All these seasonal events and changes mean that brands and retailers need to work double-time to adapt their product catalogs and keep up with the changing seasons. After all, most consumers won’t be buying new backpacks in October, nor Halloween costumes in November, and most families get their holiday shopping done long before the New Year is rung in. That means you only have a precious few days to make your seasonal catalogs and promotions count.

But making these seasonal changes in your product catalog isn’t as simple as flipping the calendar to the next month. It means onboarding new products from manufacturers and suppliers, adding new photos and other digital assets, and updating hundreds or thousands of SKUs on multiple sales channels in time for the new season, all without succumbing to errors and inaccuracies in your product information. Add it all up, and adapting your product catalog can be a monumental undertaking.

Here are four keys that you can adopt to help make the holiday shopping season more successful for you, and deliver a better shopping experience to your customers.

Automate and adapt with ease

Adapting your product catalog for each new season can be a time-consuming and error-prone process. Manually managing photos, videos, and other digital product assets can quickly become a nightmare, but getting products to market on time is critical to meet shoppers’ expectations.  That means you need to rapidly update your assortment, and take advantage of anything you can use to help your product managers take control of your product catalog and adapt information on a timely basis.

Akeneo PIM can help your team automate processes, easily model new categories, offer bulk editing, and centrally manage product data and digital assets like photos and videos. Just our customer Turner Price, a foodservice wholesaler that turned to Akeneo when it pivoted their business, modifying their product catalog with additional information required to facilitate selling directly to consumers in just one week.

Get more sales days

When it comes to seasonal sales, time is of the essence, and organizations can’t afford to miss their seasonal window. A long catalog enrichment process could doom your holiday sales plans if the catalog isn’t available during peak buying times. What your team needs is a way to help them significantly increase productivity and keep up with changing seasons — all without making careless errors or providing inaccurate product information to customers.

Akeneo PIM can help foster collaboration across the teams involved in onboarding new products, streamline the catalog update process, eliminate errors, and inconsistencies in product information. It can also help ensure that any updates made within the system are distributed to all of the appropriate channels. Akeneo customer Petra, for instance, has already seen the benefit of using PIM to accelerate time-to-market.

Communicate with customers

Accelerating your time-to-market can also help you make sure customers can rest assured any gifts they purchase will arrive by Christmas, Hanukkah, a birthday, or any other special occasion. But around the holiday season, customers could always use some extra reassurance before they complete their purchase.

The key is keeping your customers informed and aware of what’s happening with their purchase. That way, their expectations stay realistic, and your relationship with them remains intact. Keep your customers in the know by trusting Akeneo PIM as part of your buy online pick-up in-store offer, just like Akeneo customer Rural King. By efficiently collecting and enriching the right product data to support the program, the company’s BOPIS program increased online sales and in-store foot traffic.

Broadcast your values

Modern shoppers don’t just want to know about your brand’s products, and when they can expect them to arrive — they also want to know your values. In recent years, brand values have emerged as an important buying criterion. Buyers and shoppers want to know where products are made, are they ethically produced or sourced, sustainable, cruelty-free, and so on.

Let them know what you stand for by easily and efficiently adding new attributes and rewriting descriptions in one central system and rapidly populating them to all sales channels in context. Akeneo customers like Made.com, for instance, have attracted attention and acclaim for using PIM to make information about brand values the centerpiece of their brand strategy.

Improving product enrichment and management processes can benefit every part of your business, from your team to your customers, and even your bottom line. Try out these tips to make sure your team is ready to conquer the Christmas rush, beat the summer heat, get back to school, and bloom with spring flowers.

Check out more insights and recommendations from new Akeneo research in our Akeneo Global B2B Survey 2020: 5 Takeaways on the Rising Importance of Product Experience eBook, or learn from Akeneo success stories by checking out some customer stories!

