Philips Hue, Signify’s premium smart lighting brand, was on a mission to make lighting simpler, more inspiring, and personal. To evolve Hue's brand, Signify shifted its growth strategy toward a direct-to-consumer model by putting the online customer experience in focus and aiming to transform its digital landscape.

Merkle was selected as Signify’s agency partner and asked to create a solution that could enable more personalized journeys, drive insight back into the business, and grow its customer base.

Challenge

Hue’s existing data landscape held a lot of information, but it wasn’t connected well. Since the data wasn’t readily accessible to the marketing team for activation, it couldn’t be used to coordinate campaigns across channels. 
 
To support the new direct-to-consumer growth strategy, there were four main challenges to overcome: 

• The commerce process needed to be brought in-house and the site’s UX required a revamp. 
• A single view of the consumer needed to be built by housing as much data as possible into one system using existing identifiers.
• Personalized journeys across channels, using behavioral data and/or 1st party data needed to be initiated and tested 
• Support was required for organizational change to ensure Signify could continue maximizing value.

Services
Experience & Commerce, Analytics & Data Platforms

Industry
Retail & Consumer Goods

Market
Global

Tech Partners
Adobe

Approach

Together, we chose the Adobe Experience Platform to create Hue 3.0 and build out a full stack 'Experience Personalization Engine'. 

We created the backend services to collect customer data into a single unified profile and initiated organizational transformation to accelerate the platform's value using blended agile marketing squads hyper-focused on the customer. Each squad was given a phase in the customer’s journey and could now rapidly build and test campaigns, personalized journeys, custom landing pages, and automate trigger campaigns. 
 
Finally, we implemented Adobe’s measurement capabilities, giving Signify real-time access to journey and campaign data.

1. Leading UX & Brand
   We redesigned web journeys with a mobile-first framework based on UX best practices and focus group validation. We also ran a technical SEO audit to improve site speeds and content findability. After deployment, we optimized with a continuous CRO workstream to enhance engagement, device activations, and revenue.
2. Shop & Fulfilment
   We partnered with Signify to bring their commerce solution in-house, optimizing processes along the way. We also implemented headless commerce to unlock functionality across any channel.
3. People-based Marketing
   We deployed the first full stack of the Adobe Experience Platform along with Adobe Campaign, which builds a unified consumer profile and orchestrates real-time journeys across various channels.
4. Analytics
   We developed a new consumer segmentation and product recommender model. It can be used across channels to target communications and drive cross-selling within Philips Hue households. Media science modeling also helps determine optimal budget spend across channels.
5. Change Management
   To maximize the technical implementation, we helped Signify create a customer-focused organization to operate the capabilities by designing new teams and roles with specific KPIs and ways of working.

Results

With over 200 people, across 12 countries, and during a national pandemic, Signify and Merkle deployed the Adobe platform across all of Hue's markets in under five months. The marketing squads gained a unified perspective of the customer's journeys, and Signify became a true direct-to-consumer retailer. 

The marketing squads continue to build and test new campaigns every two weeks and have already reduced cross-market deployment times from months to days. 
 
With greater speed, reach, simplicity, and relevance, content performance has improved by 25%, site load times by 70%, and conversion by 30%. Now looking ahead, the improved customer experience is well on its way to realizing its targets and delivering 100% year-on-year growth.

To find out more, view our session with Signify at the 2021 Global Adobe Summit.