Product Experience

My PIM Journey

After spending 5 years implementing Akeneo PIM for all kinds of businesses across several territories, scaling product catalogs to address new digital…

After spending 5 years implementing Akeneo PIM for all kinds of businesses across several territories, scaling product catalogs to address new digital eCommerce challenges, and becoming a Product Marketing Manager and Evangelist 2 years ago, I realized that my personal PIM journey at Akeneo tells the same story as our PXM Maturity Model framework. I certainly grew with Akeneo customers, the same way Akeneo learned and grew with them too. The best is yet to come!

PXM Maturity Assessment

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  So when I opened a PIM for the first time, I have to admit that I did not get it immediately. I had never worked directly in the eCommerce industry (and the eCommerce team is rarely involved in an ERP implementation). What I could see on my screen was a lot of product edit forms! Which makes total sense, as the main goal of a PIM is to enrich product information and improve its quality. But at first, the scope seemed so small to me. After discovering all the features though, I totally got it. I just loved the marketing and customer-oriented approach. I was so ready to go onsite to work with many new colleagues: the eCommerce team, merchandising team, content team, studio team, and print catalog team. For me it was now super clear – ERP does support the supply chain and internal vision of the product, the PIM, the market, and the end consumer. As an experienced consultant, I spent my time listening to these people. One day during one particular project for a mass-market fashion brand, a young well-styled man interrupted one of our workshops to ask the Product Manager if the product he was about to showcase on their Instagram account was the right style, meaning the right color, and to make sure the product had not changed since the sample validation step. We know the impact it has on sales, so you can’t get this one wrong. At the time we were implementing a PIM to support an eCommerce platform migration for this fashion brand. So the project was 100% focused on the eCommerce part. But from that exact moment when the community manager with great fashion sense interrupted the workshop, I understood that a PIM project is much more than implementing another tool to only support one channel. It is about offering a new way of working for all the business users in a company. This community manager-turned-social-seller could have easily and quickly found this information in the PIM. Everywhere you sell and market products, there must be a PIM that establishes a strong foundation of your product data, that is always clean and available to share with all the touchpoints you have with your customers. Not just your social networks like this community manager asked about, but also your physical stores, the digital screens in-store, the sales app, the marketplaces you sell on, and yes, your own website(s).

From an eCommerce-oriented PIM to a channel-agnostic one

As soon as I understood the benefits of implementing a PIM, I started to re-think the workshops we delivered, and about the attendees of these sessions. But this implied challenging the project scope for each customer and making them understand how more teams could benefit from this new tool, and how it could solve a lot of product enrichment issues. Don’t get me wrong, it was not about questioning their strategy, but more about broadening the scope, opening this new goldmine to anyone dealing with or consuming product information. Behind each of your sales touchpoints, there is a team, or at least a human. And these people need to be empowered to understand that they won’t work in silos anymore but will work to support their company strategy, all collaborating with one single source of truth for their product information. So how did I learn to get buy-in and make a PIM project a success that involved everyone? How did I engage them in such a project? Basically, by rallying the troops! For the first workshop at one client, we advised our customer to invite all the people in the company that either enrich, contribute, or even just consume product information – which could lead to having over 30 people in the room at once. Yikes! The main goal we had was to make sure that:

• Everyone was aware of this new tool in the company.

• Everybody got the same level of knowledge: what is the PIM scope? How does it work with other systems already used (PLM, ERP mainly)? What does it mean for everyone’s daily work? It’s not about duplicating work or working for others… but about building a strong, healthy, common foundation to support the company’s growth.

• Everybody understood how they could benefit from this new tool: fewer informal requests, less manual (re)work, fewer e-mails, better relationships, smoother enrichment, and more digital processes.

After making sure all the teams were engaged and successfully able to create this smooth enrichment process, we needed to understand who is responsible for which piece of product information, and who depends on others for information. And we had to get answers to many specific questions: How do you create a product? Is a product a sample beforehand? Is it possible to start writing a description without at least a picture of the product? How is the assortment managed? Is a product available by default for all the markets you address, or do you have an assortment of products by market? Is there a team responsible for validating all the product information? Who makes sure it complies with market regulations? Who decides that a product is ready to be seen by and sold to end consumers?

