The modern digital commerce platform is a key component of a successful eCommerce strategy. Today’s consumers expect a truly omnichannel experience, and the right commerce platform can help retailers deliver that.  But to be successful in today’s competitive eCommerce environment, it’s important to adopt the right modern digital commerce platform that supports the enterprise’s business goals and provides customers with a seamless experience across all channels.  

Challenges in Digital Commerce

Organizations face more new challenges to digital commerce efforts today than ever before as customers have elevated expectations about their shopping experience regarding how and where they browse to purchase products.  With thousands of touchpoints, from new eCommerce sites to social media apps introducing shopping and discovery capabilities, organizations face an almost unlimited number of challenges when it comes to syndicating and optimizing product information across digital channels, including: 1. Dealing with monolithic and legacy technology Legacy monolithic eCommerce systems aren’t designed to provide simpler and more personalized digital experiences. They offer limited support for configurable product information sourced from the organization’s PIM software and are lagging in the sophistication of their mobile-first customer experience. Static and brittle eCommerce platforms can’t adapt to industry and digital merchandising requirements and aren’t well connected across the variety of marketing channels where buyer engagement occurs.  2. Settling for impersonal commerce experiences These outdated technology systems and processes mean that scalability and growth becomes increasingly difficult for organizations as new channels emerge almost every day. Optimizing your product information for each channel is the ideal way to provide the best customer experience, regardless of where your customers find you, but that is merely a pipedream when your team is dealing with legacy technology, redundant processes, and inefficient communication. 3. Working with minimal PIM integration Traditional PIM technologies can often struggle with integrating and communicating with other platforms that are needed. Through 2024, one-half of organizations will conclude the lack of a modern dedicated PIM environment to optimize product experiences across marketing and sales channels hampers their operational effectiveness.   

PIM Requirements for Success

A modern platform for PIM supports centralized product information and unified storage with efficient collaboration and teamwork across the organization. Having a best-of-breed PIM platform and a network within which information is collected, assessed, and enriched can save time and resources while also contributing to the best possible product experience for customers. In order to take full advantage of all that a PIM can offer, your PIM solution should: 1. Integrate seamlessly into digital commerce through headless and API methods that ensure a modern architectural approach. Blending the best possible experiences across digital commerce requires the ability to bring a range of technologies that are not necessarily from the same vendor but that nonetheless integrate effectively. The innovation of headless digital architectures separates the front-end application from the back-end technology platform using microservices and API-based methods. This decoupling of technologies enables the opportunity to integrate and unify technologies like PIM, but they must be resilient in design. Market research finds that the majority (95%) of organizations deem it very important or important to integrate PIM and digital commerce, and through headless digital commerce architectures, the use of a PIM platform can be more tightly integrated and enable the information network to syndicate the products.  PIM is the keystone for an organization’s digital strategy, but it must be more than just a product catalog. Planning the technical aspects of headless platform integration with PIM is key. More important is guaranteeing a consistent and contextualized product experience with a fully enabled catalog. When PIM is trusted and integrated with the digital commerce platform, it can enable personalized interactions in both B2C and B2B use cases. 2. Support multi-channel marketplaces through product syndication and information network-based methods. Achieving the business and technology benefits of an investment into digital commerce and PIM together should be based on achieving desired outcomes today and in the future. Unlocking these benefits is possible by investing into technology featuring an architecture and platform that is composable and that can adapt and operate across digital channels in a resilient manner. Success with PIM starts with exploiting its full potential, from the platform to the product information network it must support. PIM is the keystone for an organization’s digital strategy, but it must be more than just a product catalog. When it is trusted and integrated with the digital commerce platform, it can enable personalized interactions in both B2C and B2B use cases.  3. Provide modern, highly-personalized digital product experiences, regardless of the channel. Organizations must provide the information a buyer needs, and this requires product information that is consistent, comprehensive, personalized, and accessible natively in the cloud. PIM enables a faster time-to-value from products through a higher velocity of products sold and through effective experiences for the customer. A modern digital platform for commerce and PIM enables faster time-to-value for products, personalized digital experiences, the automation of manual product processes, accurate product information for customers, and selling into new channels and marketplaces. Interested in learning more about how the right PIM solution can accelerate you towards a stronger digital commerce strategy? Reach out to an Akeneo expert today to get started on a path to better product experiences.

The year is 2010.

Omnichannel marketing is just a sparkle in the retail world’s eye. But that September, the stage is set by a groundbreaking study. According to IDC Retail Insights, retailers using multichannel strategies are able to boost average transaction size by 15-35%—and loyalty customers’ profitability by 5-10%.¹

Three years later, the notion of omnichannel retail—the integration of all existing retail distribution channels into a single, seamless shopping experience—was featured in Huffington Post. In the article, the emergence of omnichannel marketing is attributed to the exploding popularity of smartphones, which have enabled consumers to research competitive pricing while in the act of shopping.

