BRIDGESTONE EUROPE DIGITAL VENTURES
CHALLENGE
Get organised & adapt marketing practices to scale digital ventures.
Bridgestone Europe is rapidly evolving from a product and service supplier to a leading digital mobility actor. This creates a tension between core lines and new ventures, with brand nurturing as key objective on the one hand, scaling needs on the other one.
They asked me to work on solving the equation, on how to get organised and serve new digital ventures needs while keeping the focus on the core business at the same time. At stake: talent management and skills upgrades, new marketing procedures, and tech platforms.
SOLUTION
Design a marketing factory concept to share venture scaling capabilities alongside core business nurturing.
This case of digital transformation is a classic, it raises a storm of challenges as the organisation needs to work at the same time on today and on tomorrow: very different objectives, skills, management models (esp. waterfall vs. agile) operating speed, systems (esp. legacy vs. new generation platforms). Another key point is the optimal use of resources while ventures haven’t demonstrated sufficient success yet. Last but not least, resources, practices and platforms across businesses and countries are usually not aligned and inconsistent. All that speaks for a central pool aka digital factory to build up, align and instill new practices, top skills and platforms from the middle
Figure | Conceptualising the digital marketing factory : project design, factory governance and flows, digital platforms
across the organisation, where digital coordinators intermediate.
IMPACT
We applied recommended concepts, setups and tooling to scale FleetPulse.
FleetPulse is one of the first Bridgestone digital ventures. We applied above recommendations to scale FleetPulse on quick agile iterations, with light platforms and budgets, as a testing case.
FleetPulse has been quickly adopted by commercial fleets across Europe for the daily management of their vehicles. First quick agile initiatives included a website, keyword research resp. Adwords, sales
collaterals, emailing campaigns, social media, customer relationship management, quick helpdesk with Freshdesk, and the management at a major tradeshow as key launching platform.
