The Irish Chocolate Company

9 . Outcome

With 5 cafés now open in Dublin, customer traffic exposed to the Butlers brand has increased dramatically. Overseas visitors are exposed to the brand at the airport, at duty free and within Dublin city centre. Once in the cafés the customers experience the product and the concept. In conjunction the site is heavily promoted throughout the cafés and on its labeling with many customers bringing both brochures and products Start of case study. This system of marketing and promoting the brand has led to many overseas customers with many repeat orders. “If someone purchases a gift in the airport to bring back Start of case study, they will be heavily exposed to our brand,” said Michelle McBride, “as our packaging references our web address, we get frequent requests for more products, even from chocolate bars”.

The site development took 18 months from inception to its launch in August 2001. It’s success has been outstanding on many levels with all objectives being reached or surpassed. Sales from mail order are up an amazing 500% from the same period last year. Although more difficult to measure, Butlers believe their branding objectives have been met with a huge growth in the previously untapped consumer market. The site in conjunction with its cafés have given an opportunity for customers to experience the brand, bring it Start of case study with them and then re-visit from where ever they are located in the world. Having previously focused their business on the retail and corporate market, this new market is providing an excellent new growth area coming directly from the Internet channel.

10 . Recommendations to Other Companies

The importance of writing a comprehensive initial specification cannot be over-emphasised. It took a consultant one month of investigation and discussions to complete the 50-page document describing Butlers requirements. The exercise of building the specification forced the company to explore every avenue of the site’s capabilities and drill down to the nth degree on every detail. No stone was left unturned. This diligence paid off by resulting in a clear and comprehensive guide for Labyrinth to follow, with only a handful of new additions springing up during the project. “Its fair to everyone to detail your requirements,” recommends Michelle. “Quoting is more accurate along with a lack of grey areas appearing during the implementation stage. We were very focused on our goals and both Butlers and Labyrinth had a comprehensive document to work from.”

After writing thorough specifications, the next stage is to decide on the actual content. “Decide who is going to write the content and how often,” advises Michelle, “know what on the site has to remain static and what you will need to update”. The Internet is a different selling medium. Attention has to be paid to the content of your site, the means by which it will be changed and how frequently this will be done.

As Labyrinth didn’t yet have the required tool to simplify site content updates, the timescale for the project had to be pushed out. In total, the project took about 4 months longer than anticipated. Another factor many companies fail to consider is the amount of commitment required from people in non-web focused departments, necessary for the implementation of the web site. “Tremendous effort was shown by all people involved in this project,” explained Michelle, “we did however work through one Christmas and two Easter holidays, our busiest times, along with most people having responsibilities for more than one task.” Michelle advises, “Account for all possible time delays when launching such an initiative as its often impossible to dedicate 100% of anyone’s time”.

Finally, Michelle encourages anyone embarking on an eBusiness project to look out for any hidden costs, “as we still have no web related IT skills we had to take an additional maintenance agreement out to manage the site. Make sure you know who is going to be looking after the site once it’s built”.