Piaggio
Building a Seamless Online Ordering Platform for Marketing Materials & Promo Items
Italian motor vehicle manufacturer Piaggio wanted to streamline and scale promotional materials distribution in their network of 300+ dealerships across the U.S., Canada, and Latin America. So we created, built, and launched a centralized retail activation platform to accelerate fulfillment, saving Piaggio time and money in the process.
Challenge accepted
Piaggio's retail activation process consisted of dealerships submitting requests over the phone or email, then having a team evaluate, process, and individually fulfill each request. But with dealerships dispersed throughout the continent, data scattered across systems, and a highly manual process, getting promotional materials out the door took more effort and time than desired.
The Piaggio team was looking for a better way to handle procurement and distribution of their marketing materials – a solution that could expedite the process, reduce timelines, and optimize efficiency.
Problem solved
You can’t optimize what you can’t measure. So we aggregated data pertaining to the needs of their teams and dealership partners, and evaluated the current state of their retail activation process. With the big picture in sight, we started planning an effective and easy-to-use solution: an online ordering platform offering unified real-time data and insights.
Our strategy was to give Piaggio the means to easily track and manage retail activation efforts holistically, from a single user-friendly portal.
We also sourced quality promotional materials and swag from a network of preferred vendors to meet the company’s most frequent needs based on dealership size, type, and historical data, taking care of storage and dispatching.
The end result is a platform enabling the online purchase of marketing materials, shipped directly to over 300 points of sale across the Americas.
Opportunity unlocked
Piaggio has reduced its waste, regularly saves 15-40% on the per unit price of materials, and slashed time-to-market from 3 weeks to 3 days. Thanks to a streamlined process and access to up-to-date data on dealerships and stock, the Piaggio team has increased the efficiency of their retail activations, significantly improving their bottom line.
Today, Piaggio dealers can log on, browse and order directly from the platform. As stock goes down or when a promo is planned, the procurement team can top up their inventory based on real-time data, thus minimizing waste. They can even submit special requests through the platform when custom one-off projects come up and get support from a dedicated project manager.
In short, Piaggio’s new retail activation platform and fulfillment solution keep things running smoothly, speeding up time to market, providing actionable insights, and saving the company time and money.