Polaris
Powersports leader gears up for powerful digital engagement
Staying relevant in the digital age
Founded in 1954, Polaris Industries is a global powersports leader that designs, engineers, manufactures, and markets a wide variety of sport and utility vehicles, parts, and accessories. With more than 20 brands and 8,000+ employees worldwide, the company satisfies the needs of motor sports enthusiasts shopping for anything from all-terrain vehicles to snowmobiles to motorcycles and more.
Working with a homegrown CMS built on ASP.NET MVC, Polaris would traditionally re-launch their website each year around the time their new fleet of vehicles were released, resulting in a flurry of attention but minimal updates thereafter. With consumers growing increasingly digital, the company recognized a need to provide content and engage customers more frequently, and respond to marketing initiatives significantly faster in order to stay relevant and provide the best experience possible for customers. Polaris' marketing teams focused on the goal of spending more time looking at analytics, testing and making incremental, data-driven improvements to their digital strategy, rather than starting over with a new website each year. However, they quickly discovered their existing CMS and e-commerce platforms could simply not keep up.
With 11 different product categories operating with independent marketing budgets, it was important for Polaris to not only ensure brand consistency by standardizing the features and functionality available to all marketers under the Polaris umbrella, but also to expedite the delivery of content. By using Episerver's secure Experience Authoring, editors would no longer need to wait days to see their content changes and additions realized on the website and would have the ability to push promotions out within the hour - without developer assistance.
Polaris needed a single platform to support a dozen brand websites across multiple markets, some under the same domain and some available in up to 13 languages, that would also afford them the agility they needed to react quickly and push content out accordingly.
Empowered people, aggressive launch plan
"Episerver provides an impressive framework that allows you to do exactly what you want to do," says Matt Schiller, Web Applications Lead at Polaris Industries. "As a developer, you have complete control over how you want to structure your application - and Episerver also provides a rich editing interface and a lot of other functionality to empower marketers, right out of the box."
With three websites already live on the Episerver Digital Experience Cloud for digital commerce - including military.polaris.com, store.indianmotorcycle.com and rzr.polaris.com - the company plans to continue releasing one website per month for the next year.
"Episerver offers a single platform that can provide the same features and functionality across all of our brands," says Schiller. We can have a pretty aggressive roll out schedule, because we don't need to build new code for every site. We can use what we've built in previous launches to create menus, e-commerce flow, and to integrate with backend systems with significantly reduced effort for each brand we move."
Episerver offers a single platform that can provide the same features and functionality across all of our brands. We can have a pretty aggressive roll out schedule, because we don't need to build new code for every site
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Matt Schiller
Product Owner Polaris Industries
Project Facts
See the result at www.polaris.com
