case study 1: New Zealand Rugby Union >

case study 2:  Philips New Zealand >

case study 3: Tourism New Zealand >

Rugby by the ALL BLACKS...jersey by adidas...brand by e-see®

How does the world's most famous Rugby team get their brand on apparel made by one of the worlds leading sporting goods companies ?

The answer is e-see®.

e-see® has developed an Internet based brand management system that provides the NZRU with secure delivery and management of the ALL BLACKS® logo anytime, anywhere.

Enabling adidas designers in Germany to download brand identity and artwork whenever they need it.

After two years of development and testing e-see®'s revolutionary system is now finding favour with one of New Zealand’s leading brands.

"...Building our team and competition brand identities has taken time and they play a big part in our success both on and off the field. We don't want to see them misrepresented in any way. Using the e-see® system helps us maintain our brand’s integrity".

"The New Zealand Rugby Union was one of the first clients to recognize the benefits that e-see® had to offer and now more and more brand managers are seeing the light" said e-see®'s David Vaassen

Up until signing on as an e-see® contributor, the NZRU was like so many brand owners worldwide when it came to managing its brands.

The union had almost 30 brands under management and the standards on their usage were contained on one A4 sheet per brand, which also doubled as a bromide sheet. Reproduction was conducted by scanning the image and then retracing the image. Operator error was prevalent with many subtle variations of their brands being reproduced.

To complicate matters, Rugby was rapidly entering the professional era and the amount of requests from sponsors, suppliers, licensees and the media around the world and locally, gathered pace and it became a mammoth task to keep track of and distribute all the brands logos, images and standards.

Not only that, but the value of their brands was increasing at an incredible pace. Tighter control of the use of their brands was necessary with a need of an audit on who was using their brand images and for what purpose, became essential.

The NZRU's Fraser Holland said "We're constantly being asked to supply our logo’s both locally and internationally. Building our team and competition brand identities has taken time and they play a big part in our success both on and off the field. We don't want to see them misrepresented in any way. Using the e-see® system helps us maintain our brand’s integrity".

Essentially e-see® is a central repository where the NZRU (and other organizations) store all their brand identities and enable authorized users from around the world to logon and download logos and images instantly. The system is totally secure and records brand activity so NZRU management can see who is using any one of their brands at any time.

Amanda Temperton of the NZRU sums it up best when she says, "We don't have to worry about sending materials out, it just happens in the background and we can check up at anytime who is using what brand".

New Zealand Rugby Football Union is the national organization representing the sport of Rugby in New Zealand and manages famous brands such as the ALL BLACKS, Rugby Super 12 Competition, and Teams, Blues, Crusaders, Highlanders, Chiefs, Hurricanes, NPC, Ranfurly Shield, Tri Nations and Bledisloe Cup.

MAKING THINGS BETTER AT PHILIPS

Philips the world renowned consumer goods firm had a nice problem. How to satisfy retailers insatiable appetite for Philips branded product  images for advertising

As the market for consumer electronics and appliances gets more competitive companies have to find ways to ensure they get to the front of the pack. 

"…if you can make your product images and artwork more easily and reliably accessible and available
when users need them you've got an edge"

Retailers' Direct Mail Catalogues and brochures are one of  the most common mediums used to promote products in this competitive market. Not only are manufacturers competing with each other for brand awareness but retailers are competing with each other right at your letterbox for consumers discretionary dollar.

Today the quality of these documents can be outstanding compared to the mono-colour NewsPrint flyers that were prolific not so long ago. Driving this huge quality improvement are advancements in design layout and pre-press technology, lower production costs and competition for eyes. However without high quality original artwork and product photography all these advancements would be in vain. As they say "content is king" and this applies to retail direct mail as much as any website. Long gone is the bromide sheet and clip art that used to prevail. Retailers and consumers now want to see product in all its full colour glory and at high resolution. The challenge is to manage and distribute all these high quality images and artwork in an efficient and timely manner.

"Basically if you can make your product images and artwork more easily and reliably accessible and available whenever users need them you've got an edge" says e-see® David Vaassen

The other big issue for retailers is getting easy access to up to date images, usually with "yesterday" deadlines as retailers negotiate best pricing and availability for products and still have to meet print deadlines.

What's a company to do ?

The answer is e-see® - the revolutionary new solution for branded product management.

e-see® enables retailers to logon, find and download the image they want in minutes rather than waiting hours or days to get the right data. Users can also clearly see what they're getting with keyword lookups and visual previews. File names match Philips product codes too making integration with retail systems easy.

