RNDC Truck Wrap Success Story
Leading Beverage Alcohol Distributor Streamlines Brand Promotion on Delivery Trucks
Challenge
Republic National Distributing Company, or RNDC, is one of the nation’s leading wholesale beverage alcohol distributors, specializing in wine and spirits. In addition to account sales and distribution, RNDC supports brands’ localized marketing by offering suppliers “truck wrap” promotions. As RNDC’s fleet of nearly 3,000 trucks and vans take alcohol to bars, stores, and restaurants, colorful graphics printed on vehicles’ sides expose brands to thousands of passing consumers. Always on the move, RNDC needed to manage their 24-hour mobile billboards carefully to keep as many on the road as possible, because parked trucks don’t promote their world-class brands.
RNDC managed their fleet manually on Excel spreadsheets. This made it difficult to keep vehicle details straight and up-to-date and didn’t provide an efficient way to proactively line up new contracts or update creative as existing ones approached their end. With trucks getting wrapped in 20 states and the District of Columbia, the complexity of national contracts, nationwide inventory management, tax assessments, and accounting outgrew RNDC’s manual system. They came to BrandMuscle for a simpler, efficient, online system that could manage active assets, contracts, billing, and taxes at once.
Solution
BrandMuscle built RNDC a sophisticated dashboard that tracks vehicles’ make, model, year, VIN, location, and lifespan; when vehicles need replacement; whether vehicles are wrapped or not; which brand appears on which vehicle; when contracts expire; and which supplier brands want to promote on any given truck next. The dashboard not only includes detailed production attributes, such as which graphic appears on the truck and the date of installation, but installers can add photos before and after the wrap. To close the loop, images of completed work can be uploaded into BrandMuscle’s Proof Gallery portal, so suppliers can type in the job number and view their completed trucks.
Suppliers always know where their truck promotions are and when their contracts expire, and RNDC knows which truck panels they have available for suppliers. This system streamlined the creative, production, and billing processes and solved RNDC’s tax assessment challenges by pushing everything through our Design Tracker system. Along with automated reminders every 30, 60, and 90 days, RNDC receives daily reports that notify them of soon-to-expire trucks so they can keep offering promotion space to bolster their brands and notify operations of when a truck is about to be retired.
Results
“Many suppliers like to put a lot of money into out-of-home advertising, especially vehicle wraps. Having this system, I can instantly see what’s available and communicate every detail quickly. Suppliers are always elated to see their brands represented on our vehicles, especially if they can snap a picture on the road.
There are a lot of moving parts with vehicle wraps. It’s a very long and detailed process with many people involved, so having BrandMuscle to help support has been phenomenal.”
Nick Manuel, RNDC Marketing Creative Solutions Coordinator
