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Home | Our Work | Case Studies
Case Studies
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| How do we shift business direction and successfully introduce online e-commerce to our corporation without negatively impacting our offline business? |
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| CHALLENGE: Kerstin Florian International, a 24 year leader in providing products, treatments, and services to many of the world’s finest hotels, resorts and spas, engaged Brilliant Blue to determine brand positioning, assess market opportunities, develop a quality-based experience and features, and to implement from scratch a web-based, interactive e-commerce solution that would complement and converge, but not compete with their existing traditional non-internet based business. |
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| SOLUTION: To determine the proper positioning, brand strategies, and features for an e-commerce solution, Brilliant Blue conducted extensive internal, external and competitive research. Based on this research, Brilliant Blue defined and created the corporate positioning and value proposition that would not upset their existing customers or take-away from the existing revenue base, but would allow the company to expand into online sales to the public (a new market opportunity) and allow scaling of existing wholesale customers to purchase online (and more cost effectively) at a later stage. Brilliant Blue advised and implemented all creative and systems interface to banks, processors, warehouses, accounting and customer service, plus detailed reporting and control mechanisms. |
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| BENEFIT: Kerstin Florian International is now positioned for growth to be a leader in the rapidly growing and converging internet, retail and resort spa markets, allowing substantial new market opportunities, cost savings, and new revenue sources. Brilliant Blue remains a long-term strategic e-commerce brand advisor for the Spa product retailer, and continues to host and develop features and business strategies. |
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| How does the USA’s largest retail perfume wholesaler create a cost effective and complete e-commerce solution allowing the corporation to grow into new markets, create powerful new brands, and expand into additional product lines? |
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| CHALLENGE: Perfume Worldwide, Inc., the USA’s leading provider of perfumes, colognes and related products to retail giants such as Macy’s, Nordstrom, Walmart, COSTCO, Neiman Marcus, and many other retail outlets, engaged Brilliant Blue to create multiple brands and a complete internet e-commerce solution and features for over 6,000 items, that would create awareness and loyal new consumer customers. The strategy is to create more profitable sales, to complement their existing traditional non-internet based business, and expand into and sell other complimentary future products. |
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| SOLUTION: Brilliant Blue conducted extensive research to determine the best positioning, strategies, and features for multiple (5) internet e-commerce brands, targeting the most profitable demographic segments. (VivaBella.com, StyleRule.com, PerfumeWorldwide.com, ScentedMonkey.com, SwishPop.com) Brilliant Blue then developed detailed strategies and multiple features incorporating computer technologies, database, systems interface, and offline customer service, shipping and fulfillment capabilities. Additionally we created multiple internet marketing and affiliate programs allowing the company to create rapid awareness in the new market places, and to expand new online sales to consumers direct. Brilliant Blue advised and implemented all creative and systems interfaces to banks, processors, warehouses, accounting and customer service, plus detailed reporting and control mechanisms. |
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| BENEFIT: Perfume Worldwide is now positioned for growth to be a leader in the converging internet, and retail beauty product markets, allowing multiple new market opportunities, cost savings, and new revenue sources. Brilliant Blue remains a long-term strategic e-commerce brand manager for the perfume and beauty product retailer, and has helped the company expand products and offerings in multiple markets. |
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| How does the world’s largest American Museum create a creative, engaging, and compelling internet presence, while allowing targeted positioning, messaging and content consistent with the specific needs of each of millions of annual site visitors? |
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| CHALLENGE: The Whitney Museum in New York City, one of the most vital and influential cultural institutions in the world, engaged Brilliant Blue to research, create, and develop a cutting edge internet presence, that would provide any one of the millions of site visitors annually a unique and individualized web experience, consistent with their specific needs. This eventually will encompass research capabilities (hundreds of thousands of archives), visitor information gathering and e-commerce purchases including ticket sales, in a manner relational to a visit to the museum. |
