The new Hershey ecosystem was designed and built with the consumer first, never letting technology or brand needs overtake focus on the consumer experience.
- A digital UX focused on the consumer – Hersheyland Hub is a consumer-facing enterprise hub for all things Hershey, with brands consolidated versus siloed. This streamlined approach allows Hershey to focus on content and shopability, gives consumers the ability to search and shop from any point in their journey, and eases content maintenance
- The reusable component design system simplifies maintenance of the entire ecosystem, provides a familiar user experience to users and allows Hershey to scale.
- A strategic analytics implementation sets Hershey up to understand how users are digitally interacting with sites and provides data that can be utilized for marketing efforts such as personalization as Hershey continues to refine its consumer-driven strategy.
- Site search is enabled using integration with Adobe S&P. This supports Facetted and Federated end-user search experiences as well as global search built into various pages on the site. Structured taxonomy across products and organized content are key drives to enable experiences to the end-user.
- Product versions include Adobe Experience Manager 6.5, Analytics Prime, Campaign, Assets, Search and Promote.
- In the new hub, we can prioritize top brand sites; while consolidating all other brands under the enterprise site, allowing brand teams to focus on PDPs, recipes, and shoppability versus siloed content management.
- Rendering curated content minimizes the manual lift of content authoring.
- All product data is now being pulled in from exterior data sources, so marketers can focus on marketing content. Hershey’s product catalog is vast and is ever-evolving, this implementation saves time, eliminates human error, and allows Hershey to scale.
- Dynamic SEO schema implementation streamlines the implementation of optimized schema priming the site for search engine crawls and positioning the site to perform well organically.
- The UX strategy prioritized customer needs and provided users with options for interacting with Hershey online. The new website allowed Hershey’s digital presence needs to seamlessly cater to everyone from brand super fans to families planning a special occasion to a parent in a snack aisle trying to determine if a product contains an ingredient their child is allergic to.
With this implementation of the Adobe Experience Cloud, we have truly put the customer experience first with a focused effort on understanding how they are interacting with Hershey digitally, and how we can best support them in their journey. The implementation of the hub allows us to manage content dynamically across the brands in the Hershey portfolio, and maximize opportunities for cross-promotional messaging.
While anyone can build a good site that meets the functional needs of the business – this site puts the consumer first with a structure and design uniquely crafted to their needs.
When comparing year over year, Hershey has seen the following results based on core metrics set out to impact through the website redesign in AEM and connectivity into the other Adobe platforms.
- 45% decrease in bounce rate
- 92% increase in pages per session
- 213% increase in average duration