Within another year, an MIT report proclaims that omnichannel consumers are the “central force shaping the future of e-commerce and brick-and-mortar stores alike,” driving $12 billion in retail sales from their smartphones and using online research to drive $1.1 trillion in store sales.¹

Omnichannel for retail—as powered by product information management (PIM) and CRM platforms—had officially arrived.

But where did it come from? And what exactly does it look like?

 

Omnichannel Retail: Evolution and Domination

Let’s go all the way back to the ancient days of traditional single-channel marketing.

Retailers with only brick-and-mortar or online stores were able to reduce overhead, drive sales growth and secure market leadership by focusing their resources on a single distribution channel. But as consumers began to embrace the digital revolution and all the new platforms and devices that came with it, it became nearly impossible to compete with a single-channel strategy.

And thus multi-channel marketing was born, giving consumers greater choice over how and when they purchase products—and giving retailers greater insight into what their customers wanted and how to personalize the shopping experience.

But challenges arose.

Creating a seamless customer experience across multiple distribution channels, synchronizing channel data, expanding supply chains while maintaining inventory accuracy—it all put a tremendous strain on the multi-channel strategy, sparking another tectonic shift in how retailers respond to rapidly changing consumer trends: integrations.

By pulling every possible on- and offline distribution channel into a single, cross-platform shopping experience and centralizing data management, omnichannel marketing was able to give consumers and retailers a much better way to interact and transact.

Consumers could now rapidly and conveniently start their product search on one channel and complete their purchase on another. And retailers could now effectively align sales channels, inventory management solutions and marketing strategies.

Everyone won. And won and won.

 

The ins and outs of an omnichannel retail strategy

Getting an omnichannel retail strategy right isn’t just about taking a holistic approach to consumer interactions across different distribution channels. It’s about bringing the entire customer experience into focus—and making sure the journey from Discovery to Purchase is absolutely seamless.

From social ads and email newsletters to push notifications, chatbots, and face-to-face conversations, product information (and brand identity) needs to stay consistent. And transitioning between these marketing touchpoints needs to feel fluid.

If a site isn’t mobile-friendly, if experiences differ from touchpoint to touchpoint, or if information is itself inconsistent, omnichannel marketing just won’t pay off.

Equally as important is personalization. 

In a world where consumers expect companies to fully understand their needs and challenges, employing CRM systems and in-store technologies to customize the customer experience is critical. 

And when done right, the benefits are many and mutual. 

For example, creating personal logins for consumer accounts enables customers to save their preferences and simplify their sales journey. At the same time, it gives businesses an opportunity to collect valuable customer data (like email addresses, interests, and purchase histories) that can dramatically improve the effectiveness of future marketing efforts.

Of course, aggregating and analyzing all that data across multiple retail platforms is no easy task. And building an infrastructure that can support and standardize massive amounts of information is the only way to accurately and effectively unlock actionable consumer insight.

 

On the shoulders of giants

Today’s retail landscape is crowded with omnichannel retail success stories—and there’s no shortage of high-profile omnichannel eCommerce examples to learn from.

Take Amazon. 

From a simple online bookstore to the largest online marketplace in the world, Amazon sets the standard for marketing savvy. Today, the company’s ability to smoothly integrate everything from eCommerce and order management to warehousing management and order broker solutions remains a testament to the power of omnichannel retailing. 

And by focusing on consistent, quality customer engagement across the entire retail ecosystem, Amazon has been able to cultivate a vast global audience that gives its retailers greater visibility, improved customer traffic, and increased revenue.

But how far can you take customer engagement? 

Just ask Disney.

The entertainment behemoth’s gorgeous, responsive website makes it easy to plan a trip from the comfort of your phone. Once they’re booked, customers can then plan their entire vacations through the My Disney Experience mobile app—and use it to do everything from locate attractions to assess wait times.

If that weren’t impressive enough, Disney’s Magic Band program has made it possible for customers to use a single digital tool to unlock their room door, store photos, and order food. It even has a Fast Pass function to keep things moving along.

It’s a shining example of how seamlessly integrating multiple platforms and technologies can enhance the customer experience and bolster brand loyalty.

One more omnichannel eCommerce example for the road?

Consider Starbucks.

The company’s free reward card program enables customers to check and reload credit card information via phone, website, in-store, or mobile app. Any change in the information is then automatically updated across every channel in real-time.

It may seem simple or straightforward enough, but it’s one of those little conveniences that keeps customers coming back for more.

 

Onward to omni 

Today’s customer journey is anything but linear.

In the wake of a global pandemic, most of us were forced to shop differently—and constant advances in technology have made doing so easier and more rewarding than ever.

We interact with brands across multiple touchpoints, we discuss products across multiple channels, and we expect the people selling those products to know what we’re looking for—sometimes before we do.