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| SOLUTION: Brilliant Blue conducted research to determine members, website visitors, and staff needs, then based on the research, defined and created framework engines to identify these profiles as such. The positioning and value propositions will include the ability for exhibiting artists to create their “own” look and feel for the website in a dynamic and engaging interface, while also allowing for the profiling of likely visitor preferences, automatically and seamlessly adjusting the site providing the best website visitor experience possible. In Phase 2, (go live 2006) Brilliant Blue would have consulted, advised, and implemented all creative, database, e-commerce and systems interfaces plus detailed reporting and control mechanisms. |
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| BENEFIT: The Whitney Museum will soon be positioned (currently implementing) to offer a dynamic and engaging website experience, second to no other museum in the world, that will create a positive visitor experience, new market opportunities, and increased likelihood for revenue (e-commerce / ticket sales) and benefactor donations over the short and long term. Brilliant Blue remains a long-term strategic e-commerce brand advisor for the Museum, and continues to develop additional features and business strategies. |
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| How do we shift business direction and successfully introduce online e-commerce to our corporation without negatively impacting our offline business? |
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| CHALLENGE: Heritage Escrow company www.HeritageEscrow.com had just completed a complete marketing plan with Brilliant Blue that included re-development of their website with Brilliant Blue and wanted the world to see it. They wanted to both increase traffic to their website, and find out more about the people visiting their website. Understanding more about your visitors and managing your website content helps with attracting new visitors, which in turn helps bring more business. |
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| SOLUTION: Brilliant Blue was engaged to provide “Level 1” Natural SEO program services. These services include keyword research, website code optimization, website content evaluation and optimization, and other various methodologies (backlink, traverse, etc) to increase page ranks. Level 1 program services also included additional competitive website research and search evaluation that produced a monthly status report indicating search rankings, website traffic analysis, etc. Together with using Brilliant Blue’s access to Google, Yahoo, and MSN API’s it’s possible to obtain information associated to page rankings and search engine traffic in their industry. |
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| BENEFIT: Brilliant Blue “Level 1” SEO program successfully obtained first page rankings for the 3 out of the top 5 keyword groups identified. In fact, Heritage obtained #1 overall on Google, Yahoo, AND MSN and held that ranking for 3 of the 5 months of the program. This program reached it’s peak at the end of the program (November) where we had obtained top 10 rankings for 75% of their “primary” search keywords on all three major search engines, and ranked in the first three pages on 50% of their “secondary” search keywords. Our analysis found that Heritage website traffic not only increased during this program, the “length of stay” per visitor increased well over 4 minutes per visitor! |
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| How do we shift business direction, become more profitable, and successfully integrate disparate systems within our organization? |
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| CHALLENGE: Birkenstock USA broke away from it’s parent company Birkenstock Germany after 34 years, to become a new separate entity. The new company needed assistance in the design and setup of the new company financial direction and systems. Birkenstock USA needed to design and implement new systems while eliminating existing over burdening systems that were previously implemented by an old “regime”. In addition, the support of these existing over-burdened systems during the implementation and transition of the new systems was needed to eliminate down time. The new systems provide the ability for customers, retail stores, and retail outlets in almost every city across North America, to order and receive product from both Birkenstock USA and Birkenstock Germany. …. infrastructure…middleware….applications…systems…implementation. |
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| SOLUTION: Brilliant Blue was engaged to assist in coming up with alternative company financial and systems infrastructure alternatives depending on the direction of the company. Once the company had made the decision on direction, Brilliant Blue implemented the new financial company structure within their ERP. This was aligned with designing and building a new Customer Portal, Order Entry, EDI, and other systems to increase and drive all sales through (and into) their back end ERP and legacy distribution systems. During this design and implementation phase, Brilliant Blue also supported the existing infrastructure and all legacy systems. |
