How do you build a common retail experience for multiple brands?
Ahold Delhaize, one of the world's largest food retail groups, were consolidating their brands onto a single ecommerce platform in order to increase competitiveness, performance and operating efficiency.
The key requirement was to design an experience that could cater to a wide and varied global customer demographic with a consistent group voice, while also being flexible enough to accommodate the specific needs of each individual grocery brand across a range of markets.
Capabilities
- Business & digital strategy
- Technology strategy
- Digital product design
- Web development
Example activities
- User research & journey mapping
- Concepting & rapid prototyping
- Information Architecture
- UX & UI design
- Development
The results
Our top takeaways
- 01Championing the value of design
- 02Blended teams to drive success
- 03Designing and building for multi-market, multi-brand
Championing the value of design
Starting with the user
The Ahold Delhaize brands serve a huge range of customers across the globe - from the seasoned online shopper of Belgium to the ecommerce-cautious shopper of Romania. We worked closely with the business to understand the common grocery missions across markets and channels to create consistency in the design, whilst enabling local configuration where essential. Our focus was to constantly put the user first and champion the power of design in a traditionally technology led organisation.
Blended teams to drive success
Shared approach
This project required a team of cross-discipline experts to work together towards a shared goal. A collaborative approach was essential, allowing for flexibility across time zones for the core team of designers, developers and Product Managers. Through a mix of virtual collaboration and time on-the-ground in Brussels, teams worked together to develop a set of building blocks that work across any brand property to create the white-label offering.
Designing and building for multi-market, multi-brand
Configuration over customisation
This Place designed a common feature and flow foundation that offered brand and market extensibility to ensure businesses could differentiate as needed across areas such as branding, content, product & pricing and features including payment, delivery & loyalty. The whitelabel solution we designed ensured that customers had a consistent experience, regardless of market, but which appeared in familiar brand colours.
A development team worked primarily in the front end, utilising HTML, CSS and JavaScript, which integrated with various APIs. The front-end code was then iteratively packaged and delivered for integration by a backend partner into an SAP Hybris solution. Again, the whitelabel solution made rolling out built components effortless.