Omnichannel marketing makes it all possible, incentivizing retailers to invest in the quality of every customer’s experience and improving their ability to understand and market to those customers.

And with the advent of PIM systems that ensure correct, consistent, high-quality data across every channel, retailers have everything they need to create compelling customer experiences that drive growth.

The whole omnichannel system’s symbiotic. And it works.

As technologies emerge and evolve, as retail strategies adapt, and as customer expectations continue to rise, omnichannel marketing will continue to play a critical role in retail success.

 

Sources

¹ https://nectarom.com/2015/01/05/brief-history-omnichannel-marketing/

Enterprises planning large transformations around their omnichannel commerce solutions are faced with a wide array of different technologies. A new trend toward composable commerce means that buyers are confronted with a confusing lineup of systems including DAM, PLM, ERP, CMS, eCommerce, and more. All of these technologies can play an important role in building a cutting-edge commerce solution, but where should you start? For many brands and retailers, the answer lies within a Product Information Management (PIM) solution.

Why Should You Start with a PIM?

1. Put the customer experience first

Customers today want seamless, high-quality experiences across all of a brand’s touchpoints, including marketplaces, social media, eCommerce sites, and more. A critical component of these experiences is giving customers the right technical, instructional, and emotional information about the products you sell. This information must be timely, accurate, and adapted to the sales channel, region, and language that customers are engaging from. A newer trend also has customers expecting personalized advice and recommendations around what you sell. Providing all of this can be a tall order, but the right PIM tool can centralize all your product information and ensure every customer touchpoint is optimized and up-to-date. When beginning a digital transformation, many companies lose sight of this critical focus on customer experience as they execute their strategies around expensive back-end systems (ERP, MDM, PLM), or chase the newest software trends. Starting a digital transformation with a PIM platform is a sure fire way to ensure you’re putting your customers and their experiences with your brand and products at the forefront of your transformation.  

2. Your poor product data is affecting more than you think

Many companies looking to buy the latest and greatest technologies in an effort to improve conversion rates and drive digital growth actually struggle with poor product information. They have product data that is inconsistent, generic, and ungoverned. This bad data permeates insidiously throughout their ecosystem and sabotages every new expensive digital project. Often the biggest gains come from rolling up your sleeves and cleaning up existing messes. High quality product information fuels positive online customer experiences, feeds search optimization and analytics, and is required for filtered navigation. Beginning a transformation with a PIM solution will ensure all of these product data issues are fixed, and provide other systems with the data they need to properly function.  

3. Increase your Time to Value

PIM solutions tend to be cheaper and much faster to launch (Akeneo projects can take as little as ninety days!). Many of the other systems you may be considering as part of your transformation (eCommerce, MDM, PLM, ERP, etc.) are more complex solutions that can take up to a year or more to implement, and require a tremendous amount of resources. Starting with a PIM solution will give you a quick win with measurable results, while also helping to clear the way for future projects by providing clean data and easy integration points.  

4. Get in on the ground floor with cutting-edge technology

It’s important to ensure your organization is adapting to the newest changes in technology. Today, this means abiding by MACH technology principals (Microservices, API-first, Cloud native SaaS, Headless) and having a composable commerce architecture. While many software vendors struggle to evolve and meet these rising standards, Akeneo PIM does meet these standards. It is imperative to find a tool that is built for the future, and beginning a transformation with a composable-commerce friendly solution ensures that your technology stack will be built to scale and grow from day one. PIM solutions are also designed to be easily integratable to numerous other systems, and should have multiple pre-built connectors to popular eCommerce, DAM, marketplace, datapool, CMS, and print solutions. Starting a digital transformation with a modern PIM solution like Akeneo means you have access to a wide ecosystem of technology partners that will ease your integration efforts and provide a wide range of options should your transformation strategy change.  

5. Provide a New Way to Work

There are numerous teams, processes, and applications involved in the life cycle of a product. A team of brand managers, buyers, product designers, eCommerce managers, photographers, translators, and even lawyers are involved in launching a new product to customers. Without a PIM, these teams work in silos with poor communication, a lot of excel spreadsheets, duplicate work and emails, countless revisions and error fixing, and no overall understanding of the big picture. A PIM solution brings all of these different users to the table and empowers them to work collaboratively on a single set of data with workflows and productivity tools. By starting with a PIM solution, you’re providing benefits to all of these teams immediately, and getting them together for the first time under the irreproachable objective of improving customer experiences. Starting with PIM provides the rest of your solution with a foundation of clean, compelling, customer-focused product information. PIM also opens the door to a new way to work by providing benefit to, and fostering collaboration between, the cross-functional teams modern commerce demands. An Akeneo PIM solution is a fast, economic way to incorporate a cutting-edge solution that gives you the flexibility and scalability to support future initiatives and growth opportunities, making it the ideal starting point for a transformation project.