At the end of the workshops, any stakeholders connecting to the PIM could understand what they had to do, and how to do this, without any additional training because everything would have been designed according to their way of working and their specific needs: from their workspace just showing the products they have to work on, to the language(s) they have to create content for, to the product information they are responsible for.  Ultimately, these people immediately adopted both the technology and the processes to help them, changing the way they worked for the better.

From a PIM to a PXM Studio

Feeling more than ready after this early customer, I was now mature enough to work with all kinds of companies with their different business challenges. Once the teams started to understand the power of collaboration and had product information ready for any new business challenge, they started thinking about broadening the scope of their collaboration with their external providers. For resellers, instead of receiving and dealing with a lot of different formats and spreadsheets, we started to think about making onboarding product data easier and faster. That’s precisely how Akeneo Onboarder was born, by the way! The same goes for the manufacturers I worked with. How could they share accurate information with their business partners, resellers, and marketplaces? Et voilà! Akeneo Shared Catalogs joined the family. The magic really started to happen for me when some companies heard about Akeneo and decided they, too, needed a PIM after some of their business partners mentioned they were saving time, rationalizing processes, and sharing better product data quality with this new way of working.  A lot of Akeneo customers work with other Akeneo customers: in the fashion industry, in cosmetics, in the B2B world, with specialized distributors. So many businesses in these areas are connected to or collaborate with others in one way or another. It is so great to connect people together, simplify their daily life, while all speaking the same language. One of the recurring questions I received from my customers during this time was “How long will the project last?” I have now a clear and irrevocable answer: “The project timing will only depend on how mature and ready you are with your product data dictionary and with your product enrichment lifecycle.”  If a company is clear on what a product is for them, then what their customers need to know about their products and their brand becomes much clearer too. And if every team knows which product information they are responsible for to make it the best it can be, and how doing so can address their business objectives, then they are well on their way to growth, success, and maturity. And this part of my story brings me to what Product Experience Management (or PXM) is all about. It’s how you can make sure your people, your processes, and your technology are orchestrated to efficiently deliver high-quality product information in the right context, adapted to the sales touchpoints and markets you address, all aligned with your business strategy. So that’s my journey of maturity in the world of PIM and PXM. How about you? If you’re wondering where you are on this path, go answer these 14 short questions to receive a personalized report with actionable insights all based on my 6 years of experience with discovering and building your peers’ maturity. I look forward to learning where you are on your journey!

PXM Maturity Assessment

How mature is your organization? How can you take it to the next level?

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Akeneo News

Akeneo is now Headless Commerce Certified with Salesforce Commerce Cloud

Did you tune in a take a front-row seat at Dreamforce on Salesforce+ this week? There were a lot of great sessions and exciting announcements. Speakin…

Did you tune in a take a front-row seat at Dreamforce on Salesforce+ this week? There were a lot of great sessions and exciting announcements. Speaking of exciting… have you heard the news? In addition to the Akeneo Connector for Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Akeneo is pleased to announce that we have achieved Headless Commerce certification with Salesforce. This is a new certification and we are honored to be a “trailblazer” and among the very first Salesforce Partners to achieve this milestone.

Product Experience

Give customers the product information they want

Last week I logged online and began shopping for products that I intended to use in a very specific way. I needed a light-weight, escape-proof, portab…

Last week I logged online and began shopping for products that I intended to use in a very specific way. I needed a light-weight, escape-proof, portable prison cell for my 4 month-old Weimaraner puppy, and a monitor for my home office to replace my small laptop screen. 

I did a little research and had some specific criteria in mind for both products: The Corral

• 36 inches high (Weimaraner’s can jump)
• 72 inches in circumference (Weimaraner’s get big)

The Monitor

• 32 inches (big enough for spreadsheet work)
• IPS Panel Type (hardware guides told me this was best).

Much to my surprise, I found that validating these products against my criteria involved having to jump between multiple retailer’s websites to cross-reference SKUs and model numbers and do a lot more scrolling and squinting than I expected. In some cases, the product information I needed was embedded into long descriptions with no way to filter or search, and in other even worse cases, completely missing! These gaps in information made finding the product I wanted difficult. These retailers were failing to give prospective consumers critical information about the products they were trying to sell!

