ActiveStandards™

The company

Unilever is one of the world's largest consumer goods companies, with a turnover of nearly €40 billion. It produces 400 brands across a range of food, home care and personal care products, such as Cif, Comfort, Dove, Flora, Hellmann's and Lipton. Unilever employs over 200,000 people in over 100 countries.

In July 2004 Unilever underwent a corporate re-branding, and began the process of rolling out its new identity across its global corporate web presence.

As the first new sites went live, in January 2005, it soon became apparent that a traditional best-practice approach (comprehensive web editor training; 22 hours a day, 5 days a week help desk; detailed standards manual; and a state-of-the-art content management system), wasn't enough to maintain its online brand standards.

"We saw that standards were starting to slip," says Tim Godbehere, Communications Director at Unilever. "Before every site went live we would check it, and then take any corrective action required. But identification of errors was a purely manual process. We quickly realised that unless we had a large team of people dedicated to this, we simply would not be able to keep on top of the situation."

Unilever was facing three main challenges:

• Time and resources: Delivering a new Unilever online presence with a small team and within a tight timeframe of 11 months. "We wanted to ensure that delivery of the new web presence was both on budget and on time," says Tim.
• Scope and complexity: A key challenge was the scope and complexity of the standards to which local country site editors had to adhere. "The content management system (CMS) enforced many of them, but we did not want it to be completely rigid," continues Tim. "Unilever is a multi-national, multi-local company – this needed to come across on our websites. To embrace local customisation we needed to provide some flexibility in the CMS and, in doing so, introduced opportunities to deviate from the standards."
• Support and training: The need to train and guide busy local country site editors in the application of the brand. Tim points out that "as with many organisations, these people were doing multiple roles (such as PR, Internal Communications and External Affairs) and did not have in-depth web expertise, so we needed to support them."

"With 30 sites live, and many more in the pipeline, we knew we needed an automated solution to help preserve our standards - an application that would scan every page on every website, and tell us where the issues were, providing visibility across all areas of non-compliance, and reporting back when updates were made. We needed an early-warning system."

"After investigating the marketplace for website monitoring and analysis tools, it was clear to me that no system existed that met our brand monitoring needs, so we turned to Magus to create one."

The solution: automated monitoring of global brand standards

Magus worked closely with Unilever to crystallise the initial concept, build the technical foundation and develop a fully automated system. The result was ActiveStandards™ – the industry's only dedicated brand standards monitoring and analysis solution. Verifying every brand checkpoint, on every page, on every website, its speed and accuracy go far beyond human capability.

"ActiveStandards™ is the perfect solution for global companies who need to make sure their brand is implemented consistently online," says Tim. "It focuses on fault identification and resolution, helps site managers, and makes sure their global web presence is on-brand. It takes corporate brand guidelines and makes them fully enforceable across all sites worldwide."

In addition to brand standards, ActiveStandards™ also enforces best-practice web standards (for search-engine optimisation, legal compliance, usability and accessibility). And its comprehensive asset-management reports ensure that web content is appropriate, relevant and up to date.

In April 2006 Unilever began the rollout of ActiveStandards™ to local site editors, and it has since become an essential component of the company's website management strategy. There is a process in place to introduce each country website owner to Magus ActiveStandards™: "It is really helping people to do their job." Tim affirms.

Unilever has implemented an aggressive rollout programme: currently 30 sites are live with over 40 likely to be live by year-end.

The result: total online brand consistency

Unilever takes brand management seriously and Tim believes that online brand integrity is vital. "It is important that our stakeholders see ONE Unilever. By having a consistent online presence, we have a credible message, and no dilution of the brand".

"I am delighted with this new application and it is unique," Tim says. "Magus have provided us with an automated solution to a problem that cannot be solved manually. Standards have become enforceable, and rollouts happen more smoothly. Errors are fixed more rapidly, users have a better online experience, and resources are freed up."

"It's incredibly powerful," he continues, "and it has revolutionised the way we manage brand standards across our global web presence".

For further information on Unilever, please go to: www.unilever.com