Kohler’s Growth into a highly respected luxury brand

Situation

  • Bold Innovation –- A luxury brand founded back in the 1800s this manufacturing powerhouse has developed a strong reputation for the elegance and sophistication of its products.
  • Bold Advertising –- A strategic part of their marketing communications strategy, their image is carried out across all of their striking advertising that is created inhouse with an internal creative agency.
  • All About Content – Hundreds of thousands of assets are being used to make up this company’s advertising campaigns, many with different usage rights defined in contracts and license agreements that are stored in Legal as PDFs.

Challenge

  • Conservative and Risk Adverse – With a highly regarded brand it is critical to protect the brand from any negative association
  • Lack of visibility – Brand managers do not have good visibility into what can be used and how across the thousands of assets, models and photographers
  • Overage fees – The company found that in some cases it was paying talent more than they were originally paid for the shoot due to overage fees from finding expired assets in use in published advertising
  • Cumbersome manual processes – The manual clearance process that involved emailing business affairs, operations and legal would often drive up costs and cause bottlenecks in production

Solution

  • Automating the clearance process directly within OpenText to slim down the process, reduce the amount of parties often involved and eliminate misuse
  • Mitigate risk and reduce costs with notifications on asset expirations
  • Gain business intelligence around talent, social profiles and asset associations in order to identify trends, optimize costs and monitor to protect the brand