Even in cases where there is ample supply, delivery times have increased significantly. Shipping times of weeks instead of a few days or overnight are now common. As a result, many sellers are searching for new suppliers, ideally with an eye to finding more local partners, in order to be more responsive should a similar situation arise again. For many retailers and distributors, adding product information from suppliers is a challenging process that typically involves everything from phone calls with your new supplier to emails exchanging information, and even swapping spreadsheets, burning valuable time and resources with each step. Sellers may have this cadence down with existing suppliers, but starting the process from scratch with new suppliers adds additional friction while you are trying to rapidly respond to shifting market demands and disrupted supply chains. What’s needed is a solution to tackle the issue of efficiently onboarding supplier product data. A solution that enables willing suppliers to provide their product information directly to you, the retailer/distributor, in the format you need, without having to go through the painful, time-consuming manual process of editing Excel sheets, copying and pasting data, and manually reviewing and approving their submissions. These manual processes can leave you with errors in product information, a slower time-to-market, and an inability to add new products to your product collection or modify your existing offerings. Akeneo PIM with Akeneo Onboarder can solve these issues. This solution makes it easier to collaborate with suppliers to add new products and improve product data quality, resulting in faster time-to-market.

Handling the long tail of suppliers

In a retailer’s or distributor’s ideal world, all suppliers would graciously offer the authoritative product information the sellers need to create great product experiences. But sometimes, suppliers just won’t play ball. The largest and most important suppliers you work with might often decline to collaborate directly with you — or they simply may be unable to, given their resources or whether they perceive a strategic relationship. A rule of thumb we often hear retailers and distributors quote is “20% of my suppliers are 80% of my business” — so what do you do about the other 80% of suppliers — the so-called “long tail”? The key to getting these suppliers to work with you is to make it as easy as possible for them to provide you with the information you need. So how do you make that happen?

Onboard supplier product data with ease

Akeneo PIM features integrated product data onboarding capabilities for suppliers via the Onboarder. This speeds up the process of collecting data from suppliers and makes it easier for them to provide product data directly to the seller. Myer, a leading Australian department store used Akeneo to devise an easier method for their hundreds of suppliers to upload product information and images. By informing suppliers about Myer’s exact requirements, both Myer and their suppliers were able to enjoy a more streamlined process and get products for sale much faster than before. Myer also gamified the process by giving suppliers a score and therefore an incentive to enhance data quality. You can read the Myer case study and hear more about it in the podcast below.

Accelerate time-to-market

Besides the need to find new suppliers, the current pandemic has also impacted available resources as some companies have been forced to make unplanned, unwanted cuts. If you don’t have enough people or other resources available to dedicate to manually acquire, enrich, and approve product data from suppliers, that’s just another reason to look for an integrated solution to share the work among your team and those of your suppliers. With a solution like Akeneo PIM and the Onboarder you get more done with less. Suppliers have a personalized online environment for creating, uploading, and enriching required product information requested by the retailer/distributor, who then reviews and approves the data. Once approved, the supplier’s product data is ready for further enrichment and then distribution to relevant sales channels. Akeneo customers like Petra have already seen the benefit of using PIM to accelerate time to market. The U.S.-based wholesale distributor of electronics uses Akeneo PIM to help their supplier managers oversee an average of 30 suppliers each, enriching a total of 33,000 products while accelerating time to market and improving product data quality. To hear more about this topic, check out our podcast where we discuss the challenges with today’s supply chain and how a product data onboarding solution can help to overcome them. Ready to say goodbye to supplier struggles and hello to accelerated time-to-market, high-quality product information, and top-notch product experiences? Then say hello to the Akeneo Onboarder! 

“When you’re finished changing, you’re finished.” Benjamin Franklin may not have had modern business in his mind when he first thought up those words, but the sentiment remains true to this day.

In modern commerce, constantly emerging new products and shifting customer demand means your product catalog and assortment are never finished. Whether it’s the current pandemic or just a change of seasons, your catalog is always shifting and changing to accommodate new needs and desires from your customers. That means you need to be able to rapidly pivot and update your catalog without allowing errors in product information to reach your customers, or inefficient, unproductive processes to burn time, money and other valuable resources, slowing your time-to-market.

That’s where Akeneo PIM comes in. It’s designed to help you adapt and update your product information, making sure you stay on top of quickly changing market trends. With the power of PIM, you can more easily and efficiently get new products to market, update catalog assortments for market or seasonal needs, and even add new categories to help you meet shifting market demands.

Keep your catalog current

What happens when products become obsolete, or demand for different products that didn’t exist one day does the next? You need to be able to easily and efficiently update catalogs with new products and product information. Manually updating catalogs with new product information can be time-consuming and difficult to accomplish quickly, especially if these market changes have left you with a smaller or more distributed team, as many companies are experiencing right now.

