Dealer Portal: create brand experience

DEALER PORTAL – MARKETING SELF-SERVICES

The success or failure of a car manufacturer no longer depends on technical innovation alone: The world’s largest markets have reached saturation point. That’s why brands are extremely valuable for the automotive sector – and why those brands are present when customers make contact with car dealers. These dealers need a simple and fast way of ensuring brands are presented in ways that are consistent with design guidelines, while also offering the possibility to adapt material for their customers without neglecting their core work. Combining one2edit™ and CoFS saves sales partners time and stress, and provides high-quality marketing material that is 100 % on brand.


CHALLENGE

The automotive sector is a hard-fought and saturated market. Cars are now bulk goods, and the potential to create value through development and production is limited. Brands play a decisive role. Sales partners are important representatives for car brands at home and abroad. They have direct contact with customers and are often closely associated with the brand. That’s why it’s so important that marketing material and other information – like product and performance details, contact information and special offers – meet the highest standards for quality and ensure full brand consistency.

But a car dealer’s job is to sell cars and related services, not to create communications material. That’s why they frequently use external agencies who often allow themselves a lot of creative freedom when implementing design guidelines. Avoiding embarrassing errors can be a time-consuming and expensive process that involves quality checks and approval from the central marketing team – which can be frustrating for dealers.



SOLUTION

Combining one2edit™ and CoFS gives sales partners around the world access to ready-to-use marketing material and up-to-date templates. There’s no need to install software or text formats on users’ computers: Dealers can adapt marketing templates through their web browser quickly and easily.

There’s also no need for any corporate design knowledge. The pre-defined design rules in one2edit™ make sure it’s only possible to adapt material in ways that are in line with your design guidelines. Approval processes can also be defined within one2edit™: Enabling you to coordinate your adaptation processes through a workflow featuring automatic notifications, comment functions and an archive where all changes are tracked.

Our web-based technology makes it easier than ever to give your customers a consistent brand experience across a range of different materials and channels. And it’s not an isolated solution: If you already have portal solutions in place, one2edit™ and CoFS can be integrated into these solutions easily thanks to our comprehensive and well-documented programming interfaces.

one2edit™ and CoFS give you the power to turbocharge your trade marketing – with design consistency down to the tiniest detail that is perfectly aligned with your brand profile.



RELEVANT FUNCTIONS AND MODULES

The one2edit™ brand design framework can be set up with just a few clicks. You can generate templates that reflect your choices about which formatting options to make available for your users. Each user can then choose from your library of templates based on their access rights. It’s also easy to create self-service functions for actions like setting the font size or character spacing – using slider controls that are configured in line with your preferences for the minimum and maximum values.

You can also make additional design options available for any users who need them. one2edit™ features all of the InDesign formatting options for text and images. You decide what makes sense and what’s allowed. You can set company-wide standards and define any exceptions with fully-individualized design rules whenever necessary.

Once you’ve saved your brand design rules, you can reuse them and assign them to projects easily using the drag and drop function. Any changes to saved rules will automatically be applied to any templates that use this rule. Design rules can be applied to an entire document or to individual elements of a document. This granular management of rules opens up the maximum amount of flexibility and ensures compliance with your corporate design guidelines – with a minimum amount of effort.

one2edit™ follows a consistent, best-of-breed approach that gives you the power to connect one2edit™ with as many other systems as necessary. Choose the best solution, continue using your existing systems and achieve end-to-end processes along the entire content management value chain – from supply through to distribution.  

one2edit™ offers a comprehensive and powerful RESTful server API (programming interface) as well as a JavaScript Client API for interactions with programs on workplace computers or special adaptations of the one2edit™ user interface. 

Alongside these two programming interfaces, you can also access a variety of standard interfaces for a seamless and deep integration with leading systems. 

Using our File Client creates a seamless and user-friendly connection with the desktop workspaces of creative teams. This enables them to open, edit and save InDesign files with a simple double-click, just like they can on a local hard drive – without any need for uploading or downloading.

