Adare secures top retail award with ground breaking MC² marketing communications portal
Adare has scooped the European Retail Solutions Award (ERSA) for 'Best Use of B2B Internet Technology' after delivering a complete web-enabled marketing communications solution for Tie Rack, using the company's bespoke MC² technology.
Sara Carter, Marketing Director, Tie Rack and Alistair Cane, Executive Director, Adare collect
The Best Use of B2B Internet Technology at the 2008 European Retail Solutions Awards
The prestigious awards dinner, held at Old Billingsgate Market on Wednesday 25 June, was attended by over 700 luminaries from the UK's top retail organisations and focussed on recognising retailers and suppliers for excellence and innovations in retail IT solutions and technology. It provided the ideal platform for the Marketing and Customer Communications specialist to showcase its groundbreaking marketing e-portal solution, or MC² as it is branded.
MC² is a unique portal developed by Adare, which provides complete on-line management of the communications process from creative to delivered-to-store scale out. The new technology has totally re-engineered Tie Rack's campaign management process, enabling the fashion retailer to work much more efficiently with greater control of its marketing campaigns, as well as delivering significant cost savings and more than halving campaign delivery times into its 260 stores worldwide.
The system provides a complete modular toolkit that combines store profiling, campaign planning and management, on-line proofing of creative work, digital asset management, print sourcing (through P², Adare's e-procurement system that combines five unique procurement practices) fulfilment, distribution and real-time tracking for all Marketing and POS collateral.
Working closely with Tie Rack in each of the 26 countries it operates in over an eight week period, Adare tailored its MC2 platform to manage Tie Rack's global campaign requirements. All 260 stores were audited to create an up-to-date store profile database and establish optimum and accurate POS requirements. New stores can be added to the system easily and, through log-ins, allows each regional manager to update their store details at a local level.
Before Adare came on board Tie Rack was manually managing marketing campaigns across its global store footprint from a central team in the UK. From quantifying point of sale volumes and couriering hard copy proofs to managers around the world, to identifying language and distribution variations manually, the process was time consuming, manually intensive and prone to human error.
Alistair Cane, executive director for strategic solutions at Adare, comments: "MC2 has streamlined Tie Rack's overall campaign management process, giving the marketing team greater control over its whole communications process. Brand control and integrity is notoriously difficult to control globally and our solution effectively drives process efficiencies and standardisation, whilst still enabling global stores to interact with the system online at a local level."
"Winning this award is a fantastic demonstration of the strategic investment that we have made over the last 18 months to develop technology solutions that underpin the new generation of marketing communications that we are delivering for our clients.
"To be recognised alongside some of the biggest names in technology and the only 'print management' company shortlisted for any of the 17 award categories shows how far we have evolved our proposition from the industry norm. That fact that we were also a shortlisted finalist for the Best International Solution award further reinforces our position as a true market leader."
"The effectiveness of the model has prompted other retailers who have recognised the business benefits of using MC2 technology to approach us and we are currently working on bespoke solutions for a number of blue chip companies.
Sara Carter, marketing director at Tie Rack concludes: "Adare's MC2 technology has fundamentally changed the way we manage our marketing communications. "The technology has brought the marketing team around the world together, enabling us to work much more collaboratively and efficiently. It has also delivered tangible process improvements and cost savings as well as significantly reducing the time-scale of projects so that we can allow for more time on our creative work. "We are very proud to win this award alongside Adare for a project that I know will continue to make a positive difference to our business from a planning and cost effectiveness perspective."
The award win comes hot on the heels of Adare's creative team securing the DBA Inclusive Design Challenge Award earlier in the year and a nomination for the Quality in Print (QIP) 'Print Management Award' for the company's MC2 technology which will be announced in July.
