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Powering Brand Evolution with Strategic Redesign

Posted by on 11 July 2019
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As markets shift, brands need to evolve to achieve the next level of success. For TimberTech, a leading outdoor living brand providing design-savvy consumers with the most technologically advanced composite decking materials, brand evolution involved maintaining the power of the parent brand - Azek - while repositioning and unifying the brand under the TimberTech name, and implementing a strategic digital redesign that was thoughtfully engineered to facilitate a more sophisticated, fluid and engaging customer experience.

Azek Header

Starting with a Strategy: Redesigning for Customer Experience

Azek partnered with Rightpoint, the customer experience agency with technology at its core, to completely reinvent the digital presence for their portfolio of brands and enhance their website’s marketing and conversion capabilities, starting with TimberTech. The team had four categories of challenges to address:

  • Brand-related: From a branding perspective, they needed to reintroduce TimberTech, refocus their story around their superior technology, refresh their look and feel, and further establish them as a true leader in the market. At the same time, the team needed to deal with a brand in flux and the imposing task of merging two disparate site experiences and coming up with an IA solution to effectively blend multiple product lines.
  • Strategic: On the marketing side of things, it was imperative to optimize the site for speed by reducing friction throughout the customer experience, build a strong foundation for integrated marketing and personalization, simplify product discovery, inspire consumers, and increase conversion.
  • Technical: In addition to transitioning TimberTech onto Episerver, an enterprise working CMS platform that would empower the marketing team and improve UX and interaction design throughout (with a special focus on customizing content and enabling commerce), the team also needed to manage Episerver integrations with many of AZEK’s legacy systems including Webdam, LivePerson, BazaarVoice, and a custom app.
  • Time-related: Finally, all these project elements needed to be dealt with on a very tight and immovable timeline that was tied to a major brand relaunch and new product announcement.

To tackle all these challenges at once, Rightpoint employed a holistic approach that centered on a flexible template and component approach that would enable the marketing team to creat meaningful and personalized customer experiences and ultimately help to improve engagement and drive conversion.

Harnessing the Power of Experience Strategy and Design Systems

By leveraging their strategic design capabilities, Rightpoint provided TimberTech with a redesign that inspired prospective consumers and paces them through a sometimes-lengthy decision making process. The team’s holistic approach took all elements into consideration—the market, customer personas, customer objectives, competitive threats, the existing sales cycle, business KPIs, technology, and scalability —and blended them into a digital presence that resonates with consumers and gives TimberTech access to powerful marketing opportunities.

The team began the project with an in-depth look at consumer behavior on the existing site, looking at traffic trends and cycles, visitor types, page view statistics, device usage, and other relevant data. Using insights from this analysis combined with TimberTech’s three-stage engagement strategy as a foundation, Rightpoint reorganized the sitemap to provide greater context around the customer journey, remove friction, and ultimately speed the journey to conversion.

Building off this strong new site structure, Rightpoint set about designing a cohesive user experience powered by a comprehensive design system. A design system consists of a collection of reusable components that are guided by clear standards and can be assembled in multiple ways to build any number of applications. This approach supports consistency, creates clarity, enables simpler governance, and improves speed to market and cost efficiencies.

Comprised of a series of configurable templates and components, Rightpoint’s design solution is flexible enough to accommodate a wide variety of branding, content, and marketing needs while consistently delivering a more effective customer experience and seamlessly plugging into other marketing activities and platforms.

Rightpoint also transformed source content from the two original web properties by applying the new brand voice and tone—and created net new content to support previously missing brand storylines about TimberTech products’ technological advancements.

The new, flexible site structure, refreshed design, and updated content gave TimberTech the ability to create meaningful brand/customer connections through a more personalized and contextual customer experience. Throughout the process, the team focused on guiding the customer journey, focusing on user expectations and needs, and taking every opportunity to transform practical experience moments in a way that would inspire and delight.

“Rightpoint’s ability to think strategically, work quickly, and deliver on very tight timelines was very impressive. We could not be more pleased with the result of our collaboration with Rightpoint—a state-of-the-art website and digital strategy that represent a huge step in the evolution of AZEK and TimberTech.” - Lisa Collins, Senior Director, Digital & Integrated Marketing, TimberTech

Outcomes

Despite the breadth and depth of the project, Rightpoint delivered the redesign more than two weeks ahead of the already tight schedule, ensuring that TimberTech’s reinvented brand was ready for unveiling in coordination with the launch.

As they embarked on the next phase of their brand journey, TimberTech was well equipped with a fresh visual look; a website designed to deliver a better, more effective customer experience; and a scalable, adaptable design system that gave their marketing team the ability to craft varied messaging, personalize based on in-the-moment visitor behavior, and run A/B tests with ease and flexibility.

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