The first chords of a soundcheck, the quiet purr of an electric car, the hum of lights flickering above a sports stadium. Each sound marks the start of an exciting event, from music festivals and roadtrips to sports — and they’re all powered by HARTING connectors.
Since 1945, HARTING has provided high-quality industrial connection technology to B2B businesses. Their website — which is localized for 19 languages — serves as the primary driver for acquisition. In 2020, HARTING hit its stride, raking in over 1 billion euros in annual sales. With all that momentum, HARTING 's management has set ambitious ARR targets to achieve by 2030.
To achieve this, HARTING needed to build on what was already working in its customer experience while increasing satisfaction through efficiency and personalization. Personalization was a given — but so was streamlining operations to save time and reduce resource use.
Assembling the right team — and headless tools — for transformation
HARTING ’s digital ecosystem presented a challenge, however, as it was split down the middle. The marketing site ran on a monolithic CMS, while the ecommerce experience on the website was powered by SAP. These disconnected systems created a fractured customer journey where awareness content was divorced from real-time product availability. Managing 20,000+ SKUs meant teams duplicated work, risking errors and inconsistencies across sites. And with siloed systems, HARTING lacked the unified data it needed to personalize content and understand customer behavior.
Recognizing that its existing architecture couldn’t support the level of optimization it needed, HARTING brought in United Digital Group (UDG), a digital marketing and sales transformation agency, to help overhaul its infrastructure.
An electric MVP gives way to a full-scale migration
UDG recommended that HARTING switch to a headless solution, which would allow HARTING to unite both areas of its digital experience. Several workshops helped them confidently decide to move forward with Contentful.
"With Contentful, we connected both commerce and marketing into a single front end built with Angular. The platform’s ability to support multiple frameworks at once made this possible,” noted Frank Sauer, Senior Manager Ecommerce.
HARTING chose to continue working with its previous ecommerce vendor, upgrading to its cloud solution. They integrated this tool by building an app within Contentful.
“Contentful is very flexible. We have a lot of apps and have been able to build our own connectors to make integration with the rest of our stack really easy,” said Sauer. “We also built a custom preview app with the Contentful App Framework to maintain our high-quality standards during development.”
Before rolling out the new tech stack at scale, UDG and HARTING completed an MVP for South Africa, their smallest market. In just six months, HARTING had a fully integrated ecommerce and marketing digital experience, which laid the groundwork for a full-scale migration.
Hundreds of happy users and more engaged customers
Today, more than 100 dispersed members of the HARTING team are working in Contentful. With a new composable platform, HARTING has moved beyond launching simple product overviews. Today, they can develop complex pages that drive industry-specific campaigns. These pages combine detailed product information, rich text modules, and supporting graphics tailored to companies in transportation, manufacturing, agriculture, and more, built to reflect the unique needs of its prospects for a more relevant experience.
At the same time, Contentful’s modular content structure, which supports reuse, has streamlined HARTING ’s multilingual management, ensuring consistency across 19 languages.
“A product description with tons of details, for example, can be reused across multiple pages without needing to re-enter it,” explained Sauer.
Regional teams still have the flexibility to adapt content for local audiences, but governance features let HARTING maintain control over critical pages, safeguarding brand integrity at a global level.
Pressing forward with personalization
The consolidation of HARTING's content and commerce systems onto a single platform laid the foundation for the development of specific enhancements to quickly support our customer relationships in all areas, which the HARTING team is already working on.
HARTING ’s transformation shows how the right digital foundation fuels both operational efficiency and customer-centric experiences. With Contentful at the core of its digital experience, HARTING is now positioned to scale seamlessly and achieve its ambitious revenue target by 2030.
About UDG
UDG is a leading agency for digital marketing and sales transformation in the DACH region. Since the end of 2024, it has been part of the creative, technology, and media agency group MSQ with more than 1,850 employees in 22 locations. With 350 employees based in Germany and Spain, UDG supports clients worldwide, including Porsche, Bosch, and Fendt. UDG's services and solutions include consulting, strategy, creation, content, marketing technology, CRM, data and analytics for all aspects of the customer experience. With this service portfolio, UDG plans, develops, operates, and optimizes seamless customer journeys across all digital touchpoints.
