THE HIGHLIGHTS
Unified collaboration: How it proved
a ‘gamechanger’ for Dr Martens
Campaigns requiring input from multiple partners or departments are at best a headache and at worst chaotic, with marketers wasting valuable time keeping track of basic tasks. For Dr Martens, the solution lay in uniting them on a single platform
Finding a way to align with cross-functional partners, both inside and outside a business, can be make-or-break for any marketing campaign.
As Katie Rowland, head of EMEA revenue marketing at Asana, told a Festival of Marketing audience: “As marketers, our success is so often tied to how we can align with those cross-functional partners. It can mean the difference between missed deadlines, chasing approvals and even launching a campaign on time; having an impact and ultimately driving through business goals.”
In fact, without the right processes in place, marketers can find themselves spending 60% of their day on what Asana calls “work about work” – administrative tasks that add little value in the pursuit of strategic goals, such as chasing approvals or managing deadlines – and 30% on duplicated tasks. “That’s time they could be spending on strategy, creating incredible campaigns or just more productive activities,” added Rowland.
Addressing that was exactly the challenge that footwear brand Dr Martens faced a few years ago. When Stacey Kemp, now head of global marketing creative at the brand, first stepped into a management role in 2017, aligning her team with other departments or agencies working on a campaign was complex and time-consuming.
Creative briefs would be sent into the small team by email with basic Excel spreadsheets attached, she recalled. These would be allocated to a single designer, who would then liaise directly with the relevant stakeholder. Kemp was often missed off these emails and, if a designer was off sick or took annual leave, often there would be no oversight of how far along a project had progressed.
“Our digital paper trail was messy, to say the least,” she said. So, when the company underwent rapid growth soon after, its creative team doubling in size in less than a year, Kemp and others realised something had to change.
Sponsored by ASANA
Dr Martens' Sebastien Berre on agency collaboration
To simplify this cross-functional collaboration, the brand decided to integrate management platform Asana into its workflows – not only within the business, but also onboarding external agency partners. The impact has been transformative, explained Sebastien Berre, global product marketing lead at Dr Martens.
“We work on a number of campaigns at the same time, and so Asana has been really useful in having a quick view of all our campaigns, where we are and how we're tracking with each,” he explained. “After a few campaigns working with the same agency on Asana, too, we found our feet and managed to clearly lay out all the different processes and all stages of campaign creation, from creative to post-production and delivery.”
“Our digital paper trail was messy, to say the least.”
— Stacey Kemp, Dr Martens
A quick view of all campaigns
For example, in a recent campaign celebrating Dr Martens’ four original and iconic styles, which spanned multiple different departments, the ability to channel each process through a single shared workflow proved invaluable, added Kemp. Not only did it create overarching transparency but allowed regional teams to quickly gain approvals for small changes, and allowed tasks to be easily structured and tracked by channel too, be it retail, social media or digital ads.
“It meant senior stakeholders could come in at any moment and have a snapshot across the board of where we were at, and easily find a piece of information and talk to the person working on it at any point in time,” she said.
The company is constantly updating and improving the way it collaborates with partners too, to create further efficiencies, added Berre. “We review what’s working well and what we could improve, try and use different functionalities, and refine the template every season. It's been really helpful to constantly improve the way it works for us.
He concluded: “It's been a gamechanger for us, to manage lots of different campaigns and not get lost.”◆