Briefing

One of the reasons why Weber is such a strong brand? Consistent branding from the heart in all their communication. Whether you visit the website, drop in at one of their shops or see a Facebook post; the solid design of Weber is recognizable everywhere. Not only in the Netherlands, Weber is active and consistent in 36 countries in Europe, the Middle-East and Africa.

But how is this achieved? We gladly want to give you a sneak peek. Let’s take the showrooms of retailers or the assortment in shops as an example. Weber uses “Product Feature Cards”, which shows the most important product features of each barbecue. However, how do you make sure that the same product features will be communicated in a design that meets the requirements of 36 countries, each with their own culture and languages? Weber asked us to help them with this question.

Strategy

Starting directly with the implementation without thinking? That’s not the way we work. Because, what is happening in the various countries and which differences are crucial to consider? To discover this, we developed an online survey. Not only this resulted in important insights, it also created support from all participating countries for this collective project. You might think this will slow down the process. However, we believe that a perfect preparation saves time and results in benefits for everyone.

The copy and artwork have been created based on the insights of the survey. For example: did you know that European countries attach value to using lifestyle pictures with people, while countries in the Middle-East absolutely don’t want to use this and prefer visuals of the product?

Approach

After approval on the design, the next challenge followed. Imagine processing copy for 36 countries, each with their own assortment and language. Normally this will take a lot of time, but we have found a solution for this!

By creating databases and cleverly converting them with our designs, the information per country could be integrated very fast. After this we introduced an online “text amendments tool” in which countries could easily make corrections on their own.

For other similar projects, this way of working earlier resulted in a decrease of correction costs of 30%.

Process

During 4 months Vandenbusken completed the following tasks:

  • Research to requirements of all participating countries
  • Research to and creation of 6 uniform shapes and designs for 70 different barbecue types.
  • Creating of content for product features
  • Database management for translations of 36 countries
  • Integrate translations in all different designs
  • Printing, handling and transport for more than 245.000 Products Feature Cards

Results

Whether you visit a Weber-dealer in Holland or Spain, in Russia or South-Africa, Weber stays Weber. And we are the proud developers of their brand.