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| BENEFIT: Brilliant Blue aligned their new company direction with their financial structure and implementation of necessary supporting systems. With the elimination of previous software and systems licenses, and implementation of new systems Birkenstock has put more than $1million straight to the profit line each year. The total cost of ownership has been reduced by more than 90% while providing Birkenstock customers (i.e. Dillards, Nordstroms, Birkenstock Outlets, etc) a much better, more simple, and richer experience in working with Birkenstock USA. |
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How can we combine disparate web based applications into one Enterprise wide Portal for 15,000 daily users,
while maintaining single sign on? |
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| CHALLENGE: Northwest Airlines was in need of an enterprise portal that could sustain daily usage well over 10,000 concurrent users a day. Within the enterprise portal existed the need to pull together both new and existing applications for ground operations, maintenance, technical operations, maintenance manuals, executive dashboards, Pay and Benefits, training, Corporate Instant Messaging, Team Work Rooms, Collaboration, and other applications. |
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| SOLUTION: Brilliant Blue was engaged by MSI Systems Integrators to assist in providing finalizing the Solution Architecture, and overseeing the technical implementation for a load balanced / clustered enterprise portal running on AIX 5.2, DB2 v9, WebSphere Portal (version 5.1.2), Lotus Domino v7, Lotus Sametime v7, and Lotus Team Workspace v7 with Tivoli performance monitoring applications. These clustered servers with fail-over provide a framework with Single Sign-on using LDAP service calls to the corporate Active Directory authentication protocol. |
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| BENEFIT: Northwest Airlines now has an enterprise class framework for applications. Northwest currently has approximately 125 WebSphere Application server instances, and another few dozen miscellaneous applications running on Tomcat, JBoss, and BEA Weblogic that will become a “portlet” in the WebSphere Portal framework. With more applications soon to be integrated into the portal framework, such as the airplane training system “Plateau” and HR Systems Employees of Northwest Airlines will have a one stop shop for getting their daily business done. |
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| How do you develop a unified web brand for a family of two dozen companies that design, build, and sell products for agricultural, industrial, commercial and government markets? |
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| CHALLENGE: Alamo Group (NYSE: ALG) needed to unify their brand across many international member companies, while implementing a completely integrated B2B and B2C web presence. This presence needed to be fully integrated into Oracle (JDE) Enterprise One so that customers and distributors may order and ship, while obtaining the latest information about Engineered products in real time. In addition, marketing reports were needed so that Alamo Group member companies may make needed business decisions about customers, distributors, and products. Alamo Group also needed a robust and scalable hosting solution to meet the needs of a 24/7, international online presence. Infrastructure…middleware…commerce...applications…systems…implementation. |
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| SOLUTION: Brilliant Blue was engaged to update their brand, reinforce their strong market perception, and ultimately rollout completely integrated B2B and B2C websites. Brilliant Blue implemented their online commerce product BlueCommerce and integrated it into Alamo Group’s ERP J.D. Edwards Enterprise One. The solution is hosted at Brilliant Blue’s One Wilshire facility, and provides real time access to Alamo Group’s product catalog and order entry system. In addition, customer service modules, warranty modules, and an integrated Engineering information portal, is seamlessly integrated. |
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| BENEFIT: Brilliant Blue implemented the unified and integrated commerce product while updating the Alamo Group company brand. Brilliant Blue’s research identified Alamo Group’s market perception as Quality, Stability, Strength, and Durability and therefore needed to both reinforce these qualities and provide a robust and scaleable online commerce presence rich with capabilities. In addition, Alamo Group’s custom requirements required Brilliant Blue to be flexible enough to implement new features that would further provide customers a faster and more complete experience working with Alamo Group companies. Since the initial rollout in 2006, Alamo Group’s online usages statistics show that a steady increased trend in online usage has resulted in some Alamo Group businesses reporting at least 90% of their total sales through the B2B/B2C commerce solutions. In addition, elimination of previous software and systems licenses allows Alamo Group to reduce their total cost of ownership by 71% over 2 years. With new features added daily to systems, Brilliant Blue can continue to provide Alamo Group member companies, distributors, and customers a rich and complete user experience. |
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| How does a retail company with over 400 stores and 10k employees roll out a new employee portal without manually updating employee information? |