Filling in Product Information Gaps

The notion of using mandatory fields to govern the presence of critical information within your product catalog seems both obvious and easy to implement for retailers. The reality is quite different though. Product catalogs today are massive and the challenge of ensuring integrity across such a large amount of data is only part of the problem. In an increasingly competitive post-Covid landscape retailers must also ensure their data stands up to the intense scrutiny of discerning customers and search algorithms whose requirements are constantly changing; The “Set it and forget it” mindset of yesteryear no longer works, even in the B2B Industry. To properly validate the presence of important product information and ensure “Completeness” sellers need to be able to: 1. Define the unique combination of critical information consumers need for each product type. 2. Account for multiple versions of this critical information across languages, regions, and sales channels. 3. Quickly and efficiently identify and fix missing information across an entire product catalog. Let’s dig into these a little more: The starting point for all product governance is defining exactly which information consumers need. Most enterprises today measure their product catalogs in the tens or hundreds of thousands of products and offer a diverse range of products with radically different product characteristics. For example, a big box retailer may sell Washing Machines and Laptops alongside High Heels and Blue Jeans. The information consumers want for each of these four products is radically different, but they must coexist and be accounted for in the same catalog. In this case a properly built product catalog will have hundreds or even thousands of attributes organized in a taxonomy of discrete product-type structures where the unique requirements of each product type can be accounted for. You cannot have just a few global mandatory fields, you must tailor your mandatory fields to the unique requirements of each product type.

The next consideration in ensuring a Product’s completeness is accounting for the contextualization of the product’s information across languages, geographic regions, and sales channels. It’s not enough to know that the “Description” of the English version of our Product on our eCommerce Website in the U.S. is filled out; we also need to know that the Spanish version of our Product in our Syndication channel in Argentina is ready for our customer’s eyes. Every adaptation and translation of our product, no matter how subtle, must be accounted for as part of our completeness check.

We can’t talk about product completeness without also discussing how to repair these holes in our product catalog. This can be a massive effort. A catalog of 100,000 products with 50 attribute fields has 5,000,000 data points that need to be monitored and fixed. This is an almost insurmountable effort if this product information is spread across multiple sources of truth like an ERP, eCommerce website, or even Excel spreadsheets (which is more common than you may think). Just having a single place of maintenance like a PIM system greatly helps this effort. Next, you need to be able to track and analyze the completeness of your products across the entire catalog and within different product types, business groups, websites, and regions. Once we identify the missing information it’s important to have productivity tools, automation, and even solutions that can leverage suppliers to help fill in the gaps.

In my own endeavor, I ended up finding a Pet retailer site that gave me the exact specifications I needed and purchased a corral for my Weimaraner. This experience then led me to revisit the same site earlier this week when I needed to order a new collar because I was confident that I could validate what I was buying without having to cross-reference, scroll, or squint. In contrast, I struggled to validate the information for my monitor, which I decided was more of a “nice to have,” and gave up completely. The high-quality data of the Pet retailer earned my repeated business while the poor data from the Electronic retailers cost them a sale.

Customer experience depends on product experience

Many retailers today invest significant time and money to drive incremental improvements to their online customer experience by focusing on things like rich-content, SEO optimization, and merchandising. While these are all important considerations, what’s often forgotten is that these areas all have an underlying dependency on complete and accurate product data.  Companies who invest in the basics of building a strong foundation of complete product information find a positive ripple effect through all components of their digital commerce infrastructure that has a tangible impact on their bottom line. Stated simply, strive to exceed your customers’ expectations and provide them with more than enough compelling information to help them find what they need and desire from you, and not someone else.

Product Experience

Retail Technologies That Pair Well Together

As dedicated readers of this blog know, we spend a lot of time observing and commenting on commerce trends in both the B2B and B2C markets, with an em…

As dedicated readers of this blog know, we spend a lot of time observing and commenting on commerce trends in both the B2B and B2C markets, with an emphasis on the implications of how product information affects the customer experience. For example, in 2020 we conducted a Global B2B survey and in 2021 a Global B2C Survey which sought to uncover how B2B buyers and B2C shoppers feel about the state of product information, and whether a good product experience is something customers value (TL;DR: it is!). At Akeneo we firmly believe that a good product experience is necessary to deliver a good customer experience, and our research confirms this to be the case.

Akeneo News

School is out and PIM vendor grades are in!

Here in the northern hemisphere, school is now out and two things are certain: students are heading out for summer vacation, and they have recei…

Here in the northern hemisphere, school is now out and two things are certain: students are heading out for summer vacation, and they have received their final grades from the school year. In the world of PIM, the same is true — except for the vacation part; the need for PIM never takes a day off! But PIM vendors do get evaluated, and that is exactly what happened recently. PIM vendors have two “teachers” who evaluate us — industry analysts and customers.