I remember being so happy the first time one of our customers asked me to help write a job description to find his/her PXM Product Owner to support the company’s vision.  The scope of the PIM has evolved so much since we started the journey, back in 2014. The first key success we had to insist on (and we’ll never stop) is that PIM is a Business tool that helps empower Business people! Bringing together the right people to create a PIM team is the first step toward a successful PIM implementation. And yes, you have to identify the people that are contributors (creating and enriching product data, meaning information, and assets) and people that are consumers (benefiting immediately from high-quality and always up-to-date product data).  And oh, it happens that these two groups are not necessarily always internal people, working for your own organization.  If you are a distributor (no matter B2C, B2B2C, or B2B), all the suppliers you work with are direct contributors as they provide the first level of product information. And if you are a brand, you probably sell your products wholesale, on other distributors’ websites, or on marketplaces. All these business partners need to get empowered and be part of the Product Experience Management you set up.

Use the PXM Maturity Model to scale the PIM Dream Team

To know where to start and define a clear PXM roadmap, it is important to have the PXM Maturity Model in mind:

PXM Adopter

A PXM Adopter establishes a single source of truth as a strong foundation for using product information consistently across channels and markets. This means your team is aware of the complexity of scaling, but are still dealing with outdated processes and a manual way of working (hello, dozens of Excel sheets, but goodbye!). 

PXM Innovator

A PXM Innovator starts to unlock growth with a collaborative model between teams and formalizes a process to make sure attributes and assets are defined to match the product experience that customers expect along the entire buying journey.

PXM Champion

A PXM Champion unlocks growth at scale thanks to a scalable and well-designed platform that involves internal and external stakeholders and aligns with the business strategy. Whenever you’d like to know more about where you are today, just take our free PXM Maturity Assessment, which will guide you through the People, the Process, and the Technology actions you should take as the next steps. 

Follow the Leaders

Forming your PIM Dream Team, identifying stakeholders, and earning their buy-in is a crucial step in the success of a PXM program. And the global vision, the “why we must achieve it”, must be shared very early with every stakeholder, even if they won’t all be involved simultaneously in the project. They will share and thus embodies this vision, knowing perfectly why this matters and what is at stake.  Here are the Fantastic Four that will make your project a success: 

1. It is mandatory to get Executive Sponsorship – sponsors will be responsible for keeping the projects aligned with the organization’s strategy. They evangelize the PXM vision, own the business cases, focus on realization of benefits, and provide dedicated guidance, resources, and oversight.We consider their implication on the overall project from 5 to 10%. 
2. Dedicate a (PXM) Project Manager or Product Owner – (s)he will be responsible for a myriad of things, including:
   • Planning, organizing, and directing the completion of the project 
   • Building and managing project plan 
   • Delegating team responsibilities, tracking day-to-day project action items, and escalating project risks or blockers when needed
   • Embodying the PXM visionAs nothing is better than listening to someone nailing it, here is a sneak peek from our annual summit Unlock, interviewing Royal Canin’s PXM Owner, Sylvain Cavaillé.We consider their implication on the overall project from 25 to 40%. 
3. As  we introduced earlier, the PXM project is firstly a business project made for supporting business people to achieve business goals aligned with the company’s strategy. So, the Functional Administrator is the core of such a project. (S)he is the business owner of the applications and helps optimize and adopt a new way of working, the voice of business users.(S)he typically receives design input from a variety of other business users with product knowledge like Product and Brand Managers, Purchasing teams, Sales Channel Managers, Marketing, eCom, Marketplace, Media, etc.We consider her/his implication on the overall project from 50 to 100%, depending on the project scope.
4. Last but not least, you always need a business-oriented  Technical Administrator who can manage and define the governance of the system architecture. They define and validate the architecture and integrations with other IT systems (e.g., ERP, PLM, E-commerce, DAM, etc.) and maintain integrations post-implementation. We consider their implication over time from 10 to 25%. 

Obviously, this list is not one-size-fits-all. Every organization is different, and you’ll likely have to adapt these practices based on the internal organization of your company, or whether your PIM tool is utilized for only one brand or multiple brands/subsidaries. But this should work as a great starting point for your team. Empowering teams with Akeneo PXM Studio is our mission, and we follow our customers closely on their path to PXM Maturity.  We have dedicated one of our annual awards to that topic. The Leadership Award category aims at rewarding organizations that have been able to grow with their teams.  You can discover this year’s winner’s history, Azelis, a 20 year old group that elaborates and markets specialty chemicals in animal nutrition, food & health, personal and home care, and pharma market segments.  I’m looking forward to hearing from new positions created in the PXM world! If you have any questions about building your own PIM Dream Team, our team of in-house PXM advisors is here and happy to help!

