Diageo Chateau & Estate Wines (DC&E) is the prestigious winery of Diageo; the world’s leading publicly-traded premium beverage business. DC&E produces and markets premium wines from world-famous locales such as Napa Valley, Sonoma, France, New Zealand and Australia. Diageo’s broader business line includes power brands the likes of Johnnie Walker®, Smirnoff®, Cuervo®, Captain Morgan®, Crown Royal® and Guinness®.

Objective

In order to maintain its competitive advantage, DC&E sought the expertise of creative branding agency Groove11. In a joint alliance, OpenCircle and Groove11 instituted a scalable, sustainable, manageable corporate communication strategy that enabled mission-critical business to flow seamlessly between teams, departments and trade partners. The focal point of this strategy was an integrated, process-focused communications portal that:

• Successfully manage all global digital assets across hundreds of brands
• Enable real-time collaboration across the organization — from strategy to execution
• Improve overall business performance and capitalize on future market opportunities

Collaboration

Putting forth shared efforts, Groove11 and OpenCircle completely transformed DC&E’s communication strategy from a patchwork of antiquated email systems into a streamlined, robust online web presence that ensured accurate, current and useful communication between parties at all levels of the organization.

Success

Leveraging the full power of Drupal, DC&E’s new platform exceeded all project objectives. The new site combines intuitive search functionality for awards, brand assets, sales tools and wines with real-time collaboration and custom project workflow. It also offers complete video training, DAM file-format conversion and a massive resource library, becoming DC&E’s premier platform for asset management, internal cooperation and employee/vendor education. Once the construct of Diageo’s primary internal asset management site was successfully completed, the company expressed a desire to recreate nine (9) of its premier consumer-facing sites using the same architecture. Existing code for URL’s like sterlingvineyards.com, bvwines.com and moonmountainvineyard.com was replaced with Drupal code. With the collective relationship between Groove11 and OpenCircle, DC&E’s new sites not only retain the apropos brand elements, but smoother interfaces allow for direct online communication with parent URL diageowines.com.