Rijk Zwaan
How Rijk Zwaan empowers its 31 subsidiaries for go-to-market success with Bynder
3200+
users
100k+
assets
2TB
total storage size
Rijk Zwaan is a family-owned vegetable breeding and seed production company. Combining market expertise, modern technology, and nature’s rich diversity, Rijk Zwaan develops new plant varieties and sells its seeds to vegetable growers worldwide.
With a global market share of 9%, Rijk Zwaan is the fourth biggest vegetable breeding company in the world. From cabbage to cucumbers, the Dutch company sells its industry-leading vegetable seeds through 31 local subsidiaries spread across the globe.
The last two years we’ve repurposed Bynder to be more than just a photography DAM - it’s a central marketing tool that has not only changed how we organize our content, but also create it too.Tjipke Meijer
Photography & Video Creator, Rijk Zwaan
Situation
Researching and developing new vegetable varieties is the primary focus at Rijk Zwaan—40% of its 4,000+ employees are dedicated to R&D. New seed varieties are produced and distributed regularly to be sold by local subsidiaries, requiring high volumes of high-quality, brand-consistent imagery and videos to promote new products in local markets.
With ambitious growth plans in an increasingly global (and digital) market, Rijk Zwaan needed a way to not only centralize its huge numbers of visual assets, but also to improve how the marketing department collaborated with R&D-focused crop specialists and local subsidiaries.
We weren’t just looking for a solution to archive and share stuff. We wanted a central space to also create and collaborate - an ‘asset creation workshop’ - to ensure we were supporting local markets with the assets and tools to operate independently.
Challenges
Operating with 31 subsidiaries across the globe presented significant marketing and operational challenges for Rijk Zwaan. Each subsidiary, responsible for selling a diverse range of vegetable seeds, requires market-specific, high-quality marketing materials to effectively promote new seed strains.
Additionally, photos and videos needed to be approved by crop specialists before use, which further complicated the content creation process. Without a centralized platform for creating and approving marketing assets, Rijk Zwaan experienced go- to-market bottlenecks and struggled to enable subsidiaries to create localized marketing content—directly impacting the company’s revenue streams.
As a result, Rijk Zwaan was looking for a DAM platform to:
- Centralize the creation and approval of marketing assets
- Empower subsidiaries to create content for their respective markets using on-brand templates
- Ensure all imagery and videos were consistently accurate and reflective of its diverse range of seeds and vegetables
- Integrate with their e-commerce website to enable subsidiaries to publish approved content to country-specific subdomains
Solution
Using Studio, Rijk Zwaan empowers local subsidiaries to produce region-specific marketing assets with brand-approved templates. These templates unite Rijk Zwaan’s teams for faster, more efficient collaboration.
100k+ digital assets, one solution
From product photos and campaign materials to internal slide decks and webinar recordings, Rijk Zwaan’s globally distributed team knows exactly where to find both old and new digital assets. These assets are intuitively organized with filters to ensure everyone can find what they need in seconds.
Centralized creative collaboration
No longer having to rely on back-and-forth emails to review and approve images and videos, both the marketing team and crop specialists leverage Asset Workflow to get everyone on the same page to give feedback on works-in-progress.
Webshop integration
With regional differences in how a crop grows from one country to the next, product shots need to be accurate in each respective market. By integrating Bynder with the back-end of its e-commerce platform, local marketers can easily find the right assets and have the autonomy to create and upload regionally- accurate imagery direct from Bynder.
Hands-on training
When you’re a large company with multiple local markets, internal adoption can be an uphill battle. With a dedicated customer success manager and training programs including webinars and personal demos, Rijk Zwaan has less weight on its shoulders to keep user adoption high.
Rijk Zwaan saves significant time and resources with AI Search
Rijk Zwaan recently implemented Bynder AI to further drive the operational impact and ROI of its DAM.
Facial Recognition for efficiency and compliance
Previously, deleting all photos of former employees once they’ve left the company was extremely difficult. Bynder’s Facial Recognition automatically tags employee photos, making it easy to find and remove these images. This not only improves compliance, but also significantly reduces the time spent on this manual activity.
Natural Language Search for speeding up asset retrieval and maximizing existing content ROI
Bynder’s Natural Language Search lets Rijk Zwaan employees quickly find specific images from their extensive asset library using simple, everyday language. By surfacing relevant content that already exists, the company can save significant time and money by reducing redundant photoshoots and the need for global travel. This also accelerates time to market as Rijk Zwaan’s marketing team can easily locate the right assets for campaigns.
Key benefits
By centralizing all digital assets in one platform, collaboration between markets has improved drastically. With a standardized process for approving and using imagery and videos, there’s much less chance of publishing the wrong assets—a common problem in the past.
Thanks to Studio, Rijk Zwaan is able to eliminate content silos and enable go-to-market teams to create impactful content for their markets. Subsidiaries now have the freedom to create localized marketing images and videos at scale with pre- approved branded templates. That way, they have the resources to accurately reflect subtle local differences in crops in every market (and save a lot of time in doing it).
The image and video templates created in Bynder are really welcomed by our subsidiaries in the Asian and South American regions, as they can be more independent in quickly creating branded images and videos in their own languages.Joeri van Tongeren
Digital Commerce Specialist, Rijk Zwaan