Product Experience

Breakout eCommerce Brand Thrilling Meets PXM Pioneer Akeneo

Akeneo’s VP of Global Marketing & Strategy, Kristin Naragon, speaks to long-time friend and Harvard Business School alum Shilla Kim-Parker, CEO …

Akeneo’s VP of Global Marketing & Strategy, Kristin Naragon, speaks to long-time friend and Harvard Business School alum Shilla Kim-Parker, CEO of ShopThrilling.com, about everything eCommerce and a little bit about the career of working moms…

Kristin: As you had shared elsewhere, there are more secondhand stores across the US than Starbucks and McDonalds combined – yet 99% of these stores are completely offline. It’s remarkable how Thrilling is helping them go online for the first time, while helping small business owners. What are some of the key challenges you’ve seen in their eCommerce transformation? Such as digitizing catalogs? Shilla: The biggest challenge is time – these small business owners are usually the sole breadwinners for their households and are also usually the sole employees. The amount of work it takes to manage a vintage business can feel overwhelming. These owners have on average 10,000 individual SKUs of inventory, and they have to be the accountant, the inventory sourcer, the warehouse manager, the janitor, the cleaner, the tailor, the photographer, the fulfillment processor, and the marketer. Our goal is to make the running of their businesses easier and more delightful. Our primary focus is on investing in innovations in our core technology, which makes the uploading of inventory quick and seamless. We do this by incorporating machine vision and machine learning as much as possible into the process, minimizing the amount of data entry required. But we are also offering wraparound services, such as the first on-demand eCommerce assistant service — think Uber for eCommerce uploading — to allow store owners to hire trained vintage assistants to prep and upload inventory onto Thrilling. Kristin: I’m quite inspired by Thrilling’s mission in disrupting how people shop for apparel to combat environmental waste and harm. In one of the surveys we’ve done here at Akeneo, we also found that customers are increasingly prioritizing brands that feature social responsibility such as sustainable sourcing in their product information. What key product details are/should customers look for most when shopping secondhand clothes? Shilla: The first and most important thing to ask is whether an item makes your heart skip a beat – that’s when you know it’s “the one.” A critical part of our mission is sustainability, and we want people to fall in love with their clothes and keep them for decades. Second is fit, especially when shopping online. Our sellers almost always include the measurements and some notes about fit, but if you aren’t sure, just ask. And with Thrilling, you have the ability to try on and return if it’s not quite right. Last, look for high quality brands or quality construction, so you know the item will stand the test of time. That’s the beautiful thing with vintage – these items were not only designed well, they have already survived 2+ decades. This is the reason why we do not accept any fast fashion or mass produced labels on our site – these items will not last more than a few washes, and they were often created in inhumane and unsustainable conditions. Kristin: Mckinsey has concluded that the eCommerce industry experienced over 10 years of growth in the first three months of 2020. How has this contributed to Thrilling’s growth and where do you see the future from here? Shilla: Our revenue grew 1700% over the last year, so we have absolutely experienced the continued mainstream adoption of both shopping secondhand, and shopping online. I see this as the beginning of the beginning – the resale industry is expected to grow from $30bn to $50bn within the next couple of years, exceeding growth rates for traditional retail. As consumers become more passionate about supporting sustainable shopping habits and small businesses around the world, and as platforms continue to innovate the shopping experience to make it more relevant and delightful for shoppers, the growth of the industry will continue to compound. Kristin: Marketplaces are huge in eCommerce right now and there is clearly an appetite for specialty, curated marketplaces like Thrilling. What trends are you taking note of in the world of eCommerce marketplaces? Shilla: Curation and aided discovery are key. Marketplaces can quickly become overwhelming, and if you don’t serve up relevant items quickly, shoppers will leave. We do offer a free personal shopping assistant for those who would like a more human touch, but we have also hired a data advisor — the head of data and personalization at Spotify —  to help us create a smart recommendation engine and better tailor our products to each individual’s tastes. Kristin: The pandemic has shown how hard it is when work and family collide. You’ve got 2 young sons, while running a fast-growing startup –– how do you do it all? And how has your view on parenthood changed since 2020? Shilla: There is no doubt it is challenging, and I think we are not honest enough — in public and out loud — about the difficulties of balancing parenthood and a demanding job. There is a lot of chaos behind the scenes, and just doing whatever we can to make it through the day. Part of it is accepting that you can’t be perfect in every arena at all times – having a sense of humor and some generosity with yourself is key. And I am fortunate to have a wonderful support system in my partner, my family, and my friends. Kristin: You’ve had a long tenure in the corporate world, from JPMorgan to the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts and Disney/ABC Television Group. What triggered you to take the plunge to be a founder and entrepreneur? What advice would you give to other working moms templating the move? Shilla: First of all, it’s a risk, and everyone should be clear-eyed about it, especially if — like me — you don’t come from generational wealth. Sometimes entrepreneurship gets romanticized, and examples of success are held up without discussing the hidden safety nets from which the founders benefited. So it’s crucial to have an honest conversation with yourself and your family about what you want for your own life and the amount of risk you feel you can tolerate. For me, I knew I had to take the jump. I’ve had that quote from Teddy Roosevelt stuck in my head for years: “It is not the critic who counts … the credit belongs to the [wo]man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood.” I wanted to be in the arena, building something with my own hands that helps push the world forward and strengthens our communities. I had been working on the idea of Thrilling for years, conducting pilots and drafting the business plan on nights and weekends. Part of it was to test the idea as much as possible, but part of it was because I was waiting — waiting for it to feel less terrifying before I made the jump. And finally I just had this sudden realization – it’s now or never. Nothing is going to come along to make the path 100% secure. Do I want to take a leap of faith, or do I want to regret never giving myself a shot? I took the leap.