Akeneo PIM’s flexibility and adaptability help you quickly and easily update product assortments by adding or removing products from your catalog, adding new product attributes, and pushing updates to the relevant sales channels.

Turner Price, a foodservice wholesaler, originally looked to Akeneo PIM to ensure that ingredients and allergen information is 100% accurate. Since the advent of COVID-19 and closure of restaurants — their primary customer — Turner Price pivoted their business and in just over a week, modified their product catalog with additional information required to facilitate selling directly to consumers.

Reposition products and communicate your brand values

Another phenomenon we’ve seen during this pandemic is the rise of repositioning products for different uses, or simply offering new products that consumers are currently seeking. Examples we’ve seen include positioning a neck gaiter as a mask, and clothing brands who began making masks out of the material used in their shirts. With this shift comes the urgent need to update product descriptions, technical specs, digital assets, and more pieces of product information in order to adapt the product catalog.

Furthermore, with the uncertainty about what’s next, consumers have become more attentive to and focused on what products they purchase. Brand values have emerged as an important buying criterion (read more about how this has risen in importance in our new global B2B survey). Buyers and shoppers want to know where products are made, are they ethically produced or sourced, sustainable, cruelty-free, and so on. This new product attribute and reference information, including images and information about suppliers or materials used, now needs to appear in addition to the “traditional” information in your catalog.

Akeneo can help you rise to the occasion and keep customers in the know by easily and efficiently adding new attributes and rewriting descriptions in one central system and rapidly populate them to all sales channels in context. Akeneo customers like Made.com, for instance, have attracted attention and acclaim for using PIM to make information about brand values the centerpiece of their brand strategy.

Prepare for new selling paradigms

Another pandemic-induced phenomenon is the closure of retail outlets and the need to ship all items. If items aren’t available for shipping, some sellers are offering click-and-collect or BOPIS (buy online, pickup in store) with curbside pickup. This also has implications for product information in terms of accuracy and the systems where it needs to be shared.

The key is keeping your customers informed and aware of what’s happening with their purchase. That way, their expectations stay realistic, and your relationship with them stays intact. But providing accurate shipping time estimates means being able to easily find and communicate lots of different pieces of product information, including dimensions, weight, and assembly instructions. Without a dedicated solution to handle this information, errors and inconsistencies can abound, further hurting your relationship with customers.

Midwest U.S. farm supply store Rural King used Akeneo PIM as part of its buy online pick-up in store offer. By being able to efficiently collect and enrich the right product data to support the program, Rural King’s BOPIS program resulted in an increase in online sales as well as in-store foot traffic.

So, while we all hope for the pandemic to subside soon, Ben Franklin was right about change. Being prepared to handle change and rapidly adapt will serve us all well.

Want to learn more about how Akeneo PIM can help you adapt your product catalog with ease? Contact us and we’ll put you in touch with one of PIM experts! 

Controlling costs is a major goal for businesses in good times and in bad. But when markets are unpredictable and the future of your business is in jeopardy, it’s more crucial than ever to keep expenses in check, and only invest in areas that can improve your results. This need to cut costs is particularly challenging when you’re also working to keep up with rapidly changing market demands and ensure your business continues to operate during these uncertain times. Many companies are taking rapid steps to reposition their business. Some are beginning to offer new products by changing their assortment. Others are seeking new suppliers to replace those who are shut down or located too far away for a timely delivery. Those who have not yet gone through a digital transformation to eCommerce are rapidly seeking to sell online. And according to a survey done last month by Gartner, 100% of CFOs are cutting costs while preserving budget for technology that can help their company survive the current crisis. It can be tempting to simply deploy an eCommerce platform to be able to sell online. But the only way to ensure customers will find your site, and to ensure they’ll have a good experience once they reach your new site, is to make sure your product information is complete and accurate. Without a tool to help, your teams will resort to manual efforts to collect, enrich, and deliver good product data. This can be even harder to do if current cost control measures have resulted in reduced staff. The good news? PIM streamlines the process, uses automation to replace manual work, and makes your remaining team members more efficient so you can get to market fast. And, with the rapid ROI from PIM, you can even begin putting money back into the business. PIM helps you deliver high-quality product information to each and every one of your channels easily and efficiently while helping you control product enrichment costs and deliver a significant return on investment. Akeneo PIM accomplishes all of this and more by offering you better flexibility and adaptability, giving you the power to enrich, add to, and edit your product catalog with ease. The results? Dramatically reduced costs for product enrichment and product information management, massive spikes in team collaboration and productivity, and rising sales. Let’s take a look at a few examples where PIM generates rapid, positive ROI.

