Quick Ship Lighting Guide

Building an essential sales tool to promote the Signify house of brands and its offering of products targeted towards distributors and contractors.

Quite often the amount of work that goes into preparing content for a successful piece of product literature goes overlooked. This quick case study will take a look into the process of developing the most in-demand tool for Signify Canada and customers and staff.

Objective

This guide was designed to be a replacement for a legacy catalogue series that was last published 3 years prior and contained a wealth of information which was painstakingly pieced together. Having undergone a company name change and revitalization of product brands, the new catalogue would not only serve as an outline of the latest product offering, but help reinforce our new company name, Signify.

Audience

The guide was designed with our B2B customers in mind—ranging from electrical distribution staff, to lighting specialists—the information was to be presented in a format that would be easy to follow along for new and veterans in the electrical / lighting industry. Prior to starting any work, focus groups and surveys were conducted amongst customers, and employees in different parts of the company that would ultimately utilize the final form of the guide once published.

Although we intended to produce the guide that would only be available digitally, it was determined early on that a print production would be required in order to maximize reach and adoption by our customers. Keeping that in mind, the core template and design principles for the catalogue were established.

Data Management

With the help of product marketers and demand planning teams within the organization, an initial data output was created of over 350 SKUs that would qualify for 2-day quick ship. However, as with most information pulled from SAP, the data and product descriptions were riddled with internal terminology and lacked consistency.

Having determined the type of information would need to be prioritized, I began the process of cleaning the data in order to develop a clear and easy-to-follow logic that could be easily sorted and organized as close as possible to final form within Excel. This is the key step to developing a scalable catalogue that can be easily maintained and would lead to a positive user experience.

Design Automation

While building up the template, a number of advanced techniques were utilized similar to what I had done on previous catalogue work (see Southwire Tool Catalogues and Philips B2C Catalogue). All this groundwork was not only done to streamline the data merge and layout, but ensure future updates would go as smooth as possible. This would not only benefit myself, but anyone else who would have to work on the document down the road. Of course there were still a number of unique elements that were included in order to avoid making the guide feel like a soulless piece of corporate literature.

Print & Distribution

After completing the reviews and the French version of the guide, the catalogue was first output as an interactive PDF (published to a dedicated landing page) that we would utilize for a soft launch. Through our sales teams we would get first impressions directly from our customers and incorporate any improvements before production.

To enhance the final product, I worked with our supplier to select the appropriate material and production techniques to ensure durability, and a subtle UV spot on the 14pt matte coated cover to add a little pop ;)

Promotional Activities

In order to gain traction and bring attention to the newly published guide, we planned out channel engagement activities with the support of our sales teams and agencies and digital promotions through paid and owned media. This included webinars, email campaigns, social media, and digital banners. Within the first four months of publication and launch we've far exceeded the adoption we had initially anticipated and are now moving into the second print production with consistent quarterly digital updates.