Akeneo News

The Unlock 2021 Hackathon: We Have A Winner

During our annual PXM event, Unlock 2021, we called upon our vast community to participate in a hackathon. The objective was to challenge developers, …

During our annual PXM event, Unlock 2021, we called upon our vast community to participate in a hackathon. The objective was to challenge developers, partners, and even customers to see what kind of innovative ideas they could come up with using the Akeneo API to make Akeneo PIM be even more useful in pursuit of great product experiences. As with all hackathons, it was conducted in the spirit of not only innovation, but also a bit of competition. Who had a great idea? Who could really “think outside the box” and deliver something exciting?

We’re forever grateful to all who participated. And as with any competition, we had the difficult job of naming a winner, and in 2021, that winner is our US-based implementation partner Sitation. Sitation chose to create a real-time integration from Akeneo to ElasticSearch, a powerful hosted search index, by using the new Akeneo Events API for subscriptions to real-time product create, update, and delete events.

Why is this cool? Sitation used the power of the Akeneo API to deliver product information in near real-time. Their solution avoids scheduled publishing via heavyweight integrations. It further supports customers who are implementing microservices architectures and headless solutions, providing scalability and flexibility in search. We think you’ll agree that it’s really cool – and useful! So, congratulations to Sitation, winner of the Unlock 2021 Hackathon. We look forward to having hackathons in the future. What cool new idea will you come up with? We can’t wait to see what’s next!

Akeneo News

Akeneo named a Strong Performer in our debut in the Forrester Wave™: Product Information Management, Q2 2021

Forrester’s 2021 Wave on the Product Information Management vendor landscape is here. It’s not often that a first-time appearance in a market anal…

Read on for highlights from Forrester’s analysis of Akeneo PIM and what to take away from their points of view.

User Experience

The Forrester Wave analyzed the top 10 vendors in PIM along a set of 15 criteria. Akeneo received the highest score possible in the User Experience criterion. Specifically, Forrester states “Akeneo is one of a small handful of “born digital” PIM players; its user experience is a particular strength, with the company’s offering providing an intuitive and modern user interface. Reference customers praised Akeneo for its ease of use, describing its hierarchy management as “totally user friendly…”

In our view, ease of use is the gateway to user adoption. If your PIM is too difficult for your catalog management teams to use, or requires too much IT intervention, user adoption will suffer. Because Akeneo is designed for easy adoption, it means you can take your complex catalog hierarchies, high volume, multi-dimensional, multi-language, multi-geography product catalog and output simplicity for your users. In fact, some of our customers have 300+ users collaborating and contributing to PXM in Akeneo. Which makes sense when you consider that some individual Akeneo customers are managing 60MM+ products with us! The result is faster time to market, increased sales, decreased returns, and reduction in cost.

