Better Homes & Gardens

This is an abridged case study. All sensitive information has been omitted. All information in this case study is my own and does not necessarily reflect the views of the client.

Product

One of Australia’s most beloved legacy brands and umbrella to a host of namesake digital products.

 

Problem

The brand’s products were siloed, which splintered the power of its message – as well as the power of each product.

The brand was split into many different channels: magazine, website, ecommerce shop, tv show, multiple Facebook groups and Instagram accounts, independent YouTube channel, etc.; this segmentation created a fragmented audience.

With such a wide spread of products there were also too many stakeholders and a very long history of segmentation.

 

Limitations

Budget and resources

 

Team

Role / Research, UX

Responsibilities / Take product through the user experience process; recommend viable solutions to the problem based on the findings from the UX process; put together a thorough and compelling body of research to support the proposed solutions; present the solutions to internal and external stakeholders; iterate based on feedback

The Discovery Phase

How could the BHG ‘universe’ come together?

How many BHG products were there? Did they each have a clear and specific purpose? Was there overlap? Could they help each other out? Where could the brand’s message be strengthened? How could the segmented audiences be brought together?

What followed was a deep dive into the who, what, and where’s of the BHG universe.

Step One / Tools

I chose the UX methodologies that were most relevant to the problem at hand to help guide the analysis.

Product analysis and comparison

Put together a chart documenting all products and their overlapping features.

Market analysis

Researched and created a chart of top competing websites and blogs, measuring social stats and special offerings against each other.

Newsletter/email matrix analysis

Reviewed all BHG universe email strategies across all products and brought them together in one document.

Shop promotional funnel flow

Created a flow chart documenting all current channels promotion of BHG Shop.

Step Two / Findings & Recommendations

There was indeed overlap between the products, especially when it came to marketing strategies and funnelling the audience toward the shop.

The biggest recommendation was to create an omni channel. Bringing the siloed products together would create more integration between editorial and ecommerce content in website and emails. This integration could be used to create content loops so editorial would feeds into ecommerce, which would feed back into editorial. These loops would create extremely powerful, clear messages for the audience and minimising duplication would free up editorial time to focus on continual creation of engaging content.

Solutions

Solutions were complex and had to be broken down into three streams:

BHG Omni Channel Recommendations

An in-depth document detailing easy to implement, inexpensive changes that could be made to the existing products to start bringing them together for a more powerful and cohesive output.

BHG Shop Recommendations

Easy to implement solutions specific to the shop – a massive property on its own that would require a separate case study in the future.

BHG eDM Recommendations

Breaking down emails into two categories: promotional and transactional. Going through each module and creating suggestions to optimise them. Creating an email schedule based on Amazon’s famous 21-day email cycle.