Bacardi
Raising a glass to global digital innovation through WordPress
Marketing and branding
Founded in 1862, Bacardi has been family-owned for seven generations. Bacardi is now one of the largest privately owned spirits companies in the world, employing more than 6,000 people and selling its products in over 160 countries. The Bacardi portfolio includes over 200 brands and labels, including iconic names such as: Bacardi, Gray Goose Vodka, Dewar’s Blended Scotch Whisky, Bombay Sapphire Gin and Martini Vermouth.
What did we do?
WordPress
Backend development
Interaction design
Consulting services
Design services
Front-end development
A need to improve the overall presence in multiple digital locations
At the global level, each country and local market was responsible for its own brand. The websites looked very different, even if they were for the same brand. In addition, they were the responsibility of several different digital agencies around the world, which meant that large sums were spent and efforts were often repeated.
Bacardi wanted to bring consistency to these digital assets and so sought a simple standardized approach to adopt. This required an approach that was both more coherent and more cost-effective than before.
Cost-effectiveness through consistent design and functionality
The first step towards the final goal was to come up with a scalable template that could be applied both fully or partially to each website. The goal was to build a custom WordPress theme for Bacardi. Each site would be based on this, so that all would have a similar structure, but at the same time there would also be flexibility to handle market-specific requests as well as to incorporate input from multiple market stakeholders.
New Bacardi-owned brand websites now have a cohesive look and feel, and all sites adhere to strict international alcohol marketing regulations, with age rating implemented as appropriate. Using WordPress for all websites has significantly reduced the skills gap needed to update websites with new content. This ease of use means that local brand managers are empowered to carry out updates themselves, without having to rely on a digital agency, furthermore it also means that content changes can be made immediately.
The result
All the newly created websites now comply with the global IT policy and are security and performance tested. Each site differs enough in structure and design that some degree of flexibility would be necessary. The technical approach we used meant that, even though each site was built to a master template, customizations could still be easily implemented.
These fixes do not change customizations in the main template and are therefore not updated on other websites. Keeping all Bacardi sites separate or synchronized in different situations is therefore not a problem.