A best-of-breed PIM

In the Wave, Forrester notes that “While Akeneo positions as a platform to support product experience management, unlike many of its peers, the company strategy and innovation roadmap doubles down on optimizing product data for that goal as opposed to expanding into adjacent areas like DAM or commerce.”

Powering your business from one vendor with an all-in-one solution is a tempting vision: that you’ll get PIM, DAM, eCommerce, SEO, OMS, MDM, et al, in one vendor’s offering. Very often, what you’ll get is something that’s not actually great at any of the individual pieces. It’s very often an overpromise. Which is why we believe Forrester has a Wave for DAM, a Wave for MDM, two Waves for eCommerce (B2B & B2C), a Wave for SEO, and a Wave for OMS. If your priority is tackling your product information, it’s best if you hone in on a vendor that is obsessed with making you successful there.

Akeneo has always been squarely focused on PIM and the practice of PXM (Product Experience Management). Best-of-breed also means avoiding the dreaded “vendor lock-in.” With Akeneo, there’s no need to also rip out your eCommerce solution or your DAM solution or your ERP or your OMS. Instead, a best-of-breed solution relies on tight integrations with surrounding tools in your ecosystem. That’s why you’ll find that some of our customers are leveraging our powerful APIs to the tune of 10 million calls per week! And why some of our customers are managing over 1TB of digital assets in Akeneo PIM, either alongside a dedicated DAM that manages other non-product assets, or not. The Forrester report states that reference customers describe Akeneo’s integrations as “one of the strongest parts of the platform.” 

No one wants to be oversold when investing in mission-critical tools like PIM. Akeneo’s vision for your company is to leverage PIM in a similar way that you leverage CRM. PIM is to product information as a CRM is to customer information. With that in mind, your requirements to manage product information well, require a PIM solution that is focused on solving core PIM use cases and ensuring sophisticated integrations into other specialized systems.

Merchants with Any Business Model

Forrester notes that “Akeneo targets both B2C and B2B enterprises, with retail, construction, and food and beverage as top industries” and further summarizes that “Akeneo is a good fit for companies that need a PIM built for marketers with minimal IT support needed.”

With over 500 customers on our Enterprise Edition — and over 80,000 on our free-forever Community Edition — Akeneo is well-represented across many other industries too, spanning both B2B manufacturers and distributors, and B2C brands and retailers. The Akeneo PXM Studio includes dedicated offerings designed to enable internal and external contributors who participate in delivering great product experiences that drive growth, all oriented around Akeneo PIM.

Akeneo’s ability to meet the demands of each of these types of business models means that when you choose Akeneo, you choose a future-proof offering for your growth needs. Akeneo PIM was the critical centerpiece for many customers during Covid to enable a quick pivot of their business models from B2B to B2C (or vice versa) because Akeneo supported an easy adaptation of their catalog, quick time to market with new product lines, and ease in integrating to new channels and routes to market. The “phygital” buying experience is here to stay; in fact, a full 50% of Akeneo’s customers are selling in offline channels, in addition to the digital shelf. Who knows what channels your business will need tomorrow or what routes to market your CEO will demand? So you can rest assured, that regardless of your business model, Akeneo will be able to support you.

How to use the Forrester Wave for PIM

Industry analyst reports serve a valuable purpose by doing the initial triage of solutions in the market for you. The Forrester Wave for Product Information Management Q2 2021 presents Forrester’s view of the top 10 solutions, in effect creating a “short-list” of PIM vendors. Next, do some serious reflection on your use cases, business challenges, and priorities. We know there’s a lot of pain when it comes to managing product catalogs and potentially a lot of organizational silos and process challenges to overcome.

If you’re a marketer or catalog management professional and are seeking an easy-to-use solution that integrates with your current technology stack, and have the sense of urgency to rapidly deliver great product experiences to grow your business, contact us for more information. We’d love to help you out!

TL;DR – if you need to quickly mobilize your marketing teams with an easy-to-use and quick-to-adopt solution; easily integrate with your existing tech stack; and get your product catalog organized, enriched, and published on traditional channels and on the digital shelf, Akeneo is a very strong choice.

Download the Forrester Wave for PIM

Akeneo News

Highlights from #Unlock2021

Thank you so much to everyone who participated in and attended Unlock 2021! We are overwhelmed with gratitude and humbled by the positive responses we…

Thank you so much to everyone who participated in and attended Unlock 2021! We are overwhelmed with gratitude and humbled by the positive responses we’ve received about Akeneo’s first-ever digital event. With 2,000 registrants, we’re confident this was the biggest gathering — virtual or in person — of PXM and PIM practitioners to date in the world.

