How a Multinational Food Company Strengthened Governance By Centralizing Short Link & QR Code Creation On a Single Platform
BL.INK’s solution allowed autonomy for its customer’s brands while also providing the company’s headquarters with central control.
The platform improved governance by standardizing links, facilitating audits, and enhancing collaboration among brand and country teams.
About Our Customer
Our customer is a Swiss multinational, founded as a confectionery in the mid-nineteenth century before rapidly expanding into a titan of the modern food and drink industry.
It operates over 2000 brands in 180+ countries worldwide, dominating almost every area of the food and drink market, as well as pet food, infant formula, and supplements.
The Problem: Thousands of Employees Using Different Tools for the Same Task
Before hiring BL.INK in mid-2021, this multinational food company used dozens of uncoordinated tools to create QR codes and branded short links for packaging, promotional emails and social media.
The lack of a standardized link management tool meant many short links and QR codes were created following different rules and structures. They were also difficult to edit or delete if the employee who had created them left the company, transferred departments, or lost the password to the legacy tool.
The Need for Standardization
“Their real issue was having a standardized platform that all brands could use worldwide across every project, team, product, and brand,” says Andy Meadows, BL.INK’s CEO. “It was really about consolidation: how do we get everybody doing the same thing in the same way?”
One of the company’s subsidiaries had used BL.INK’s services for six years, and when our customer broached the topic of rolling out a standardized link platform for the entire corporation, they were adamant that BL.INK was too good to give up.
BL.INK was thrilled to take on the challenge.
The Solution: A Dynamic & Unified Link Management System
A critical factor in this multinational’s predicament was its sheer size. Andy notes, “the simplest of problems is that in an organization like (our customer’s), you have thousands of marketers and engineers all over the world.”
The first step of BL.INK’s solution was widely implementing its dynamic link management system, providing the entire group with one coherent set of tools.
By using the platform, any marketer or engineer in any corner of the world could create a branded short link using a rational set of rules. If the URL needed to be edited, it could be done dynamically and efficiently on the same platform - without having to track down the person who had initially created it.
But apart from standardization, our solution solved many other issues for our customer.
1. Market Domains
Along with a global domain (i.e., brand.com), our customer hosts individual brand websites (i.e., brand.1, brand.2), with separate market suffixes for each country the brand operates in (i.e., brand.1/fr, brand.1/de).
The company wanted its short links to follow that same structure - both from a visual and a control aspect.
“They wanted each market to be able to work autonomously and independently on their particular links,” says Andy. “But at the same time, Corporate wanted full control over all domains.”
So the team at BL.INK created a new feature specifically for this customer and called it “Market Domains.” This feature allows regional users complete control over their specific market domain while the Corporate Office retains top-down authority over all the domains nested into the main one.
“If you have an /fr account, you have full control over that specific short domain: you can manage links, you can manage users, you manage it as if it were a full domain name. Whereas Corporate has access to the brand domain itself,”
The Market Domains feature is now available to all BL.INK enterprise customers.
2. User Audits
BL.INK’s solution also made governance more efficient and economical by helping the company perform internal user audits.
Using the tool, the corporation can run quarterly audits to determine the following:
- which users access the system on an individual domain basis
- whether users are active in the system. and
- what activities they are performing.
“It gives (the company) access in a single report to all the governance and compliance aspects around user access and controls,” says Andy.
Quick and easy access to this information allows this multinational group to remove users who are no longer working on a particular project. The company can also provide time-limited access to users who may only need the platform for a single project.
On the BL.INK platform, access to this information is on-demand. “In one click, they have a full report,” explains Andy.
3. System Uptake
Among the most significant challenges facing any multinational trying to implement new technology is ensuring everyone understands the tool and is actually using it.
BL.INK’s single sign-on, coupled with a streamlined onboarding and easy-to-understand interface, allows the company to understand which departments and users are leveraging the platform for their campaigns.
“So they can see overall utilization,” adds Andy. “Who is actually adopting the platform.”
This way, our customer can address uptake issues through training programs and resources.
4. Collaboration
Beyond governance, ensuring compliance, and monitoring uptake, BL.INK’s tool fostered collaboration between brands.
With thousands of engineers and marketers in hundreds of countries all using a single platform, a campaign that succeeded for one market or project can be reproduced or adapted by other countries or brands.
“The tool allows them as an organization to replicate the success and lessons learned from one campaign across other brands and other products,” says Andy.
5. Cost
BL.INK also proved to be cost-effective for this multinational company by allowing them to add a new brand to the platform easily.
“From a governance and general corporate standpoint, they have been able to onboard multiple brands into the same platform,” notes Andy. “When they do, they benefit from the shared infrastructure, pricing, and overall general governance and structure.”
“It makes it very cost-effective for the company to add another brand to the mix,” he adds.
The Takeaway: Seamlessly Standardized Link Creation & Easy Management
One of the world’s largest multinational companies had a significant challenge to overcome: its thousands of brands in hundreds of countries were inefficiently using dozens of systems to do the same thing.
The company hired BL.INK to standardize link creation and management. BL.INK’s solution allows all of its brands to build independently while giving headquarters access and control over every market domain in each country.
Now, this food & beverage giant can streamline its content sharing with consumers, improve collaboration between brands, and perform audits more quickly and economically.
Discover how BL.INK can improve your company’s link management and governance with a single tool.
Login