Accelerate time-to-market and reduce enrichment costs

Product enrichment often takes a long time and demands a lot of resources — but market trends demand you be quick and agile enough to keep up with ever-changing customer behaviors. You can accelerate your time-to-market and conserve valuable budget and resources with PIM. Akeneo PIM allows you to easily and efficiently adapt your product catalog and product assortment, allowing you to respond to new and shifting market demands more quickly while reducing enrichment costs. Take the example of Akeneo customer Midland Scientific. The scientific instruments and lab equipment manufacturer was able to reduce the cost of product enrichment by 5 times — from $5/SKU to $1 SKU — and accelerate product catalog production speed by 50% after using Akeneo PIM to take control of their product information processes.

Expand to new channels and locales efficiently

Shifting market demands can also cause you to look to new channels or geographic markets to sell products. Expanding to a new locale, however, requires translation and localization of product information, a tedious, time-consuming, and resource-intensive task. Adding a new channel to your omnichannel offering isn’t exactly an easy process either — you’ll need to put your product content into the proper context for the new channel or marketplace you’re selling on. What’s more, remote teams often do not have access to the proper information they need to localize or contextualize product information, costing you even more time and money. But with Akeneo PIM, you can automate these manual tasks and processes, accelerating the expansion process and saving valuable resources in the process. You can also more easily and efficiently enable remote work and outsourcing, and provide automation and workflows to help smaller or scattered teams do more with less. Akeneo customer Pierce, for instance, was able to expand to new locales and ease translation management thanks to Akeneo PIM. Cox and Cox, meanwhile, is using Akeneo PIM to improve their product data enrichment processes, creating a more compelling experience for customers in the process as they work to increase sales by 20%.

Onboard suppliers with ease

If your supply chains are disrupted due to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic or other shifting market trends, you may need to add new manufacturers or distributors to your list of suppliers. But adding these new relationships can be time-consuming, and lead to delays in shipments to you and your customers, slowing down your time-to-market, increasing costs, and possibly losing valuable revenue. What’s more, a lack of resources can make it harder for you to add accurate, consistent, and compelling product information about your new suppliers’ offerings to your product catalog. But, with the Akeneo PIM and the Onboarder, you can easily and efficiently add new product information, even new products, to your catalog by working directly with your suppliers. This way, you get the information you need, in the format you need, when you need it, accelerating time-to-market and increasing sales. Just ask our customer Myer, a leading Australian department store used Akeneo to enable suppliers with an easier method for uploading product descriptions and assets, streamlining processes, and getting products to customers more quickly. Ready to cut costs and boost efficiency? Check out the podcast below to learn more about how Akeneo can help you get a notable return on your product information investment, or contact us today and we’ll you walk through our ROI calculator to show you the business case for PIM. 

 

Your “employee experience” encapsulates all of the ways your employees interact with their workload — including whether they have the right tools for the job.

Your team can’t provide a top-notch experience if they’re suffering from a sub-par experience themselves. You hired your team to create these compelling customer experiences to wow your customers and help boost conversion rates. But without the right tools, they’re going to be stuck dealing with product information silos, poor processes, and wasting time on manual, repetitive, low-value tasks. That’s where Product Experience Management comes in. Not only does PXM enable you to better serve customers and see increased conversions and revenue for your business, but also arms your team with a solution designed to make it easier to manage product information, so you can give your employees a better experience, too. How does Akeneo help create a better employee experience, you ask? It’s all about increased efficiency, greater productivity, and enhanced collaboration that enables your teams to get their product information management tasks done without the drama associated with manual, Excel-based methods. Allow us to explain.