Akeneo’s in-person user conferences have traditionally been oriented around a theme, and this year’s virtual event was no different — Unlocking Growth Through Product Experiences. The Akeneo headquarters was transformed into a scene reminiscent of the time of “extraordinary voyages” as described in the works of French novelist Jules Verne, who, like Akeneo, was born in Nantes. Read on as we take a short walk down memory lane and revisit some of the best moments from Unlock 2021.

Opening Keynote

Akeneo CEO Fred de Gombert opened the conference with a conversation with emcee Francois Chaix to discuss his personal experiences with online shopping during the “extraordinary voyage” that was 2020, and the impact that it had on the world of commerce. “If 2020 taught us one thing, it’s back to basics,” he said. “The job is to sell products. And so wherever products are sold, we need to ensure that the product itself creates a compelling experience.” The conversation turned on the discussion about customer experience versus product experience. “For years, retailers have been urged to massively invest in customer experience. But then came lockdowns, and what happened? No stores. No more fancy customer experiences,” Fred continued. “One impact from 2020 has been the sudden acceleration of digital channel adoption. Suddenly, managing the product experience became a bottleneck for growth. And PXM has become a real transformation for the long term.” Fred was quick to conclude, however, that “PXM is not only about technology. It is also about people and process.”

Panel Discussion

Unlock 2021 sponsors Vaimo, BigCommerce, Productsup, and Translations.com joined Fred following his keynote. This lively session of Akeneo partners shared perspectives on how to define and think of product experience management, the main components of what makes a good product experience, and who has ownership within an organization for creating and managing those experiences. The panel also discussed whether PXM was relevant for only B2C, or whether B2B organizations should worry about it. On this point, the panel was in universal agreement — the product experience is more important in B2B. For manufacturers who use printed catalogs, it’s critical to avoid any information mismatch in content parity across channels. The panel also advised that as B2B companies continue to implement direct-to-customer (D2C or DTC) strategies, the product experience needs to be better and more consistent in order to reduce pressure on the total cost of sale.

PXM Maturity Assessment

Following up on Fred’s and the panel’s comments about PXM and its adoption, Akeneo’s PXM Evangelist Virginie Blot and head of product marketing Ali Hanyaloglu discussed the results to date from Akeneo’s PXM Maturity Assessment. This online tool asks 14 multiple-choice questions to assess an organization’s maturity in the areas of people, process, and technology to ensure great product experiences, and offers actionable recommendations on changes you can make. According to the responses, one-third of senior management is still blind to the strategic value of quality product information and the impact it has on driving growth. Furthermore, results to date show that 73% are unhappy with the way collaboration works today. According to Virginie and Ali, “The importance of collaboration across internal teams will have a large impact on the success of your product information management processes.”

Gallery of Great Product Experiences

In the above sessions, we discussed why PXM is so important, how to approach the practice, and the state of PXM today. But what does a good product experience look like? The gallery of great product experiences session looked at some B2C and B2B examples from Akeneo customers who we think are delivering the kinds of experiences customers want and expect. Take a look — how does your product experience measure up?

Customer-led Sessions

Half a dozen Akeneo customers offered insights and lessons learned from their PXM journeys to unlock growth in their businesses, whether by expanding their catalog, adding new channels, or entering new markets. They all echoed the comments from the opening keynote about transformation, change, experimentation, and the need for compelling product experiences.

