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Aprimo

Limited Brands, Inc. (LBI) is as much of a shopping-mall mainstay as food courts and teenagers.Founded in 1963, with one women’s apparelstore in Columbus, Ohio, Limited Brands hasgrown into more than 3,500 stores and nine retailbrands.

Background

Limited Brands, Inc. (LBI) is as much of a shopping- mall mainstay as food courts and teenagers. Founded in 1963, with one women’s apparel store in Columbus, Ohio, Limited Brands has grown into more than 3,500 stores and nine retail brands. Historically, Limited Brands has been viewed as a multidivisional, largely apparelbased, popular-priced retailer. Over the past 10 years, Limited Brands has reinvented itself completely, becoming a predominantly personal care, beauty and lingerie company, with more than 70 percent of its sales coming from those areas.

Limited Brands, through Victoria’s Secret, Bath & Body Works, C.O. Bigelow, Express, Limited Stores, White Barn Candle Co., Henri Bendel, La Senza and Diva London, presently operates 3,543 specialty stores. Victoria’s Secret products are also available through the catalog and www.VictoriasSecret.com. Bath & Body Works products are also available through the catalog and www.BathandBodyWorks.com. Limited Brands has 19,800 full-time employees, 100,000 retail associates and $9.7 billion in annual sales.

Problem

As a visionary company, LBI continues to focus efforts and make improvements to enable the enterprise business strategy and continue driving profitable growth. Managing the marketing of its well-known consumer brands is no easy task. One of LBI’s goals was to bring greater consistency and increased visibility to all of the brands. The company saw the need for a system that would:

• Provide additional insight into the overall marketing process flow;
• House all documentation in a central repository for accessibility across the brands;
• Enhance the facilitation of planning and executing all the marketing initiatives across all brands; and
• Create additional visibility regarding workload management prioritization efforts.

Solution

Aprimo partnered with LBI to help align the company’s internal marketing processes and to strategically execute marketing to drive acquisition, growth and retention of customers. To help achieve these goals, LBI implemented the Aprimo Marketing Enterprise Marketing Management (EMM) suite, including components of Planning and Financial Management, Marketing Production Management and Marketing Asset Management. In the customer marketing functions, these tools:

• Facilitate discipline throughout the marketing process;
• Capture, store and communicate data through a centralized system that includes work flow;
• Manage approvals for the planning and execution process;
• Manage marketing schedules across brands;
• Track history of all changes to documents and work flow dates;
• Increase speed in communications and process internally; and
• Provide consistency in products and deliverables.

The project was implemented in phases. At the beginning of the relationship, the focus was on providing a marketing platform for three brands to share information and marketing strategies. The next step in the rollout was to extend its use to additional brands and the internal customer marketing functions that support these brands.

Since LBI’s launch of Aprimo, the company has been capturing all documents in a centralized location, which has made it easier to ensure that marketing campaigns have all the required instructions and are being executed to requirements. They have been tracking key milestones and changes in campaign initiatives through the tool, using documentation around version control and change communication, and managing projects through work request functionality. In addition, they have leveraged visibility into all campaigns and project work through report tracking, which has also helped in managing prioritization efforts.

Resolution

Aprimo provided a framework to facilitate standardization and structure in LBI’s marketing processes. Creating a centralized information store helped ensure all supporting campaign materials are updated and available. The marketing organizations can access a snapshot of all marketing activities being planned and executed, as well as have the ability to drill down into the details where necessary. In addition, it’s easier to manage schedules and highlight key decision-making dates in an effort to keep team members informed and identify opportunities to flex with business needs.