Customer spotlight story: Marshall Group

who is Marshall Group?

Marshall Group is based in Stockholm, Sweden. Marshall Group formed after the fusion of Zound Industries and Marshall. The brand is a consumer electronics company that designs, develops, and markets branded earphones and speakers for adidas, Marshall, and Urbanears. Marshall Group works with a global network of e-tailers and marketplaces, ranging from Tmall in China, to BestBuy in the US, Mediamarkt in the Nordics, and Amazon globally with distributors in 130 countries, selling in more than 15 languages.

Always on the cutting edge of new technology and meeting market demands, the brand’s commitment to sustainability is core to their values and evident in their products from sourcing to design. The latest headphones, Urbanears Boo are made of 97% recycled plastic. Marshall Group is a case study in how to manufacture and sell products the right way.

challenges: shifting focus to e-commerce

The move to digital commerce didn’t happen overnight. However, Marshall Group recognized the importance of omnichannel commerce and wanted to deliver the same buying experience across channels for their customers. In addition, they wanted to replicate the way its field marketing team audited physical stores across its e-commerce reseller channels to optimize performance.

However, without the right technology and processes in place, it was a major challenge. Marshall Group needed a digital solution to ensure their products “looked good, were priced right, and were whole and clean” to sell effectively both on and off the digital shelf.

The team quickly realized that it was impossible to design an auditing solution without leveraging new technology due to the sheer size and complexity of the digital shelf. Attempting to do this manually would be incredibly expensive, error prone, and time consuming. They chose inriver as their digital shelf analytics solution to solve those challenges.

solution: building a foundation for success

Marshall Group uses inriver to solve costly e-commerce challenges and audit reseller channels including:

• Content correctness: Have products been listed correctly, with the correct title, descriptions, images, and videos?
• Product availability: Are products in stock and available to buy?
• Findability: Do they have a high search ranking? Inriver shows exactly where brands need to focus their efforts to ensure they are findable.
• Customer reviews: Do products they have sufficient customer reviews and are they trending positively?
• Share of shelf: Do the products have the correct share of the digital shelf?

Langley explains that these five key areas are equally important. They form the foundation for Marshall Group’s e-commerce marketing and sales success.

Change is never easy. However, universal adoption is important for new processes and the supporting technology to be effective.

“The inriver solution is important for our success and was adopted quickly across our sales and marketing organization, including among our management team,” said Langley. Who uses inriver at Marshall?

The channel market team are the daily power users of inriver at Marshall Group. The sales teams and sales managers review the notifications and watch out-of-stock levels. Brand and marketing teams evaluate performance and visibility of products, while product teams monitor reviews and ratings.

The inriver solution is fundamental for Marshall Group.

results: achieving a step-change in conversions

“Inriver has helped us achieve a step-change in awareness and sales conversions across the 13 markets that we track. They have helped us meet the customer early in their buying journey by achieving a high search ranking and by being present and relevant on the sites our customers use.”

The entire sales organization uses inriver Evaluate now. Even though the departments have different KPIs, the inriver solution is customizable, allowing each team to extract the data they need quickly and easily to reach their business objectives.

One of the most important advantages of a digital shelf analytics solution is access to real-time data. Consumer insight teams at Marshall Group leverage this data for competitor analysis, to see how they are performing compared to competitors, and to identify what share of the digital shelf they have. This data delivers the insights they need to make changes and edits quickly to optimize performance and conversions across the digital shelf.

Every second counts when you are competing on a global scale like today’s retailers are.

Leveraging different applications that integrate easily into inriver like translations and localization are key to driving conversions for Marshall. Customers want product information in their own language. As Langley says, “Local content is king.”

Global teams need to ensure the digital shelf is optimized where they are selling, but also for their resellers and partners. How does Marshall Group make that happen? “Our brand team also use it to ensure we have the expected exposure and that resellers are using the right assets and resources to sell our products. For example, we discuss product performance and how to optimize product descriptions, videos and images to achieve top positions for our prioritized products,” said Langley.

the right partner

Choosing the right technology solution is important for overall success in any project. However, it’s often more than just the right solution that makes implementation and adoption of that technology effective.

“We really enjoy working with inriver. Their solution is incredibly user-friendly and super-easy to navigate. It identifies the pain points which trigger lost sales, gives us the actionable insights to improve conversions and it even prioritizes what actions we should take first, to get the maximum benefit.”