One of our customers (Head of CX in brand apparel) recently shared this statistic with me: 50% of customers come to your website because they already know what they want to purchase, and 50% of others come to get inspired.
Social media success (Instagram, Pinterest, and, more recently, Tik Tok) has set the path. Being inspired is now a must-have, and shoppers will be engaged with brands they share values and inspiration with. Engagement is the new loyalty. This is what TikTok marketing-based company Revolution Beauty Digital Director, Sally Minto, perfectly described in a recent conversation.

To inspire and engage your customers, there is nothing more effective than offering services before (only) selling products. Everybody appreciates a personalized and insightful experience. There is no better feeling than buying the right product(s) for your needs.

How can you offer value to your customers? Here are 5 great examples from our customers at Akeneo.

From the now classic Usage Finder… with a focus on education

To ease the product research process, you can offer the relevant filters on your website to make the search experience easier and the process more visually appealing.

Below is a great example from one of our customers, Made.com: when you buy a sofa or any piece of large furniture, the most important first step is to ensure that you find one that will fit into your room. The Sofasizer enables you to drag to the maximum size allowed by your space and instantaneously display only the relevant sofas.
You’ll be more willing to buy when you save time and are sure the products you’re browsing are the right size for your space.

And if you need help on what to pay attention to when you buy a specific piece of furniture, Made.com has prepared some Guides for every important product category. They guide you with measurements and questions to ask before buying a product. Once you know what to look for, the brand suggests the most appropriate shopping list.

Educating your clients is one of the best ways to increase customer loyalty and retention. It gives them a feeling of being cared for and supports their informed decisions. Additionally, it allows you to stay up-to-date on the latest trends in your industry so you can offer them the best service possible.

It is even more true when it comes to the Cosmetics and Food Industries – people really want to be aware of what they eat and use for their skin.
Belco is a coffee sourcer that sells directly to coffee roasters and upholds sustainable, environmentally-friendly coffee culture, showcasing its extensive farming know-how and land identity.

Their enhanced filtering capabilities allow their B2B users to filter based on the aromatic family of the coffee you’re looking for (floral, fruity, malty, milky, roasty, spicy, etc.), certification or origin, and each matching coffee is introduced with the farmer, and producer who cultivates it. This transparent process helps customers learn about their coffee beans’ history and source, humanizing everyone in the process and making it easy for Belco to communicate and share their values with their shoppers.

To the Emotional Finders…

Whether you’re building a product recommendation quiz or a virtual consultation for consumers to find their right style or fit, quizzes help brands engage with their target audience in more meaningful ways.

Through a well thought-out series of questions, brands can improve their retargeting and personalization strategies to acquire new customers and keep every visitor returning for content and products relevant to their needs.

And remember, quizzes aren’t just fun for your customers; they help provide valuable information for brands, making the shopping experience at your eCommerce store, on your App, or in store, better for the customer—while increasing your sales.

Let’s start with the Beauty industry. Sephora offers a quiz to find the perfect product for the lips. From the type of lipstick finish to the benefits and the composition of the makeup to the kind of brand (“hot” vs “best sellers”), you’ll get a selection of products that match 100% with your desired product. This reconciles both the usage and the inspiration and is a near-guarantee to selling a product.

And the more expensive and important the product, the more customers will want to be sure of their investment.
Beds are a good example as you don’t change them every month. This quiz from a US-based company, Sleep Number, takes care of several people’s considerations (you and your partner) to suggest the best mattress.

And this is not relevant for human needs only! All pet owners want to offer the best for their loyal companions. This is why Royal Canin wants to ensure every pet gets the food he or she deserves.

The quiz delivers a personalized outcome to the user, making the entire shopping experience engaging and fruitful. You can then go on to link the recommended products to your website and complete the sales cycle.

Remember, the primary goal behind the best product recommendations should always be to provide the best value to the customers.

Ready to offer the best product experience to your customers?

Wait a minute! Even if that kind of service can look easy to deliver, this requires that every single product you sell has a high quality of product information so that every single piece of data can be used as a filter, a tag, a possible answer to a quiz question, and can then be displayed as a possible result.
And this is possible only when you get a mix of the right people involved, the right optimized processes, and the right dedicated tools to support your product experience strategy. A user-friendly PIM, like Akeneo PIM, empowers every stakeholder to collaborate around the product information to ensure that the (e)merchandising team can easily offer the best product experience thanks to accurate information enriched by the product or marketing teams.

Now you know how to delight the 50% of customers coming to get inspired!

