Bayer Consumer Health

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The Client

Bayer is a global enterprise with core competencies in the life science fields of healthcare and nutrition. Its products and services are designed to help people and the planet thrive by supporting efforts to master the major challenges presented by a growing and aging global population. 

The Situation

With 170 brands globally on a platform coming to the end of its life, Bayer Consumer Health needed to replatform in a very tight timeframe. And with search and user behavior driving new expectations, Bayer needed a flexible platform that would set each brand’s content strategies free. But it wasn’t clear how the company would go about replatforming dozens of consumer brands with unique visual identities, in over 50 languages, spanning 400 sites in just 18 months – all while still allowing the platform to evolve and maximize ROI.

The Challenge

Bayer faced a change program of colossal scale and complexity. Each brand has its own content strategy, audience profile, functionality, visual identity, regulatory needs, language, and market presence. Simultaneously, consumer expectations drove the need to create a consistent user experience, search visibility, accessibility, and device support. And from an operational standpoint, the company needed to be able to publish on demand at a market level while centrally managing risk and cost.

The Solution

Bayer partnered with digital customer experience professionals Coherence. Coherence took the visuals for 23 Bayer brands and created a common design system using their underlying patterns. It then built this into a primary design system in Acquia Site Studio and used Acquia Site Factory to deliver a platform driving each market site from the central code base. 

In Bayer’s new Drupal site, all accessibility, user experience, and responsive behavior configurations are made at the centralized level with brand-specific configurations set at the site level — consolidating governance and decentralizing nuances and communication. Site Studio allows brands to bake-in best practices while enabling distributed teams to manage their own unique content strategies without breaking governance practices that underpin the brand. Site Factory then amplifies this across multiple brands, markets, and languages without creating multiple unique codebases. This ability to enable and amplify communication while keeping strong core governance releases growth potential at scale while managing cost and risk.

The Results

Coherence and Bayer delivered 437 sites on Drupal in 1.5 years, reaching 100 sites a month at the peak of the project. The sites span 50+ languages and allow market-level enablement of content strategies and instantaneous page creation. By using 60 core components within one primary design system and core code base, time to market has been reduced by 40%, with new sites taking two to three weeks to launch. Organic traffic has shifted from 4% prior to now 57%. Visit durations have increased 13% and the bounce rate has dropped 19%. As a result of the replatform, Bayer has realized a $15 million efficiency in IT and third-party costs in three years.