Digital brand consistency for Lord's
The spiritual home of cricket was not as at ease in its home online as it is in St John’s Wood. For Lord’s Cricket Club, the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) and the Lord’s Cricket Ground, a unifying web presence was elusive until only recently.
The three entities acted as separate units online and the web portal was ineffective on mobile devices. This prompted a massive overhaul of the website. The MCC enlisted Richmond-based marketing agency Positive to revamp the offering using the SilverStripe content management system (CMS). The project has been rolling out over the last two years, with the finishing touches placed on the homepage this month.
Featuring everything from match information to e-commerce to members-only information, the Lords.org site had to reach a variety of audiences in a simple way. Ian Treseder, digital manager at MCC says, “The dream is to get to point where a user only sees one website and one basket. We want them to be able to purchase anything from a ticket to a t-shirt in one process, whether they are sitting in the stadium or halfway around the world.”
The SilverStripe system allowed for these challenges to be met by one, simple, responsive site. This unified the brand experience and made for a more logical, coherent user journey. However, Positive adapted the framework to allow Lord’s to integrate third-party services into the site and to give it more flexibility.
Since the launch, mobile traffic has increased by 300% yielding an increased revenue by 51%. It has also increased business efficiency by halving admin time managing the site. Yet, Lord’s has also taken the enhanced brand experience it has created online to the Lord’s Cricket Ground itself. It is the first international cricketing ground to offer free Wi-Fi to visitors. Treseder adds that the versatile system now in place online will allow for a simpler process when updating the site in the future, thus ensuring future brand continuity.