 

As I write this, family vacation time is almost here. It’s been 3 years since the last one abroad, and we realized there were lots of new things we needed for the trip. For me, it’s a new camera bag. Choices abound for these, across styles and features and price points. But which one should I get, as quickly as possible? Here’s how I came to a decision on one:

• I checked out the websites of the brands I was already familiar with, many times over
• I used a couple of search engines to see if there were any brands I hadn’t heard of yet. For the new brands, I checked out their websites too, many times over
• I also browsed reviews, images, info, availability and pricing on Amazon, eBay and some of my favorite camera gear retailers
• One evening, I popped into my local Target store to see if they had any inventory in stock that I could touch, try on and compare to (they didn’t)
• I swiped through my social media feeds to see who else had bags from my shortlist, how they looked in real life, and how they were being used by those beautiful influencers
• I read over countless reviews by photography experts I trust
• I might have even clicked on an ad I saw while reading the news in my browser

I counted at least 15 individual touchpoints to come to a conclusion on a single product that I now really like and can’t wait to use. That doesn’t include the retargeting ads and “you forgot something!” emails I saw along the way. Yes, like the other 90% of shoppers out there, I am a 100% bonafide omnichannel shopper. Was I led by the brands to follow a particular customer journey? Absolutely not! My stops at these points and channels were totally random and at my convenience. My decision was based on that warm, satisfying feeling that I had all the information I needed to make a solid decision that I wouldn’t regret later. What happened here is that the brand I purchased from [sorry, I won’t tell you which one here, you will just have to catch me at a live or online event and ask me directly] had done the work to ensure their brand values and style, alongside information and assets about their products, was shared and leveraged widely across all those different channels I was on. They didn’t come chasing me by tracking my every step (maybe a little, but that’s OK). Nor did they blatantly try to drive me to a particular place to buy (I ended up buying from one of those retailers I visited). Instead, wherever I went, I had a consistent, informative and enjoyable product experience with them, whether that was on their owned properties or someone else’s they didn’t control. Brands like this one don’t look at each channel and touchpoint as separate strategies for selling and marketing their products. If that were the case, any one of those owned or unowned channels and touchpoints would have been a disappointment. Information missing. No images to see what the bag could carry. Unconvincing descriptions and reviews. We’ve all seen those bad product experiences somewhere. And all it takes is one bad product experience for me to not buy from that brand and go elsewhere. Or not be satisfied with my purchase once I receive it, inconveniencing me with expensive returns and no bag to carry all that camera gear in. When approaches to bringing product information and content to life in the market are siloed, the chances of mistakes slipping through are that much greater. So clearly what’s needed is a single, holistic and comprehensive strategy to activate a brand or retailer’s product story across any channel or market that I, you or our fellow shoppers see, explore and buy from. It should support and drive their company goals and objectives, while meeting or exceeding the experience expectations shoppers have. It needs to be built on a strong and scalable foundation of the complete product record that encapsulates everything the shopper needs to make informed and satisfying decisions. It also needs to enable the brand or retailer to learn and adapt from what works and doesn’t work, and quickly launch into new markets and channels without having to recreate everything. This single approach to having a product story win on any channel is what we call Product Activation. “But isn’t that just product content syndication?” you might ask. Actually, it’s so much more than that. Product Activation brings together many different types of technologies and approaches for each of the channels you need to be on:

• It needs a means to be able to reliably and scalably connect with and publish rich product data and assets to your owned properties, so your e-commerce sites, point-of-sales systems and people, and maybe your commerce-enabled apps, all have a consistent set of the latest and greatest information about your products in multiple locales for your international customers.
• Yes, product content syndication and feed management are parts of Product Activation, so you have the pipework necessary to automate the publishing of your product data and assets to those unowned 1st-party retailers, 3rd-party marketplaces and marketing channels like ads, search and email. You need a way to be able to tell a consistent and compelling product story across all of these, even with their specific and sometimes ever-changing requirements.
• For those unowned channels that don’t have automation endpoints like APIs, you need a method to be able to filter and transform your existing product record to their requirements as flat files like CSV or spreadsheets easily right from with your PIM, without you having to change your internal product catalog structure.
• And don’t forget that people need to activate your product story too, whether they are your long-tail retail partners selling your products in that cool college town, or maybe your sales and service teams helping customers make informed decisions to buy from you, or influencers telling your story to their followers. They all need the means to make sure they have the latest, consistent and relevant product information from you too.

But why do this? It all sounds cool, right? By taking this Product Activation approach across all your routes-to-market, with a consistent and compelling product experience across any of those channels, you will be able to drive higher conversion rates and greater loyalty that comes from omnichannel shopping. But you and your teams will also be able to lower your time-to-activation of those product stories across current and future channels your shopper will be on, enabling you to get to revenue faster than ever before. And many of our customers are applying a Product Activation strategy today. Take Bradfords Building Supplies as an example, a truly omnichannel business that just recently celebrated its 250th anniversary:  

As we head into a period of economic uncertainty, commerce businesses are beginning to wonder what will happen to the shopper behaviors that drastically changed during a pandemic when we all had to go into lockdown, unable to take that vacation abroad with our loved ones. The answer is: no one really knows. But one big thing businesses can control is their product story. And those businesses who are ready with a Product Activation strategy are the ones who will be able to survive and thrive through another unpredictable and tumultuous time. Will that be you? I’m sure it will be. If we can help you find a way through that, please do let us know. In the meantime, let’s see exactly how much photography gear I can get in that bag. After all, there’s no such thing as too many cameras and lenses.