Make your employees more efficient

Asking your employees to manage product information and create compelling experiences without a purpose-built solution, and instead forcing them to rely on outdated or poorly suited solutions like spreadsheets or ERPs, is like asking a lumberjack to chop down a tree with a spoon. It’s just not going to work. Instead, give your team of product experience practitioners a razor-sharp tool that can help them clear the forest of product enrichment in no time. Akeneo PIM is a purpose-built solution that can help your team manage even the largest and most complicated product catalogs easily and efficiently. It helps you optimize the process of collecting, enriching, and getting new products to market using one centralized, trusted source for product information. It does so by providing a system of record for product information and digital assets, improving the accessibility of product data and liberating it from disconnected silos. Akeneo can also help your team eliminate the hours of time spent on repetitive, low-value tasks with intelligent automation. It takes these menial and tedious tasks off your team’s to-do list using a business rules engine, which automatically populates attribute values across a wide range of products and product models and helps you manage your product data in bulk. That way, you can speed up your enrichment process, slashing time-to-market along the way, while minimizing errors and inconsistencies in product information.

Help your employees collaborate

When it comes to creating compelling and enticing compelling experiences, teamwork makes the dream work. Your teams need to be able to work together seamlessly — but that’s often easier said than done when you’re dealing with internal teams, remote teams, field and regional teams, and even external teams like translators. If you want to keep up with the increasingly fast pace of omnichannel commerce, every member of your team needs to know exactly what they’re responsible for — and what they shouldn’t touch. That’s why Akeneo PIM comes packed with features like Advanced Rights Management to help you govern product enrichment processes by ensuring contributors only access the products and field values they need. It also offers validation workflow controls designed to help your team ensure that only the highest-quality, validated, and approved information makes it to your touchpoints. What’s more, with Akeneo’s Teamwork Assistant, Akeneo PIM help fosters collaboration across your teams by tracking product data completeness to ensure no incomplete products make it to your sales channel. It also helps you pick up the pace by helping you audit your enrichment processes and notifying your marketing team when a product is missing attributes, needs translation, and is ready to be exported to your sales channels.

Give your employees a 360° view

The last weapon your team needs to triumph in the battle over bad product information and product experiences is a complete view over every part of your omnichannel offering. That means providing your employees with a 360° view of all of your products, product descriptions, digital assets, and any other elements that comprise your omnichannel experience. It also means helping them understand not only what products are available and what products need to be enriched, but also helping them understand how well products have been enriched, by assessing the quality and completeness of the product data and assets you’re presenting to your customers. Akeneo PIM, fortunately, offers all of the tools your team needs to understand the quality of your product data. This includes tools like the catalog completeness feature, which tracks product data by sales channels and locales, ensuring no product data is published before it’s complete. Data Quality Insights helps your team quickly measure product data quality and consistency while making suggestions for how to improve data quality.

Give your employees a great experience

Give your employees the tools and resources they need to be happy and successful at managing product information. People are your most valuable resource, so it’s crucial to give them a high-quality employee experience, so they can create the compelling customer experiences your business thrives on. Give them the tools they need to get the job done right with Akeneo PIM! Want to see how other companies have become more productive and delivered a better experience for their teams? Discover how companies like Kurt Geiger have used Akeneo to boost productivity, slash time-to-market, and ease expansion to new channels. 

That’s why making a decision surrounding a business solution can be so difficult. It often isn’t enough that these purchases provide only a new way to solve an old challenge or a new perspective to view the same challenges you face every day. Your solution needs to provide tangible benefits if it’s going to be seen as a good investment. This is certainly true when you’re considering a Product Information Management (PIM) system. A good PIM isn’t just a container for product information, nor does it simply provide a new place for you to perform old processes. Instead, your PIM should add value to your organization by transforming product enrichment and management process, and, ultimately, help you raise your revenue to new heights. Akeneo PIM is built to do just that by providing B2B and B2C businesses alike with value-added tools and features designed to take their product information to the next level. So, if you’re having a little trouble understanding or articulating the benefits Akeneo PIM could provide for your business, don’t fret — just read on to see what Akeneo PIM can do for you.

