Molson Coors

The Client

For more than two centuries Molson Coors Beverage Company has been brewing beverages that unite people for all life’s moments. From Coors Light, Miller Lite, Molson Canadian, Carling, and Staropramen to Coors Banquet, Blue Moon Belgian White, Blue Moon LightSky, Vizzy, Coors Seltzer, Leinenkugel’s Summer Shandy, Creemore Springs, Hop Valley, and more, Molson Coors produces many beloved and iconic beer brands. While the company’s history is rooted in beer, Molson Coors offers a modern portfolio that expands beyond the beer aisle.

The Situation

Molson Coors wanted to redesign its previous architecture to build a flexible, scalable platform based on Drupal component architecture. Specifically, the company wanted to:

• Launch five sites globally for Molson Coors brands.
• Implement a global governance framework to foster brand consistency, site performance, and site security.
• Enable a low-code platform to easily configure without development.
• Enhance the content authoring experience to empower non-technical users to create, edit, and publish pages
• Reduce maintenance costs and delivery timelines by increasing reusability across brands and implementing process automation.
• Implement scalable and extendable architecture.
• Create a highly secured platform adhering to industry standards and data compliance.
• Meet visitors’ needs with a tailored experience.

The Challenge

Molson Coors’ existing Sitecore architecture had room for improvement in content authoring, reusability, and overall architecture. The company found it difficult to use the existing architecture, which made it time-consuming for developers and website administrators to perform application updates or enhancements. Additionally, the setup made globalizing and localizing websites a laborious task. All these challenges posed a serious risk; as a global organization that caters to a multicultural audience, attracting users' attention from around the world was crucial for Molson Coors’ success.

The Solution

Molson Coors partnered with digital transformation firm Ameex, which kicked off the project with global discovery to understand the business and content authors’ pain points. Ameex laid out a roadmap for Molson Coors’ platform, which would optimize the Drupal architecture on top of Acquia Cloud Platform and include multisite architecture and multi-theming to provide flexibility in using several templates across sites. 

The teams worked together to achieve their common goal: building a true digital experience platform (DXP) that provided end users with an intuitive experience. Three factors were crucial for the project’s success:

• Acquia Cloud: Ameex built the new experience on Acquia Cloud, leveraging the scalable and secure digital platform’s full feature set to boost performance, achieve consistent uptime, and create a developer-friendly architecture.
• Drupal Layout Builder: Component-based design allowed for the creation of “layout templates” and templated layout customizations.
• Website performance: Ameex implemented lean scripts and eliminated redundancies, improving page load time and increasing user engagement.

The Results

Using Acquia Cloud as the core of the multisite architecture, Ameex delivered five brand sites in just three months. This gives the global business the key advantage of keeping the costs low even as it enhances the digital experience. Metrics show that Molson Coors’ new customer-centric experience is resonating with customers across the globe.

Key improvements include:

• Implementation cost reduced by 45%
• Total cost of ownership reduced by 60%
• Cost of maintenance reduced by 60%
• Time spent updating content reduced by 50%
• Google Page score of 90 for sites
• Fully on-page SEO compliant
• Improved the time to market by 2.5x
• Tightened security using OWASP
• Compliance with GDPR guidelines