HEB Mexico

Brief

Having successfully beaten a leading international profesional services firm to provide digital support and direction on the project to develop HEB’s new eCommerce presence in Mexico, we took a four month in-house residency at HEB Mexico HQ to work in partnership with an international creative agency, and large Magento developer from Argentina, and we were responsible for managing the information architecture, UI design, UX elements, and content development.

In addition to the core project, we were also to provide support on developing the overall marketing strategy, internal marketing capabilities (including the sourcing of human capital, analytics reporting processes), search engine marketing (SEM), and marketing campaign planning.

Work Insight

This high CapEx project was extremely complex in nature and of significant importance to the future business model of the client. It required us to work with large teams of internal stakeholders from store operations, category management, marketing, and IT departments (Mexico & USA) as well as external suppliers and local marketing agencies (Mexico & Argentina).

Information Architecture

HEB Mexico stocks in excess of 70,000 products in physical stores and this was to be fully replicated to the new website, our challenge here was to not only replicate the category structure but to identify new category opportunities within the structure and redefine aspects of the nomenclature, something that would be vital to a new post launch promotional strategy.

New Front-end Design

Prior to our inclusion in the project, HEB had been presented with many different design proposals from the incumbent design agency in Mexico, but after discussions with the the USA digital team, we came to the conclusion that building a more homogeneous design aligned to the USA operation was the smarter and more cost effective approach.

We produced a comprehensive design brief and guide for the creative and technical agencies covering all aspects of the website including a ratified timeline for deliverables, with the objective of adapting the USA design to our own wire-frames taking into account the nuanced differences in user journeys, use cases, site structure, peripheral business requirements, and the Magento platform.

Marketing Analysis & Strategy

Whilst building the new platform, we were also tasked with the responsibility to define the marketing strategy for the website/digital operations, delivered by way of a strategic document utilising the SOSTAC approach, where we defined the market strategy geographically and by product portfolio utilising models such as the BCG and ANSOFF matrices to seek out areas of growth, and the activities required to achieve that growth in users and market share.

This included the overall competitive strategy, plus Segmentation, Targeting, and Positioning (STP) that would underpin the integrated marketing communications campaigns that we produced on behalf of HEB Marketing. We also identified areas of Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) and detailed the activities required to close performance gaps and capitalise on identified opportunities to support the attainment of the overall corporate objectives (desired % share of HEB Mexico’s annual revenues).

Search Compliance Strategy

In 2020, up to 68% of all trackable website traffic came from search (organic & paid), so aside of other channels such as social, search engine marketing for eCommerce sites is fundamentally important to targeting and generating qualified traffic that will actually convert to customers, based on the type of product/service and stage of their information search behaviour within the search landscape.

Through many years of experience, Disruptable have built up a knowledge base of over 100 organic search signals (load speed, mobile optimisation, https, inbound links, domain credentials, canonical’s etc.), weighted by levels of importance. With HEB we created a comprehensive project plan that prioritised all of the activities, who would implement what and by when to ensure a high level of compliance at launch. We followed this up with educational sessions for marketing staff to support post-launch activity (analytics, keyword targeting, content generation, paid search optimisation and management etc.).

Operational Enhancements

Beyond the business strategy, the setting up of the website experience, and preparing the inbound and outbound marketing activity, if… the internal organisation of human capital, its skills and knowledge, the systems and software, the supplier networks, decision making processes and information flows are not in place or optimised for such a big change to a traditional operation, very quickly an overarching strategy will fall over, or under-perform due to significant deficiencies, very much like the best Formula 1 race car without an amazing driver, pit crew, support infrastructure, and team manager.

To close the circle ensuring the HEB operation was optimised to squeeze out every possible point of gain, we utilised the McKinsey 7S Framework to comprehensively analyse day to day operations. From this internal reflection, we supported HEB Mexico through additional documentation, training sessions, and recommendations for software and hardware. We also participated in the recruitment process and the acquisition of new support services and creative agencies. Finally we provided executive council to the senior managers to ensure they were empowered and focused on the areas of priority for their new digital operation.