Hyster-Yale Group (HYG) designs, engineers, manufactures, sells and services a comprehensive line of lift trucks and aftermarket parts. These are primarily marketed under the two brands names of Hyster and Yale.
Product innovations within the area of lift trucks – such as IOT, robotics and automation – increase the complexity of HYG’s offerings, accelerating the need to move the value proposition from the physical product (the lift truck) to more value-adding solutions. As the market became more competitive in this solution-oriented area, HYG needed to reimagine the digital experiences for their Hyster brand and Yale brand, to communicate the more complex value offering beyond building a great lift truck, while simultaneously accommodating a newly recognized digitized buying journey of their customers.
To add to the complexity, HYG needed to ensure differentiation between the two brands while leveraging a common technology platform from which to build the two sites. This would enable the company to recognize customer journeys across the two brands but also distinguish them enough for clarity of which brand is more appropriate in which scenarios.
HYG’s vision was to be part of a paradigm shift within the material handling industry. The website project enabled them to move from communicating ‘to’ customers, to create entangling experienced 'wtih' them. The new hyster.com and yale.com empowered HYG to expand the reach and effectiveness of their digital experiences while digitizing their internal processes.
Vertic’s strategy began with considerations for a digital brand architecture that would empower each individual brand to accelerate the sales cycle increase operational excellence and utilize learnings to enhance the end-to-end customer experience. Defining distinct brand positioning for each of Hyster and Yale would reduce messaging cannibalization between the brands and minimize buyer confusion in the decision making process, closing the opportunity gap for HYG to drive customer centricity.
The strategy furthermore needed to leverage a powerful global storytelling platform that could simultaneously showcase the strong legacy of the two brands with their tireless innovation in materials handling solutions, while always being tailored to the individual needs of their markets.
This was complimented through a digital insights exercise that was able to assess the actual positioning according to the websites’ current messaging and semantics utilized. Understanding this positioning gap, while also assessing the competitive positioning outside of the two HYG brands, empowered Vertic to create a ‘Brand Eye’ strategy that defined the differentiation points and what they inferred for digital brands interpretation.
Vertic’s research continued to recognize subsequent content and functionality requirements at each stage of each brand’s customer buying journey, enabling us to recognize relevant aspects of the website build that could scale across the two brands while building out the content strategy. Together with the ‘Brand Eye’, this led to our recommendations of new content or changes in content that aligned with each brand’s audience’s expectations of more solution-oriented information.
The UX and design of the two websites included the creation of a design system, which would enable scale of the web build by combining modules for the two companies’ web properties, with recommendations of cross-brand usage according to matching steps and need in the customer experience.
Finally, Vertic built the solution on Episerver’s (now known as Optimizely) Digital Experience Platform. Recognizing the need for contextual relevance for each customer as they traversed over the websites, and the content needed at each step of the journey, the Hyster.com and Yale.com are built to scale with dynamic customization according to journey stage, brand touchpoint, and profile information.