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| CHALLENGE: Charlotte Russe Holdings Inc, is a mall-based specialty retailer of apparel and accessories targeting young women in their teens and twenties. With their existing rollout of Lawson Portal and the Lawson Self Evident Applications, they were in need of a solution that would allow them the ability to roll out access to this portal to thousands of both corporate and store employees without having to manually enter employee information. In addition, Charlotte Russe wanted to provide the new employee portal in a secure environment in order to provide browser access for confidential employee information. |
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| SOLUTION: Brilliant Blue was engaged to assist Charlotte Russe by providing a NEW Java based solution for securing Lawson Portal that otherwise has inadequate security for any company rolling out the Lawson Portal system where there exists a “shared computer” environment. In addition, this company wide rollout consists of user authentication for thousands of employees, while also providing immediate access to specific user information, bookmarks, and corporate links that would otherwise require duplicate manual entry in many different locations within the Lawson system and Charlotte Russe’s security platform. While providing this solution, Brilliant Blue also automated the process so that it maintains the Lawson system by itself, without human intervention, and as a result integrates the Lawson security platform with the Active Directory platform. |
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| BENEFIT: Brilliant Blue provided this NEW Java based solution for Charlotte Russe so that the company’s IT and HR resources could focus on more business critical needs, rather than manual entry and daily maintenance of thousands employees. Within the retail industry, this is extremely crucial since there exists high turn over. In addition, employees that access their information while at work on a “shared computer” can be assured that Charlotte Russe is doing what they can to keep their information safe, and therefore be less likely to be a vitcim of identity theft. |
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| How does Southern California’s largest mattress retailer provide a fully integrated online shopping experience to their growing Hispanic Market? |
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| CHALLENGE: Sit N Sleep, Southern California’s largest mattress retailer, engaged Brilliant Blue to help design a complete interactive e-commerce website that would appeal to both their traditional target demographic as well as their increasing Hispanic market through translation of the entire site, ecommerce module included, into Spanish. It was necessary to design the website to allow for frequent updates in both English and Spanish by Sit N Sleep staff members without prior web programming knowledge. |
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| SOLUTION: Brilliant Blue designed the website utilizing a Content Management System specifically allowing for easy translation of all site components into Spanish. All English content was housed in a database structure and provided to our translators. Because of the site architecture, the translated database was easily integrated into the website. |
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| BENEFIT: The seamless translation of the website into Spanish, has positioned Sit N Sleep for rapid growth in the growing Hispanic market. The easy to use CMS system allows for anyone on staff to easily make updates to both the English and Spanish content. The site has also been designed to allow for easy translation into other languages if there is ever a future need. |
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| How does a 27 year old company update and modernize the brand without losing the integrity and clout it has gained throughout the years? |
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| CHALLENGE: JNR Incorporated is a staple in the corporate incentive industry. JNR’s customers include some of the biggest brands in the world. They have worked tirelessly over the past 27 years to establish themselves as a leader in their industry. JNR prides itself in delivering the highest level of quality, customer service and creativity to their clients employees and customers worldwide. The need to modernize the brand without losing industry credibility and clout, yet be perceived as best of breed in a highly competitive industry was the biggest challenge. Also, although JNR has gained a reasonable amount of brand awareness, it has been highly specific to a limited number of vertical markets, primarily the automotive industry. It was necessary for Brilliant Blue to create a brand that would appeal to a broader number of vertical markets. In addition, JNR’s existing website needed a complete refresh to reflect the exciting and engaging new brand being created by Brilliant Blue. The website, while reflecting their new branding, also needed to be utilized as a tool to generate new sales leads. |
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| SOLUTION: Brilliant Blue was engaged to create a hip and engaging brand and website that reflected the level of quality offered by JNR. Brilliant Blue conducted extensive internal, external and competitive research to determine proper positioning and brand strategies. Based on this research, Brilliant Blue defined and created a corporate brand and website that would differentiate them in their highly competitive industry and allow them to expand into other vertical markets. Additionally, the website, built with intuitive navigation, engaging imagery, and effective messaging, was created with state of the art technology and database functionality, allowing for additional sales opportunities through targeted customer questionnaires. |