The title of this article is not a misprint, nor is it hyperbole or exaggeration. We all know we live in a different world than we did just 18 months ago. The Covid-19 pandemic has upended many previous trends and predictions for the modern-day world of both B2C and B2B eCommerce. The demise of print and other offline touchpoints has been greatly exaggerated. One of the definitive effects of Covid was that retail traffic obviously plummeted while e-commerce dramatically increased- forcing companies to re-evaluate their marketing strategies in the wake of this traffic shift.  In today’s world, the definition of “print” has expanded well beyond the traditional paper catalog or product brochure – though those publications remain more important and relevant than many folks give them credit for. These types of publications remain an ideal platform for new product discovery and introduction. However, in most instances, the processes used to create these are archaic at best. We are constantly amazed by some of the things we hear from organizations across the spectrum regardless of industry or company size. Unbelievably, there are even some companies that spend 12-18 months working on a single publication. Most of the layouts we see today are done manually with copy/paste techniques and excel exports. By the time a publication is ready to go to print, much of the information is already out-of-date, further lengthening the publication process as more revisions are made. Even purely “digital” publications often follow these patterns. For instance, the prototypical PDF datasheets that are downloadable from many websites and webshops often follow a similar process. Whenever a new product is released or updates are made, someone has to get a data export from IT, manually open up Adobe InDesign, make the change, send for proofreading and approval, generate the PDF, and finally publish it to the website. These are just a few of the scenarios that we encounter frequently. Outdated processes such as this just exacerbate the stereotype of print’s important role in the omnichannel experience.  Print and other offline touchpoints have been largely ignored thus far in the digital transformation of most marketing departments. A primary reason for this is that the types of capabilities that are taken for granted in the digital world have simply not yet been made accessible to the creative publisher. The ideas of segmentation, personalization, A/B testing, AI, etc., have remained out of the reach for much of the publishing world up to this point. However, a new generation of tools offering layout automation, headless publishing, personalization, and more is now readily available. Rather than furthering the false narrative that offline is dead or dying, these tools enable the marketer to deliver a true omnichannel experience. Additionally, they have the ability to produce very robust ROI from investments in systems like a PIM. Imagine producing a catalog up to 80% more efficiently in terms of time and cost. For example: What if you were able to produce ten 200-page variations of a catalog for various segments versus one 1,000-page monolithic catalog for all? In this case, the substantial increase in ROI comes from both a better-targeted publication and also having saved 800 pages in printing costs. As an added benefit, the creative production time gap between online and offline narrows significantly. Suddenly these publications go from being a legacy necessity to a strategic capability. Creative marketers and agency partners transition from being copy and paste editors to true strategic marketers. Marketing automation platforms are now able to easily incorporate these capabilities into your organization’s campaign planning. The foundation for all the automation and capability is your corporate data that is often contained in a PIM system. Simply put, clean and consistent data is essential for this level of automation. There are several areas where these new capabilities can be employed to directly improve your e-commerce performance. It’s now possible to instantly generate accurate and up-to-date downloadable datasheets simply by making a change to the product data in the PIM without the creative team having to lift a finger. Organizations can enable users to create their own on-demand personalized catalogs, brochures, and more. To cite a particularly innovative use case, a large electronics retailer is now using cart abandonment data to generate personalized postcard offers instead of a standard follow-up email approach. The difference in open rates is staggering. Depending on your source, the email open rate averages around 18-20% and that number is not climbing. Again, depending on your source, the “open” rate on these kinds of offline mailer offers tends to average around 75-80%. Anecdotally, our customer says they have seen a significant increase in conversion and that, additionally, this automated process has not added any burden to their company’s creative marketing resources.  Taking advantage of the well-managed data that exists in the PIM, closing the creative production time gap and enabling the flexibility to produce the same quality of segmentation and personalization offered by offline channels is the key to delivering the complete customer experience management and optimizing the effectiveness of your company’s e-commerce channel. Organizations that capitalize on true omnichannel experiences are the ones that will ultimately succeed in differentiating themselves from their competitors. 

American national security expert and former government official Richard Clarke famously once said “If you spend more on coffee than on IT security, you will be hacked.” We Akeneos do love our coffee, and Ziggy knows a good cup when she sees one. But our commitment to the continuous improvement of how we handle the security of our customers’ and partners’ data is infinitely more important than a strong café noir. And it is that commitment to security implementation and risk mitigation that has been validated with Akeneo achieving ISO 27001 certification status. This is a milestone that we are proud to reach and share with our community. You may be wondering what ISO 27001 is exactly, and you wouldn’t be alone. In short, ISO 27001 is a management system covering processes, people, and tools to protect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the information organizations manage in a systematic way. It not only provides the know-how, but a company can also get certified against ISO 27001 and so demonstrate to its customers, partners, and employees that it safeguards their data. As an international security standard, it is well-recognized around the world across all industries and organization sizes.