"We were a little uncertain initially how many of our retailers had Internet access or were comfortable with using the Internet. We did some research and got nearly 100% support for Internet, which was a bit of turnaround for some retailers" says Philips management.

Philips introduces new products regularly and they needed a system that could handle frequent updates and changes without penalty. e-see® has been able to deliver. While some original images come from Philips offices overseas for loading onto e-see®, many are photographed locally to account for local differences. For example, a lot of the TV cabinets are made here in NZ - so Philips NZ product images will differ from Singapore for example.

e-see® provides a full product photography service and can get new product photographed and online promptly

….. so retailers can get the latest products to market quicker than ever before and more importantly before the competition has time to respond.

KEEPING 100% PURE ONE HUNDRED PERCENT PURE

Ask anyone at Tourism New Zealand what is the country's greatest asset and you're sure to get the same answer: our brand

In today's highly competitive global tourism market that's what it's all about. No matter what aspect or feature of New Zealand you're trying to promote, someone, somewhere will be able to offer something the same. But a well developed brand is more powerful than any individual product feature, it is a mark of quality and the promise of a unique experience.

Once you've established a successful brand, however, the hard part is to ensure it remains consistent in the hands of others. Just think how many businesses, advertisers, promoters, travel companies, web sites, tourism operators and media companies publish New Zealand related material every day throughout the world.

How does Tourism New Zealand(TNZ) hope to ensure that our brand is properly represented by a diverse range of users who may or may not have New Zealand best interests at heart?

The answer is e-see®

Now, New Zealand's most famous brands, Brand New Zealand and TNZ's own 100% PURE global brand, are safely housed at e-see®. That means that anyone involved in the publication of New Zealand brand imagery anywhere in the world can download the latest, owner approved versions of logos, icons and images from one central source in their preferred file format for the task in hand.

…a well developed brand is more powerful than any individual product feature, it is a mark of quality and the promise of a unique experience

More than just a logo.

In a new development for e-see, its not only the brand logos and symbols that are online. TNZ is making full use of the service by including a comprehensive range of brand related materials, including typefaces, large format photographs and full advertisement templates for use by its many affiliates throughout the world.

100% Fresher

TNZ had just launched their new 100% Pure campaign brand and refreshed its Brand New Zealand brand identity. Brand New Zealand identity was developed by Designworks (a leading design house)in partnership with the NZ Trade Development Board while the 100% Pure Campaign by M&C Saatchi (TNZ's ad agency).

TNZ management had to co-ordinate all their identity and communicate and distribute all of the material to a worldwide market. Before e-see® introduced its revolutionary brand management solution, management were contemplating a fairly expensive CD burn and distribution of the data and a large format brand manual to far flung offices of clients and media houses around the globe. A rather expensive task. Furthermore like most organizations the images used, change on a regular basis giving CDs and manuals a short lifespan - meaning further expensive distributions in the future.

e-see® published TNZ's data on its e-see® brand management system (an extranet central repository ) and allows approved users to come in and access always up to date data whenever they need it.

"Tourism has a great campaign brand in 100% Pure and really fantastic looking brand manual but fundamentally its crazy to ship CD's full of data and a large format book to multiple addressees around the world. The material is often out of date by the time it gets used and often only 1 for 2 files are used anyway. It makes far more sense to make the data available across the Internet and enable approved users simply access the data when they need it. And its always up to date." says e-see®'s David Vaasssen

With e-see® TNZ management saved considerable costs and can now update materials whenever required. Users of the material are alerted instantly there is a change and can access the data if and when they need it - anytime from anywhere.

100% Quality Control

TNZ have great images which considerable thought and expense has gone into creating and selecting, so naturally TNZ are a little sensitive about their correct use.

e-see has split 100% Pure core images into Low Res and Hi Res sub-brands. Also stored are ad templates, typefaces and layouts of complete print adverts.

Now TNZ management can give access to the low res images and other elements to make up adverts, Overseas ad agencies or clients can make up ads for their local market using the low res images and then pass them back to TNZ for approval. Once TNZ management approves the ad, access is then granted to the high res image for final production. This can all be done online and remotely - so the traditional hold-ups are a thing of the past and Tourism has total control.

e-see® also worked with TNZ's ad agency M&C Saatchi to make available different versions of each image depending on output media. So authorised users can choose between a standard high res. image or one specifically created for Newsprint or for Web Offset printing.

This way TNZ could positively control what is presented to the market and ensure consistency for their brand.

Well no one takes branding more seriously than Tourism New Zealand. With the help of   e-see®, it's good to know that our brand is in safe hands