Evelyne Cardinal from Solotech, an audio-visual and entertainment technology services company, talked about how, with the demise of in-person events in 2020, Solotech leveraged Akeneo PIM to enable a rapid move to selling used audio equipment via eCommerce which  led to significant growth in that part of their business. “We initially chose Akeneo PIM Community Edition because it looked easy, and it took IT just a few hours to get it ready,” said Evelyne. “We decided to migrate to Enterprise Edition to create automation in our process. What’s great is as we migrate to our new eCommerce platform, there’s no need to recreate the catalog.” European footwear retailer Melvin & Hamilton offered insights for how PIM helped their move to expand into new markets. Anja Skolozdrzyk noted, “With Akeneo we can work on translations simultaneously, which we could not do on our ecommerce platform, which saved us 50% in time and effort.” Anja also offered advice for companies looking to fast-track their growth: “Think easy and think big. Choose tools that will facilitate your work and allow you to grow fast.” Office supplies retailer and business services firm Staples Canada dove into the world of PXM as part of a complete digital transformation across their business. Jeff Serota advised us that “Taking the position ‘that’s the way we did it before’ is never a good thing when you’re going through a transformation.” As a result, Staples completely retooled and revised their processes to enable them to better serve their customers. As Jeff stated, “For Staples, product experience is about what our customers are looking for, what they need and want, in order to work and learn more effectively.” French fashion brand Zadig & Voltaire offered insights into unlocking growth as part of their omnichannel sales strategy. According to Global CIO Fabien Delivre, “For the omnichannel experience we wanted to offer, we needed one source of truth for every sales touchpoint” and the best way Zadig & Voltaire saw to achieve that was through greater efficiency and fewer manual operations in order to speed time to market. South African furniture and home goods retailer JD Group offered many interesting thoughts on the importance of PXM in unlocking growth through catalog expansion, and had the business results to back it up. Garreth Trent noted that “Online customers can’t interact with people who can recommend and explain products, so online product data needs to act like a salesperson.” He also remarked that “Consistent product data and marketing messages help our customers trust us, and they’ll find a similar experience on every channel.” JD Group’s results have been impressive — they grew their catalog from 6,000 to 20,000 products, and cut the time to prepare products for sale from 6 days to 6 hours. Impressive, indeed! Hotel chain Accor Group had a different yet highly interesting twist on how PXM helps their business. They used Akeneo to help achieve a digital transformation in their procurement process. Their idea was to take B2C marketplace standards and adapt them for B2B, with a special focus on product information. According to Emmanuel Barbosa, “PIM is a real must-have. It helps us enhance our business relationships with our suppliers and become more mature in the customer relationship. As a result, we have really achieved our digital transformation in our procurement processes with our suppliers and partners.”

Product Highlights & Demonstrations

In Akeneo PIM Summits of the past, there are always several sessions focused on new products and new features released in the prior year, and Unlock 2021 was no different. Our product managers delivered a series of product highlights sessions as well as some deeper dives into the products which included short demonstrations of new capabilities and products.

The What’s New in Akeneo PIM 5.0 session recapped some of the notable enhancements released to our SaaS customers on a monthly basis over the past year, culminating in the 5.0 version. Due to time constraints we could not discuss the more than 70 new features, but they are documented and easily found in the Help Center! Two of the sessions were dedicated to drilling down into enhancements in two exciting Enterprise Edition features – the first one on Data Quality Insights and the second on the new user interface for the Rules Engine. With these enhancements, catalog management teams can more easily understand the state of data quality by product and across the entire catalog, as well as build their own business rules to simplify and automate product data enrichment – no coding required!

As discussed by Fred and in the PXM Maturity Assessment session, PXM is also about people and process. A session on governance and productivity enhancements gave an overview of areas of the Akeneo PIM technology that were improved to support these two equally-important pillars of PXM. As we like to say, a PIM by itself is useless, so Unlock 2021 also featured a session on what’s new with Akeneo’s premium connectors on the marketplace and a session on product data synchronization. The latter session covered new ways to manage connections between the PIM and the systems that surround it, which is so critical to ensuring a smooth integration from raw product data to compelling experiences delivered to eCommerce platforms and more. Further on the subject of collecting and distributing product data, a product highlight session covered enhancements in Akeneo Onboarder – used for onboarding supplier product data – and a new product called Shared Catalogs, which makes it easy to share published product information with internal and external stakeholders. This session was supplemented by separate talks which offered additional details and demonstrations of Akeneo Onboarder and Akeneo Shared Catalogs. With the addition of the new Shared Catalogs product, Akeneo’s offering has expanded yet again. A session describing the Akeneo PXM Studio explains how everything fits together and supports the practice of product experience management. Speaking of new products, we also announced the availability of a new PIM offering called Akeneo Growth Edition. This session described this new offering that is targeted at helping small/medium businesses compete by delivering better product experiences, but using the same type of technology that larger enterprises use. With Growth Edition, customers have a proven SaaS-based PIM that gives access to many of the same core capabilities from our fully-featured Enterprise edition. If you were unable to attend Unlock 2021, which ran nearly the entire month of April, you’re still in luck! Just click the links embedded above, or browse and watch them in the Videos section of our Resource Center. See you next year (and hopefully in person!).