The Maserati Club

Client: The Maserati Club
Industry: Advocacy/Community/Non-profits

Challenge:

Officine Alfieri Maserati was founded on December 1, 1914, in Bologna, Italy. Since then, Maserati has played a consistently leading role in the development of the sports car and its culture. More than a century of activity has brought with it glorious achievements, both on the road and the track, as well as more challenging times, which have helped forge the company’s character and personality.

The Maserati Club (TMC) is a not-for-profit club for Maserati enthusiasts with five chapters in North America and four more worldwide. Members include enthusiasts, collectors, journalists and a number of well-known race car drivers.

The existing website was using an outdated Flash animation introduction with very old and basic HTML. The site could not take advantage of any social media tactics or SEO. New members had to print out a pdf form, fill it out, and then mail a check via snail mail to become a member.

TMC needed to be able to connect all the chapters together and accommodate a surge of new cross generational owners; they needed a new website that could function across all platforms and deliver a database-driven architecture in order to market, organize and facilitate a large membership nationwide.

Lastly, TMC needed and wanted a website that represented not only a strong and well-respected brand, but a website that would attract strong and passionate owners alike.

Solution:

HCP thoroughly researched the luxury car market and its dealers/buyers in order to understand what the owners wanted and needed the portal site to do. Our design team worked side by side with the Northeast region club management, mostly out of New York and Connecticut, in addition to various team members at Maserati North America.

HCP developed numerous designs before creating a wireframe site map, a home page and sub-page design and various unique assets that would create a simple but aesthetic and useful website concept for TMC members. HCP worked with the club’s leadership to update and wordsmith copy in order to tell the story and explain the passion that exists between owners and their cars. The new website was built in WordPress in order to take full advantage of database-driven capabilities needed to organize and socialize with a large database of current and new club members all over the world.

The new architecture offers more functionality for all the chapters to provide members with information on events, membership registration and renewal with a safe and secure online e-commerce transactions and special discounts for “members only” offering access to the official Maserati online store.

HCP revitalized TMC’s central website with a stylish, up-to date, mobile friendly design that reflects the clean and elegant style of the vehicles driven by its members. The HCP team paid special attention to elaborate on the long and rich history of Maserati and really strived to deliver a theme that captures the love affair between owners and their Italian masterpieces. The new website also provides members a forum where they can discuss upcoming events, find and trade specialty parts and much more. The site will also allow dealers and partners to advertise on the site, once the propagation is final.

TMC is an active club that sponsors over 40 events each year worldwide. These include car shows, food and wine events, charitable functions and luxury driving events. Each chapter is autonomous and self-supporting while being managed by an International Board of Directors consisting of one representative of each chapter.