Standard Single-Sign-On (SSO) processes are available to support the integration of portal solutions like brand management portals, marketing platforms or intranet channels. Simply connect your company directory via LDAP. one2edit™ takes on your groups, roles and user rights – and then allocates the specific attributes of one2edit™ that are necessary for efficient collaboration, even in complex organizational structures.

Dynamic Layout Engine (DLE) is an expansion module for one2edit™ that can automatically make format changes to documents by following pre-defined guidelines. Based on a master document that has been set up to follow specific rules whenever the height or width of the format are changed, you can use DLE to create multiple additional formats in just a few seconds. 

The comprehensive guidelines within DLE make it possible to connect design elements like text frames and image frames. On top of this, you can define absolute, relative, maximal and minimal spacings between elements or set the document dimensions, while also limiting the minimum and maximum values that apply when making elements or fonts bigger or smaller. You can also define a huge range of further rules for how documents should behave when the format is adapted. 

The Dynamic Layout Engine (DLE) automatically generates a document that has been adapted to meet the specific output format – and that is fully aligned with brand guidelines. Different formats of the same design can be created at the touch of a button within the user interface for one2edit™ or through a web service API as part of a batch process. Your corporate design guidelines for spacing, logo size and position, typography and more are implemented automatically. 

DLE can be used to create print documents as well as image files in PNG or JPEG format in whatever size you choose. This makes it possible to produce a web banner or image for social media based on templates at rapid speed – without the need for any external support.

The integrated one2edit™ workflow engine can be used to create editing, feedback and approval processes quickly and simply using the drag and drop function. There’s no limit to the number of process steps or participants involved. You can set up automatic notifications to be sent when a process step is completed, activate interactions with other systems via web-services and follow the progress in the project overview. 

User rights can be based on roles and job assignments – and can be adapted for each individual project. External and internal users worldwide are able to work together through their browser. Each user has a personalized list of tasks, while the project manager can follow all activities in the project overview. This makes localization and adaptation of communications materials an efficient and transparent process.

There’s no need to create complicated workflows or business process notations, and no need for programming skills or training activities. Our workflow engine is built to meet real-world needs and makes it possible to create processes quickly – and adapt them just as fast if necessary. Workflows enable you to automate processes by offering a wide range of export functions and possibilities to communicate with other systems. You can also save workflows and reuse them as templates. This gives you the power to standardize your processes using the one2edit™ workflow engine without having to give up your agility.

Files within the BRANDGUARDIAN® CoFS aren’t constantly copied from A to B and back again – unlike the synchronization processes from well-known cloud providers. CoFS offers a real-time approach that all users can access just like a shared hard-drive on a common network. This means everybody can immediately see when a file is changed or a new file is added. This is a stark contrast to conventional systems that require users to wait for synchronization to be completed.

All saved files can be protected using AES 256-bit encryption that provides the maximum level of security when your files are transported from one saved location to another. Files are automatically encrypted if you choose to store them in cloud storage solutions like Amazon Web Service or Microsoft Azure.

CoFS makes transferring files easier and simpler than ever. It can be integrated into file systems from Windows and macOS seamlessly so your employees and partners can carry on working in the same way they always have – but better.

The intuitive and flexible user interface can be adapted to meet all requirements. one2edit™ offers a role-specific display with an interface that only features the relevant functions for each specific user. This gives users a simple and fast introduction to one2edit™, while increasing acceptance levels and raising the degree of use – which eliminates the need for training in the majority of cases.

Access rights and user roles can be freely defined and allocated quickly and simply through group structures. one2edit™ can be set up to reflect multiple internal and external organizational structures. You can also manage the specific content each user is able to access, as well as defining every individual user’s role within each workflow and deciding which tools and formatting options for editing documents are made available.

Make content elements available to be edited by a group of users by moving them into ContentGroups using the drag and drop functionCreate multiple ContentGroups to distribute content to various teams or individuals (e.g. copywriting, image editing etc.) or withdraw selected content from the editing process simply by not allocating it to any of your ContentGroups. one2edit™ can even allocate most content automatically as soon as you import the InDesign document.

The detailed options and settings for rights and roles provide a secure and efficient way of working, even for less-experienced users.


BENEFITS

BRANDS USING OUR PRODUCTS FOR DEALER PORTALS

OTHER USE CASES