1.  Reduced Returns

The value of your PIM starts with making things right. With Akeneo PIM, you can make sure that every piece of product information that reaches your customers is correct, consistent, and complete thanks to features like automated enrichment rules, product completeness tracking, and data validation. And that’s important because if B2B buyers and consumers don’t feel like they can trust the information you’re providing them with is accurate and paints a full picture, they’ll quickly abandon the purchase in favor of a merchant that helps them better understand what they’re buying. Even if you do somehow convince a customer to make a purchase despite incorrect, inconsistent, or incomplete product information, the victory will likely only be temporary. Because when your customer eventually receives their purchase, only to find the product isn’t what they pictured or won’t fit their needs, they’ll likely return it, costing you that hard-won sale in the process. What’s worse, that return is probably the end of the relationship between you and this customer — after all, most consumers do not make repeat purchases from companies that they don’t feel they can trust. With Akeneo PIM, customers have seen reductions in product returns of up to 40 percent, which leads to higher revenue, increased customer loyalty, and increased value over the lifetime of your relationship with that customer.

2. Excellent Experiences 

Accurate product information is just the beginning, however. In the omnichannel age, consumers must be able to see your product in action or get an inside look at how your product functions via digital assets like photos or videos. This is especially true as competition becomes all the more fierce on digital channels. The advent and mass popularity of marketplaces in both B2B and B2C industries has made digital assets even more crucial. Akeneo PIM includes Asset Management capabilities that are designed to help your team more efficiently and effectively manage your digital assets right alongside product information. Its asset management capabilities for both B2B and B2C businesses are designed to offer flexibility, better asset organization, enable asset transformation and linking capabilities to support different needs in different channels, and a dedicated asset library to help you easily visualize all your digital assets. So what do you get when you combine the correct, complete, and consistent product information you get from Akeneo PIM with its Asset Manager capabilities? You get the high-quality experiences that turn shoppers into buyers and transform first-time customers into lifelong fans. Research indicates that providing your customers, whether they’re consumers looking for a new outfit or a Fortune 500 company looking for a new tech solution, with excellent experiences is the biggest thing you can do to guarantee success in the omnichannel age. In fact, according to one study, 66 percent of buyers care more about experience than they do about price when it comes to making purchase decisions, while another report found that 86 percent of buyers are willing to pay more for a better customer experience.

3. Tight Time-To-Market

Success in an omnichannel world requires speed. If you want to be able to keep pace with modern customers, your time-to-market needs to be as speedy as possible. Speeding up time-to-market without letting your product information quality suffer, however, is often easier said than done. Pushing your team to move more quickly can lead to errors and inconsistencies in product information, which kill your product experience. But with Akeneo PIM, you can accelerate your time-to-market, all while eliminating errors and inconsistencies. Thanks to better governance over processes and a more streamlined flow, Akeneo customers report significantly faster time-to-market — like the case of Australian retail giant Myer, which saw time-to-market accelerate by 400% after adopting Akeneo PIM. What’s more, with Akeneo’s Teamwork Assistant, Akeneo PIM help fosters collaboration across your teams by tracking product data completeness to ensure no incomplete makes it to your sales channel. It also helps you pick up the pace by helping you audit your enrichment processes and notifying your marketing team when a product is missing attributes, needs translation, is ready to be exported in your eCommerce or is added to the PIM.

4. Climbing Conversion Rates

With your PIM implemented, your team moving more quickly, your product information enriched consistently and correctly, your digital assets driving interest in your products, and your compelling customer experiences delighting and exciting buyers, you should begin to realize the final benefit of Akeneo PIM: increased revenue! As we’ve addressed above, today’s consumers and B2B buyers have high standards when it comes to making purchasing decisions. Fortunately, Akeneo PIM is built to meet, and exceed, those expectations by enabling you to provide dynamic, compelling customer experiences on every channel, offer localized and geographically-appropriate information, and turn shoppers into customers. Akeneo customers have reported increases in conversion rates of up to 400% — and when paired with reduced returns mentioned above, this can have a real impact on your bottom line. So if you’re ready for a PIM solution that provides you with real results, look to Akeneo PIM.

That’s because instead of slashing prices and scrambling for customers, the company is launching a campaign called “#BlackForGood”, donating its profits to environmental charities. “This campaign is intended to be a positive and encouraging call to action for those who agree that Black Friday could be better,” according to the movement’s founder, Ning Li. In recent years, Black Friday has evolved into a worldwide sensation, even as some companies, like Typology, fight back against the rising tide of consumerism. Just a few years ago, Black Friday was a purely American phenomenon. But now, in storefronts from New York City to Paris, and everywhere in between, companies are looking to make their mark on the holiday season by appealing to discount shoppers on Black Friday and Cyber Monday — or by appealing to shoppers who just can’t take one more Black Friday promotion.

