Bianchi USA
Bianchi: How the right strategy and tools keep a 120-year-old brand up to date
Since its beginnings in 1885, Bianchi has stood as the oldest and most prestigious name in cycling. The Italian company is widely revered for its long history of achievements in bicycle racing as well as design and technology. For the past decade, Bianchi USA, which serves Bianchi’s largest market, has relied on Infield Design for strategic communications that enhance the face of the 124-year-old brand. Most recently Infield Design upgraded Bianchi USA’s website by tightly integrating the open-source Magento e-commerce platform and TYPO3 content-management system.
"It's a balancing act — we need to maintain the U.S. face of a historic European brand while remaining fresh and competitive. The guys at Infield Design understand our brand and our challenges. We can ask them for something and they lay out the options in plain English and just get it done, without all the tech talk."
- David Reed, V.P. Marketing, Bianchi USA
Challenge: Guarding a well-respected brand
- Bianchi racing legend Fausto Coppi
As the most prominent property of Cycleurope, a multinational company with an active-sports focus, Bianchi has earned a favorable reputation among millions of consumers worldwide. As a result, those firms entrusted with marketing strategy and communications shoulder a great responsibility to uphold and add to these positive perceptions. With a major brand at stake, the wrong marketing could do a lot of damage in a short amount of time.
Since 2000, Bianchi USA has granted Infield Design (ID) the honor of being the sole firm managing and maintaining its historic brand. Over the years ID has taken on numerous projects, from Bianchi’s annual printed catalog to its interactive presence, including original and successive iterations of a website and online store. When setting out to work on the latest site redesign, ID hewed to its premise that a successful website depends first on a well-thought-out communications strategy. Infield Design identified three objectives for bianchiusa.com:
- Protect the distinction and high quality of the Bianchi image, conforming to Bianchi corporate as needed while also balancing the necessity for branding appropriate for the U.S. market and U.S.-specific product line.
- Support Bianchi’s sales cycle and dealer network by efficiently presenting Bianchi’s wide range of bicycles and establishing a multi-tiered commerce platform for Bianchi’s multiple stakeholders.
- Strengthen and streamline the site’s enterprise content-management system with extensible architecture that enables easy and continuous updates.
Solution: Melding strategy and technology
With these objectives guiding the process, Infield Design applied the necessary tools and platforms to deliver the best results for Bianchi USA and its target markets. Specifically, the website marked a pathbreaking unification of the emerging Magento enterprise-class e-commerce application with the TYPO3 open-source content-management system. This achievement enables bianchiusa.com to have the best of both worlds—Magento for e-commerce, TYPO3 for website content—while site users experience a seamless integration of the two systems. A few highlights:
- Bianchi USA store
E-commerce support. The customized Magento platform serves multiple end users, including consumers purchasing apparel and accessories and sales reps and dealers accessing secure information. The online store interface is consistent with the rest of the website, avoiding the “add-on” feel of other companies’ commerce efforts. The store is also integrated with Bianchi email newsletter marketing to improve personalization of the customer experience, and repeat customers benefit from enhanced account management.
Content management. The design organizes Bianchi’s bikes into easily navigable sections and gives users the options of quickly drilling down to details on individual components or browsing an entire line. Because the extensible framework supports multiple editors and permission levels, the site greatly simplifies the process of adding new bike models and managing other dynamic content.
Localization. The “dealer search” function enables customers to get a mapped listing of Bianchi-equipped bike shops nearest their zip code.
Social networking. The site links to a new Flickr group for Bianchi riders to post their own photos and join a community of like-minded individuals.
