Focus Brands acquired 7 brands over several years, prompting them to streamline content operations and processes to avoid bottlenecks and ensure consistent customer experience across their franchises.  

The company implemented KeyShot Dock to centralize assets on a single platform, eliminating repetitive tasks in content creation, approval, and management. KeyShot Dock also laid the groundwork for machine learning and automation to minimize human error across the business.  

Focus Brands has 7 well-known global food service brands, including Auntie Anne’s, Cinnabon, Jamba and more. As the #4 Food & Beverage Global Brand Licensor with over 100 products and more than a $1B in annual retail sales from their 6,000+ worldwide franchise locations, Focus Brands serves more than 12 million customers.

Watch Thomas Korthuis, Manager of Digital Content, present how Focus Brands up their customer lifetime value.

Having been acquired over a period of years, each of the 7 brands within the Focus Brands umbrella had its own processes, needs and standards. To better serve franchisees and, ultimately, customers all over the world, their assets needed to be centralized in a single DAM. They needed to help their creative department eliminate bottlenecks and wanted to know which assets truly resonated with customers, so creating a feedback loop was imperative.

While getting assets into all relevant channels was key, so was the ability to continue to improve customer experience.

Focus Brands put together an advisory group of stakeholders from across the business to select a DAM – they knew they needed to centralize assets that were stored across 15 systems. Focus Brands is unique – for now – in that their DAM is set within the Customer Engagement team, but it would need to be fully embedded across the organization. Aligning people to new ways of working was just as important as selecting new technology, but the first step was truly understanding the business goals, said Thomas Korthuis, who serves as the Manager, Digital Content, within the Customer Engagement team.

“You need to understand what problem you are solving first before you go and find a software or a solution for it, and that sounds obvious, but it’s not always as obvious as that sounds – you need to define exactly how you are going to solve it, otherwise the software you introduce into your stack is going to exacerbate the problem.”

Once clear ‘whys’ had been established, the task of defining and enabling automations and integrations began, and KeyShot Dock’s in-built and extensible library of both made it easy to streamline those processes, eliminating much of the administrative work, and reduced the risk of human error. For example, automated image recognition could identify celebrities in photos, and those images were then routed via the Legal department to ensure the right agreements and information were attached to the images. In addition, keywords were easily validated, once again removing a layer of manual work.

“An automation is there to make sure that you eliminate repetitive work…that was the reasoning for tackling certain integrations.”

The team conducted a content audit before going live, ensuring that all the assets going into KeyShot Dock were up-to-date, and they tested the experience with internal pilot groups, so that they could get fast feedback and make improvements on the fly. They stress-tested the system with stakeholders from PR and Creative, and an immediate example of that real-time feedback was the need to enable file extensions for users to view and filter – a quick and easy change that improved the user experience with a simple configuration change.

“We got up and running quickly, everything worked brilliantly,” continued Thomas.

But simply going live was just the beginning – Thomas and the team at Focus Brands are continuing to evolve beyond their initial footprint, with further investment in machine learning and automation capabilities that will enable them to think bigger, making the DAM a resource across the entire business, with enthusiastic ambassadors across Focus Brands helping to drive that transformation.