The scope of the information security management system that Akeneo is certified for covers the activities and processes that we use to build, deliver and maintain the products that deal with client and partner data, including Akeneo PIM, Onboarder, Shared Catalogs, Connectors, and Apps. It also covers the different editions and ways we deploy our software, and all the Akeneo teams involved across all our office locations. So why does this matter to you as a member of our Akeneo community? It’s a simple answer with huge implications: you can trust and rely upon a robust solution for PIM and PXM from a provider that takes the people, processes, and technologies to protect your data very seriously. One who is willing to make the investment and be audited by independent third parties to be certified in its approach to the security of your data. So the next time you order that double-shot soy milk no foam spiced pumpkin latte in celebration of achieving your growth goals, you can do so confidently knowing that Akeneo is taking care of your data and the platform that helps drive your success.

The Leadership Award category aims at rewarding organisations that have been able to grow with their teams. That includes organizations where teammates are happy to use Akeneo in their daily business and don’t regret old methods. If it brings them maturity and opportunities to be less operational and more strategic, if new positions have been created, helping working on more value added content, offering new services and experiences to their customers, and realizing measurable results through the use of Akeneo PXM Studio.

This year, for this category, we received great submissions and had 3 Akeneo customers short-listed as finalists: 

• Azelis (BE), along with their partner Smile
• Bergfreunde (DE), along with their partner Flagbit
• MTI – Mobile Technologies (US), along with their partner Sitation

Congratulations to all the finalists! But only one can win… 

A winning formulation for Azelis! The 20 years olg group elaborates and markets specialty chemicals in the animal nutrition, food & health, personal and home cares, pharma market segments. They have acquired 7 renowned local and regional brands in the Americas, which provides them a unique go-to market strategy. All of their brands are the best in class distributors in their respective market and offer the highest quality products and technologies supported with application labs and technical service. 

Much more than moving goods, they are moving markets forward. Breaking new ground in their technical laboratories by combining ingredients with ideas and creating opportunities through innovation.

 

 

With a product catalogue of over 100,000 base products and unique marketing, regulatory and operational requirements needed to serve 58 countries in various market segments, Azelis was missing the ability to master product data on a global scale while still providing unique product enrichment from a marketing and regulatory/operational perspective.

Compounding this issue is the speed of growth Azelis has experienced due to new distribution mandates and a strong track record of mergers and acquisitions. A centralized platform to master product data connected to disparate downstream systems and supported by one aligned governance structure was critical to expedite time to market for new products and to integrate acquisitions.

Azelis decided to choose Akeneo PXM Studio to support their digital transformation program, with one key goal: to facilitate enrichment of product information by market segment and connect to their online customer experiences platforms on a global scale and maintain their unique sense of innovation.

Becoming a true PXM champion

The largest challenge that Azelis had to overcome was the time taken to create a product which impacted on their time-to-market and responsiveness to customers.

To overcome this the following solutions were found and integrated to the PaaS version of Akeneo PIM Enterprise Edition:

• Creation of business request forms using SharePoint that use workflow to allow validation at the source (e.g. duplicate check) and integration of product reference data. Information from business is automatically transferred into Akeneo.
• Creation of an A.I. based Automatic Data Extraction tool that is embedded into Akeneo. The AI tooling automatically extracts information from non-standard pdf documents attached to the business request form.
• Automatic upload into SharePoint of documents and link to products and to the customer experience platforms
• Near real-time integration

This resulted in internal improvements: 

In the first 3 months, Azelis experienced 50% efficiency gains in processing product creation. By increasing quantity and quality simultaneously this has resulted in 50% less errors thanks to automation, validation rules and workflows.

Azelis has been able to increase its enriched master data by 46% to include information for over 190 attributes including marketing, operations and SHEQ (regulatory and safety) data. They also have marketing information and support input for locale specific values required for regulatory compliance and language translations.

This has definitely reduced the complexity of master data fields within ERP that moved to PIM with the advantage of less maintenance and one single source of truth only.

They have reduced the requirement for ERP licences as well as reduced ERP development & maintenance costs resulting in 0,2M€ savings.

200+ users based in 58 countries and 45 languages now work regularly in Akeneo and speak the same language. Multiple teams can now work simultaneously on the same products.

 

 

But this also resulted in external improvements which make you a PXM Champion:

The implementation of the Akeneo PIM Enterprise Edition truly improved connectivity with Azelis’ suppliers and warehouses and has meant faster onboarding of their Merger & Acquisitions projects and new distribution mandates.

And last but not least, from a carbon footprint point of view, Azelis has been able to rationalise their pack-sizes by 37%.

Discover other inspiring customer success stories reading the Expansion Award post, the Accelerator, the Global or the Expansion one.