Black Friday, Cyber Monday go global

The Black Friday shopping frenzy has now truly gone global. This year, shoppers everywhere from Latvia to Brazil are flocking to their local malls and fighting over discounted handbags, clothing, and consumer electronics. Along the way, Black Friday has metastasized from a single day into a week-long festival of consumerism. Stores now start “Grey Thursday” sales on Thanksgiving night, and shoppers can also look forward to spin-off events like Small Business Saturday, Cyber Monday, and Fair-trade Tuesday. Then there are the other special discount events, from Amazon’s Prime Day to Overstock.com’s Overstocktober, and local copycats like Mexico’s Buen Fin and the UAE’s White Friday events. This year, Macy’s, eBay, Target, and Walmart even staged a “Black Friday in July” summer sales event. These events, and dozens of others like them, prove that there is definite consumer appetite for seasonal promotions, not just around the winter holidays, but at almost any time of the year.

Swimming against the tides

Amid the near-universal sea of sales, how is any one brand supposed to stand out? One alternative Black Friday strategy is simply to refuse to participate. That’s why we find Typology’s approach so interesting. As everyone else rushes to slash prices, companies that swim against the current, and think a little differently or a little more creatively, have a real chance to grab shoppers’ attention. Similarly, since 2015, outdoor retailer REI has won endless column-inches with its #OptOutside campaign, with its 12,000 employees receiving a paid day off, and customers being urged to get out and enjoy some fresh air instead of trudging through a crowded mall. Other, slightly less committed companies make a point of closing their doors or limiting their hours on Thanksgiving Day, and brag about giving their employees a chance to spend some time with their families. That’s what makes REI’s decision to opt-out of Black Friday altogether impressive, eye-catching, and certainly on-brand —but hard for most companies to replicate. (Try telling your shareholders you’ve decided not to open on the busiest day of the year!) That’s why Typology’s #BlackForGood campaign is so smart: instead of simply turning its back on Black Friday consumerism, it’s hoping to harness it for good.

The history behind bucking Black Friday trends

Typology and REI may be relatively unique in the discount-dominated holiday shopping market, but they’re far from the first retailers to buck the trend of discounts and promotions around the end of the year. American consumers have seen #BlackForGood-style events before. In 2016, for example, Patagonia saw a fivefold uptick in Black Friday sales after pledging to donate 100% of daily takings to environmental causes. More recently, online fashion retailer Everlane has pledged to remove 1lb of plastic from the ocean for every product it sells, while Cuyana is matching every item it sells with a donation to victims of domestic violence. For companies outside the United States, though, such campaigns are as new as Black Friday itself. That’s why it’s so exciting to see companies like Typology seeking new, socially conscious approaches instead of simply emulating American box stores, slashing prices, and hoping for the best. By bucking even a relatively recent trend, they’re making their mark on the space and standing out from the competition.

The future of Black Friday

It’s clear that shoppers, both in America and around the world, are hungry for creative, socially conscious approaches to Black Friday. According to one global survey, for example, 81% of consumers want companies to help the environment, and almost half would switch from market-leading brands to support smaller, eco-friendly companies. And while four-fifths of shoppers remain motivated by discounts and special offers, two-thirds say they’ll forgo those savings and pay extra to support sustainable brands. That makes eco-friendly, socially responsible promotions like Typology’s #BlackForGood campaign a smart branding exercise. Increasingly, products are seen as embodiments of brands, and while consumers always want to get a great deal, they also want to support brands that share their values. At Akeneo, we’re seeing that trend play out across all the markets we serve, in Europe, the United States, and worldwide. Companies are starting to understand that it’s important to be mindful about how they manage products, and to take a more careful and internationally informed approach to commerce. We’re seeing more and more clients warm to initiatives such as fair-trade sourcing, carbon footprint reduction, and recycling or second-hand purchasing programs. The #BlackForGood campaign is a sign of how effective it can be to commit to such strategies, and take mindful marketing and product management to the next level. As Black Friday spreads around the world, it’s creating big opportunities for brands that are bold enough to stand apart from the pack, and broadcast their values instead of simply slashing prices. If your company is brave enough to stand apart from the pack, take risks, and find creative, value-driven sales strategies, you too could find that this year’s Black Friday will be a holiday to remember. Take Control Of Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Holiday Shopping With PIM! Learn how PIM can help your team conquer expansions with relative ease by reading our blogs on Turning A New Commerce Channel Into A Success and Expanding To New Locales today!

