams, and journalists to showcase their brand consistently, globally, and dynamically.

“Specific permission groups help us better communicate with distributors ahead of time. We now launch products in a very dynamic way.”

With smooth asset sharing and streamlined communication, Santa Cruz Bicycles enjoys the peace of mind to scale and move fast knowing they’re always on the right trail.

“In terms of ROI, we’re spending way less time tracking assets across multiple groups of people. It’s a matter of operational efficiency.”

Beyond asset sharing – ‘professionalization of PR communication’
Santa Cruz Bicycles receives a lot of attention from industry publications wanting to cover their product launches and sponsored events. Through the DAM portal, the brand team can share selected assets with journalists. By cutting down email threads and sharing links across multiple systems, the team easily stays on top of how the brand is communicated.

Beyond asset availability – empowering distributors and retailers
With anytime, anywhere access to the latest files via the DAM portal, distributors are now self-sufficient and always compliant with the brand’s guidelines. As a result, there’s more time for the Santa Cruz Bicycles creative team to spend on the creation of new and existing campaign assets. And, from campaign photoshoots to new product launches, partners are provided with the right content at the right time.

Beyond asset distribution – harnessing the power of tracking asset use
With Bynder Webdam, the marketing teams at Santa Cruz Bicycles gain better insights into their global and regional markets by reporting on asset usage. They use these data to adapt to regional promotional demands and drive adoption for less engaged users.

What’s next for Santa Cruz Bicycles?

“Our creative team spend a significant amount of time making sure the quality of our photography and design matches the quality of our bikes. In the future, we plan to redesign the brand portal, so the experience you have here is a natural extension of the experience on santacruzbicycles.com.”

Giving more retailers access to the DAM portal
Santa Cruz Bicycles plans to extend access to the DAM Portal to all their partners worldwide and empower them to use the assets and imagery beyond planned, coordinated promotions. Easy access to guidelines ensures retailers can use the brand image correctly, consistently, and associate it with local initiatives.

Brand Connect and Guidelines
Santa Cruz Bicycles uses an internally developed landing page to communicate their brand guidelines to retailers worldwide. They plan to fully roll out the Brand Connect module, which integrates with the Asset Library and automatically reflects any changes to ensure brand consistency is achieved quickly and maintained easily.