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| BENEFIT: JNR is now properly positioned for growth with the ability to expand into additional vertical markets. JNR is now able to differentiate themselves in an industry of competent competitors, but ones with little or no existing brand awareness. Brilliant Blue remains a long-term strategic brand advisor for JNR and will be launching a large scale Search Engine Optimization and Pay Per Click program to ensure JNR’s continued growth. |
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| How did we integrate multiple disparate systems and components globally, enabling thousands of high security transactions per second - so business unit functions and data would roll up to a central financial group for consolidated transactions and financial management. |
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| CHALLENGE: As a leading designer and producer of engine, driveline, and chassis products, Metaldyne delivers innovative technology to automakers and Tier One suppliers around the world. With manufacturing facilities in multiple locations across the United States running on different systems, Metaldyne implemented a java-based integration solution to maintain voucher and payment information across these systems. Without in-house capabilities to support this system, Metaldyne needed a full service provider who had the capabilities to provide 24x7 support as well as the abilities to work across all applications involved in the integration solution (JDE World Software and QAD Software). |
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| SOLUTION: Brilliant Blue was engaged to support Metaldyne through the use of it’s support and development competency center (SDC). Metaldyne is provided 24x7 support with the assurance of a multi-tiered contact structure. Support includes on-line ticket entry and tracking, phone support and assistance with identifying and correcting issues before they can affect their business. Brilliant Blue provides the expertise to support their JDE World software running on an IBM iSeries server, QAD Software running on multiple HP UNIX servers and java-based integration software running on both platforms. |
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| BENEFIT: Brilliant Blue provides the expertise needed to maintain an integral part of Metaldyne’s day to day operations at an affordable cost. This decreases focus on system maintenance and allows Metaldyne to focus on improvements and growing their core business. |
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| How do you update a respected 30-year old brand to better position itself to its target market…without losing the company’s core customers? |
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| CHALLENGE: First Team Real Estate, California’s #1 Independent Real Estate Company and market leader in its headquarters of Orange County, California, had developed a respected reputation as a trusted partner in Real Estate over 30 years of operation. While the existing brand had served the company well, it was universally felt among senior marketing management that the brand needed an update and was limiting both increases in local market share in Orange County as well as geographic expansion plans. |
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| SOLUTION: Brilliant Blue was engaged to conduct in-depth market research on First Team’s target market, segmented by both geography and income. Research showed that First Team’s existing brand and market positioning was well-directed at entry-level and mid-level home buyers and sellers, it did well target the more affluent, brand-conscious segments of their market. A breakdown of the target market by known psychographic clusters revealed that, across all segments, consumers engaged in similar aspirational behaviors, and that these segments could all be targeted with the use of aspirational messaging and imagery. In addition, consumer research showed that First Team messaging could more precisely address the needs and issues of the market. Finally, a competitive survey revealed that, although the industry was filled with national players with larger marketing resources than First Team, few achieved anywhere near Best-of-Breed marketing standards as compared to other brands (Target, Ikea, Apple) marketing to the same demographic. |
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| BENEFIT: Brilliant Blue developed a revised, data-driven First Team brand and marketing campaign that effectively targeted all segments of its target market. Aggressive use of aspirational imagery and messaging made for a brand and campaign that differentiated First Team from its immediate local competitors, as well as national competitors. The brand – projected to launch Summer 2007 – was accompanied by a Brand Book, directing First Team personnel in the application and use of the revised brand elements. |
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| How do you educate patients about a new a life-saving procedure… while educating their physicians as well?
