Kroger
Learn how a national grocery retailer achieved a 35% time savings in marketing operations with MERGE, enhancing efficiency, project management, and personalization.
time savings
What does it take to transform a large, multi-brand and cross-channel in-house marketing agency on time, despite a pandemic? Our client, Kroger, has first-hand experience.
The 2,800-store company took on a marketing transformation initiative during the pandemic. The project, undertaken in partnership with MERGE, anticipated saving 35% of the team’s time spent in project management — time that will be redirected to producing more personalized content.
An ambitious work management implementation encompassing a comprehensive people, process and automation plan was launched to deliver personalized customer experiences at scale to better compete in the digital age.
Kroger's marketing manager orchestrated the effort to connect corporate strategy with marketing process using the Workfront platform and other technologies.
"Our team and MERGE dug in with dozens of key associates to intimately understand their work now, and iterate on new ways of working in the future, to determine the best way forward. We identified imperatives and best practices up front, and kept on course throughout the one-year plus execution. Our goal was to enable projects to flow smoothly and seamlessly across all teams and systems—to save time, money and help us better serve our customers."
- Marketing Technology and Operations Manager at Kroger
Kroger's marketing leadership and MERGE consultants realized that achieving goals required the following: a strong in-house champion; an appetite to invest in process design prior to touching technology; an iterative, hands-on approach to system design methodology; and a commitment to integrate adjacent solutions as part of the initial roll-out.
#1: The right people in place
The initiative’s success is due in large part to having a leader with a willingness to get into the nitty gritty design issues, and with real authority due to the support of an executive sponsor. Kroger's marketing manager worked in concert with a strong cross-functional core team.
The core team provided input and expertise from across marketing: from Brand and Lifecycle Marketing, Merchandising, Creative and Print Services, and Channel Activation, including Digital Experience, Media, Social, Affiliate Marketing, all the way through Measurement, Analytics and Insights. In the general uncertainty in the early days of the pandemic, Kroger's marketing manager focused on tactics to not only keep the team’s attention while working remotely, but to develop more cohesiveness than would have otherwise been possible.
"Normally these implementations would have required hundreds of hours of in-person white board collaboration. Being remote gave us more focus, providing a more convenient platform to discuss issues as they arrived. In hindsight, working remotely worked on our behalf."
- Marketing Technology and Operations Manager at Kroger
The core team partnered with MERGE to design each channel’s process work stream, documenting together the needs of the different channels and understanding how they needed to work for cross-channel campaigns.
To provide a fundamental POV of roles across 100s of marketers, executives held closed sessions to build directional RACI models. Once provided to the work team, these RACI models served as guide posts for how work should be performed into the future, helping the work team put meat on the bones to design process.
"We started this project with process silos. Everyone understood how things were done in their area, but rarely understood how their actions affected those up and downstream. Workfront gave us the opportunity to build a seamless, end-to-end system."
- Marketing Technology and Operations Manager at Kroger
To ensure teams had flexible but intuitive workflows, MERGE utilized a marketing process model to translate distinct workflows, including Brand, Test & Learn, Social, Promotions, Customer Journeys, Media, and Brand Assets.
#3: Technology design
Workfront now provides a single place to connect all of Kroger's marketing work— across all teams. To keep pace with rapidly moving and complex integrated marketing programs, campaigns, promotions and content, the solution design focused on connecting the work and providing visibility for the internal teams so the end customer experience could become more personalized.
"The integrated design is managing the flow of work in a way that is consistent with out-of-the-box functionality which also allows us the ability to be flexible and evolve workflows as we learn more about the customers."
- Marketing Technology and Operations Manager at Kroger
To improve planning and visualization from a customer view, the Quarterly Roadmap builder Calendar View was introduced. Process workflows were optimized in iterative working sessions with the core team. Customized dashboards and views were developed allowing teams and users to have the right level of visibility into all the different programs, campaigns, promotions and content within a workflow.
Custom forms were created for deliverables’ lists and creative briefing and Workfront’s Fusion product was used to push deliverable information to the print services team, achieving a common intake process. Workfront Fusion was also used to automate the activation of channel and creative teams with unique task-based project templates.
These flexible project templates are built to be adapted and evolve as Kroger learns more about their customers and process needs change. Approvals are obtained through the Workfront Proofing tool and additional Workfront Fusion automations used to deploy final assets. And, integration between the Measurement Reporting Platform and Workfront was introduced, connecting results to future work.
#4: Integrations
Specific integrations were prioritized in phase one that allowed for a closed loop process, which greatly promoted adoption. Kroger integrated with the tools well-adopted that people already liked, allowing users to get even more value out of those systems.
While working through process implementation, Kroger also had a track solely focused on integrating with other systems. This focus automated some of the redundant tasks that their teams complete daily. These tasks were centered around asset trafficking, repetitive information transfer from team to team, and enabling the Measurement Reporting Platform to make measurement reporting available.
At the end of the day, the project is about improving the teams’ work life by digitally transforming into a single place for work to happen. Using Workfront’s Fusion (IPaaS) product, MERGE began integrating the familiar solutions. This allowed Kroger team to expand their comfort zone with Workfront and integrate hundreds of fields of data.
Integrations included:
Now that the project has been successfully launched, the work to drive adoption continues, including: a Workfront adoptions track, ongoing training, lunch-and-learns, and scheduled releases to introduce new functionality.
Together, Kroger and MERGE helped gain footing and build rapport among marketing, technology and PMO teams, as well as enterprise leaders.
