“ KME is able to manage content easily, across multiple markets, with a consistent look throughout each market site, while the custom car configurator allows specific markets to include the appropriate pricing, car models, options, and accessories. „

- Hans Anton Verschoor, executive partner at Redhotminute

Challenge

Kia Motors Europe (KME) is the European sales and marketing division of the Kia Motors Corporation (KMC) based in South Korea. With its headquarters located in the heart of Frankfurt, Germany, KME’s staff is small, dynamic and highly motivated. The company structure encourages individuals to make vital contributions to its operations and the multi-cultural atmosphere is home to more than 15 different nationalities.

The company is responsible for marketing Kia products in more than 25 countries across Europe. Each market has its own line of model cars, accessories and options, and is responsible for its own marketing. With each market having developed its own website, naturally there were challenges with maintaining corporate identity consistency. KME wanted to centralize the website to ensure a more consistent corporate identity and brand across all markets and provide innovative functionality locally.

Solution

KME put the bid out to over fifteen agencies, including Sitecore partner, Redhotminute.  Redhotminute evaluated multiple content management solutions to find the best match for KME’s needs. They ultimately chose Sitecore based on the following reasons:

• Extensibility: Redhotminute felt that the combination of possibilities with an extendible, flexible solution such as Sitecore would allow them to build exactly the type of site KME wanted.
• Platform: Since Redhotminute is a .NET company, they preferred to work with a .NET solution
• User Interface: Sitecore’s intuitive user interface was favored over other CMS solutions on the market.
• The price: Sitecore offers a highly powerful solution that was within KME’s budget.
• Best overall fit: Redhotminute put together a matrix of the possible CMS’s, and Sitecore had the highest score.

Redhotminute integrated Sitecore, starting with the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, France, Spain, Italy and others – for a total of 14 KME markets now using Sitecore. In the next year, over 17 KME markets will be using Sitecore.

Some customizations include:

• Car configurator: Working with the Munich-based design agency H2O, Redhotminute also built a custom 3D car configurator, which allows product management within KME the ability to manage information for all cars, options, accessories, options, colors, trims, etc. This makes it possible to make the appropriate information and pricing available to the specific markets with a single click. The car configurator was integrated with the Sitecore product database. 
• Dealer dashboard: Redhotminute also created a dealer dashboard for the Kia dealers – which connects to Sitecore and allows dealers the ability to customize their sites with dealer specific information.

Result

KME is extremely happy with their new, centralized site. According to Hans Anton Verschoor, executive partner at Redhotminute, "We’ve been able to offer KME the best of both worlds – with Sitecore to manage their content, along with the customized solutions we created. KME is able to manage content easily, across multiple markets, with a consistent look throughout each market site, while the custom car configurator allows specific markets to include the appropriate pricing, car models, options, and accessories."

Technical Description

Solution Special Ingredients

• Flash
• Google maps
• Google analytics
• NetMining