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| CHALLENGE: McLeod Health, a large hospital serving northeastern South Carolina, sought to promote its bloodless surgery program to both local and regional patients and physicians. Bloodless surgery is an often safer alternative to traditional blood transfusions during elective surgery, and is today primarily used by the Jehovah’s Witness community, who are forbidden from receiving blood products. McLeod Health wished to grow the market for the procedure, but realized that awareness of it was as low among potential referring physicians as it was among potential patients. |
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| SOLUTION: Brilliant Blue was engaged to develop a new educational website for McLeod’s program, including brand/messaging development and creation of all content. The site was to have both complete patient and physician sections, with a resource library of information on the bloodless surgery procedure. In addition, the physician section was to include a fully-administerable LEARNING CENTER where users could take courses to earn CME credits. |
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| BENEFIT: Brilliant Blue developed a revised McLeod Bloodless Surgery web site, including a “Blood Type” look and feel throughout the site, combined with aggressive use of confidence-building physician, staff, and patient imagery. The site – to launch June 2006 – allows McLeod staffers to administer course content and learning center usage/membership. |
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| How do we combine strong creative and technical abilities to enrich and simplify the user experience of a highly interactive, portal based website? |
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| CHALLENGE: Alteer® was a leading maker of practice management software that wanted to re-position the company as a provider of both software and consulting services for Practice Management and Electronic Medical Records implementation. The company needed to determine the best way to re-launch the brand to the market, and re-position the company to align with its new product and service mix. The company was saddled with a sterile, clinical legacy brand and a web site whose look, feel, and functionality that reflected its late 90s development. |
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| SOLUTION: In order to achieve their marketing goals, Brilliant Blue was engaged to 1) revise the Alteer brand, 2) re-design the web site, 3) develop digital and print marketing materials, and 4) coordinate direct mail and email campaigns – with follow-up telemarketing -- to best promote the new Alteer to its target markets. Research also revealed that the market for practice consulting services was segmented by specialty, with each specialty requiring dramatically different messaging. |
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| BENEFIT: Based on its market research, Brilliant Blue developed a completely revised brand for Alteer -- including revised logo, look and feel and tagline, “Practice for a better life” – that better communicated the company’s new value proposition to the market. The previous clinical, white look and feel was replaced by a warmer, richer palette of grey and orange. The Alteer web site was completely revised with the update color palette, and robust content explaining the company’s new service offering. Brilliant Blue developed specialty-specific copy to communicate to five (5) different target markets, and developed web content, direct mail pieces, downloadable i-brochures, and email blasts specifically for those specialties to launch the new business. The result has been the successful launch of Alteer into this new space. Web traffic – and leads from the web site – have increased by 150% over the previous site and preliminary market research shows brand perception of Alteer has shifted. |
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How can we combine disparate web based applications into one Enterprise wide Portal for 15,000 daily users,
while maintaining single sign on? |
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| CHALLENGE: With a mission to provide schools complete freedom-of-choice and equal access to all education financing providers, ELM Resources was established in 1994 as the only open, non-proprietary, lender-neutral student loan delivery system in the industry. Through its members -- lenders, guarantors, and loan servicers -- ELM administers a common, open, and universal student loan delivery system that seamlessly links the diverse computing platforms involved in processing and disbursing a student loan. ELM offers students and schools the convenience of using a single data channel for both alternative and government guaranteed loans, regardless of which loan provider is serving the customer. Due to the abundance of different applications, database formats and platforms, the existing user interface is complicated and difficult to administer. The challenge was to make improvements that change the experience lenders and schools have when they use the ELM Resources site and add value to ELM Resources' brand. |
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| SOLUTION: Brilliant Blue chose to redefine the user experience by utilizing IBM’s Websphere Portal platform. By making use of WebSphere Portal dynamic UI framework, Web Content Manager, in addition to building custom AJAX-enabled UI components they enriched the user experience, and simplified the online delivery of student loans. Ajax is a JavaScript and XML based framework that adds powerful interactive capabilities. |
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| BENEFIT: ELM Resources new user interface has enabled them to enhance the service it provides to schools and student lenders. The new, more intuitive, user friendly design strenthens ELM Resources’ already well defined brand and has paved the way for ELM’s long term plans for an ongoing service improvement program |
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