This was the challenge facing Beaphar, the 80-year-old pet care brand from the Netherlands, which today operates in 86 countries and sells more than 2,800 health, nutrition, and hygiene products. Beaphar was a victim of its own success: the company’s global scale had outrun the way it organised and distributed its marketing assets, and its six-person design team was overloaded with ever-growing requests.

Enter a new Global Brand and Marketing Manager, Marlies Nijmeijer, whose new approach to digital asset management set tails wagging across the business. Marlies explains more.

Brushing out inefficiencies

One of the creative team’s main issues were outdated, manual ways of working. Beaphar’s designers estimated they spent up to a quarter of their time distributing content, fetching assets, and doing admin.

So, Marlies went on the hunt for easy-to-use software that would help the whole business organise, find, and distribute its assets more effectively. After evaluating six vendors, the leading digital asset management (DAM) platform Canto emerged as the clear winner.

“With Canto, you get a lot more worth for your money,” Marlies explains. “We’re easily 20-25% more efficient in terms of time saved for marketers, graphic designers, and customer service. We save a lot of time, and time equals money that can be spent on other priorities.”

By automating menial tasks through an AI-powered platform, the creative team can focus on higher-value work like developing new campaigns and pushing packaging updates and retailer programmes. Canto helps them be more efficient and more creative – who’s a clever boy, then?

A treat for the whole litter

Introducing a DAM solution didn’t just benefit Beaphar’s marketing function. Canto soon became the single source of truth across the business, empowering its sales teams with the right collateral and dramatically reducing the burden on its customer service teams.

Take customer service as an example. A single asset request from a customer could easily send a staff member logging into servers, navigating folder structures, checking versions, then writing an email. 

But, with Canto’s simple URL sharing and portal access, the admin was nearly eliminated. What used to be 30-minute tasks were suddenly cut to 2-5 minute interactions. And with about 50 requests each week across four major markets, this has saved roughly 1,200 hours, or 50 full workdays, each year. Marlies explains more here on Canto’s website.

New ways of woofing

According to Marlies, introducing a DAM solution brought some unforeseen benefits too, like collaboration and ideas-sharing across different markets. Initially, she saw Canto’s all-purpose sharing solution Portals as a way for each country to easily retrieve relevant assets in their local language, and for distributors like ZooPlus to view customised collections – rather than being overwhelmed with irrelevant content. 

“We really wanted to centralise all those efforts because that’s the only way to be more effective with marketing resources and achieve brand growth,” says Marlies.

But, with assets visible in one central library, Beaphar also found teams began learning from each other’s campaigns. Marketers in Spain can adapt successful top-performing sales materials from France, instead of starting from scratch.

“Canto isn’t just a tool for us,” Marlies concludes. “It’s become part of how we work.”

Canto is the world’s leading digital asset management (DAM) solution, empowering more than 4,000 customers to maximise the value of their digital content. Read Beaphar’s full story on the Canto website.