Not too long ago, B2B and B2C organizations alike had just one or two sales channels to worry about: their brick-and-mortar store and a print catalog. But those simplistic days have gone the way of the dinosaur, and the advent of online, mobile, and other connected devices have forced merchants of every shape and size to embrace multichannel and omnichannel commerce by selling products not just via physical stores and catalogs, but through online stores and marketplaces, mobile apps, and more. Connecting with customers in an omnichannel world is easier said than done. It requires that companies craft compelling customer experiences. Creating these top-notch customer experiences requires the building of near-perfect product experiences, which use consistent product information delivered in context for the channel customers are using, wherever, and whomever, their buyers are. That’s where Product Information Management (PIM) and Product Experience Management (PXM) come in. These solutions put customer interaction at the center of everything you do, ensuring your product information is complete, accurate, relevant, and delivered on time, to the right place, everywhere your customers are.

Ready to master omnichannel commerce?

To help you handle these challenges, we’ve partnered with BigCommerce to bring you a guide to how PIM and PXM can help you create successful omnichannel practices. It’s designed to help you discover and master all aspects of your multichannel business to boost conversions, reduce product returns, increase revenue, and make your team happier and more efficient in the process. This valuable eBook will teach you how to:

• Understand omnichannel sales and growth
• Build successful multichannel operations
• Put product information in the proper context for each and every channel
• Scale operations using high-quality, contextual information
• Tackle cross-border expansion and localization
• Create a compelling and effective omnichannel strategy

Scale your operations Product Experience Management! Discover how to use PXM practices to grow and scale your organization across channels and locales in our eBook.  

Our new round is led by Summit Partners, a leading U.S. investment firm, and includes participation from our existing investors; Alven, Partech, Salesforce Ventures, and Stephan Dietrich. We are honored to join the Summit Partners’ family of great companies, which include Uber, Philz Coffee, and Webex. This is great recognition for the entire Akeneo team and the work we have accomplished thus far. A lot has happened since our previous funding round, led by Partech in late 2016. We launched several new products, grew our team to include 180 talented individuals across five countries, established strategic partnerships with Adobe/Magento and Salesforce, and have seen our community undergo enormous growth. With more than 60,000 installations of our Community Edition, we are proud to say that Akeneo, in less than five years, has become the most used PIM platform in the world. But we are only at the beginning of our journey.

With great power comes great responsibility

A funding round is just a means to an end. With all the cash and the support we now have to fuel our growth, we’re committed to continuing to execute on our vision of building the market’s standard for Product Experience Management. To quote Nicolas Dessaigne, CEO of Algolia: “In the end, we will not be judged by how much we raised but by how much we delivered.” So, let’s take this opportunity to see what’s coming next for Akeneo.

What lies ahead 

We released many product improvements and new modules during the past three years — including Reference entities and Onboarder, among others — and we successfully introduced our Cloud offering in 2017. But there is still a lot more to do:

• Continuously improve Akeneo PIM to remain the most user-friendly and efficient PIM solution available
• Unleash more Product Data Intelligence capabilities to automate product enrichment workflows with AI
• Further develop Akeneo PXM platform capabilities to allow our ecosystem to build and benefit more easily from SaaS-compatible add-ons.

Our primary area of investment with this round will be in our R&D, to continue to innovate and keep pace with our customer and community needs.

Embrace our open source roots

The software industry we are living in needs more transparency and collaboration to reinvent itself. Black boxes and vendor lock-in models are from another time, and should disappear. What makes Akeneo unique is the combination of our best-of-breed enterprise solution and our vibrant open source community. Most open source vendors tend to, at some point in their growth, consider their community offerings as competitors for their enterprise businesses and therefore start slowly killing them. We are — and will continue to be — determined and firm believers in the open SaaS model. We believe that our open source edition is our strongest asset and that we need, now more than ever, to keep investing in our ecosystem of partners and developers. There is still a long way to go, but this is an incredible journey, and we are proud to share it with you!

Onward and upward, Akeneo!

Fred de Gombert, CEO and co-founder of Akeneo