We seem to be living through the heyday of data — call it the data days.
Increasingly, industry experts and observers are preaching the importa…
We seem to be living through the heyday of data — call it the data days.
Increasingly, industry experts and observers are preaching the importance of data and information management. Some describe data as the new oil, while others call it a new currency, and even more still settle for claiming it could change how companies of every shape and size operate. Managing all this product data, however, presents a challenge. The world of product data solutions is full of acronyms. As a result, it can be difficult to determine what each solution is actually designedto address.Here’s a breakdown of all the acronyms and how they compare to PIM (product information management):
Product Data Solution Comparison
Figure 1: Displays how PIM, MDM, DAM, and PLM intersect within an enterprise organization.
PIM vs. MDM
MDM stands for master data management. This solution is typically an IT-led initiative that aims to create a “golden record” of all master and reference data across multiple domains. This can include customer, product, location, supplier, financial data, and more. The goal is to create accurate and consistent information repository that is accessible to everyone within an entire organization.PIM is a subset of MDM that creates a golden record specifically for product data. It focuses on delivering high-quality, complete, and accurate product information to support merchandising, marketing, and omnichannel efforts. PIM is a business-led initiative that is typically much easier and cost effective to implement compared to a comprehensive MDM deployment.
MDM is a single source for all information, while PIM focuses on product information – ideal for supporting your marketing and sales teams.
PIM vs. DAM
DAM stands for Digital Asset Management. DAM manages digital media files like images and videos. It typically includes specialized version control tools and advanced search functionality to help organizations maximize the use of existing digital assets.PIM often includes some digital asset management functionalities as part of its product information management capabilities. The main difference is that DAM manages a broader range of digital assets, including those that do not deal with product information. An enterprise-wide DAM solution is complementary to PIM, and many integrations link popular PIM and DAM systems.
PIM handles digital assets associated with product information, while DAM handles digital assets enterprise-wide.
PIM vs PLM
PLM stands for Product Lifecycle Management. This data solution acts as a repository for the entire lifecycle of a product, from initial conception, through design, and up to end-of-life support. It is typically used within manufacturing organizations to track sketches, CAD files, parts, inventory information, disposal details, and other assets.A PLM is focused on the internal organization and stakeholders and doesn’t typically contain any customer-facing information. However, PIM solutions can integrate with PLM solutions to pull relevant specifications and other information to support customer-facing merchandising.
PLM is an internal system that doesn’t hold customer-facing information but can integrate with PIM to provide technical details for merchandising.
PIM: The Solution for Sales and Marketing Product Data and Descriptions
PIM is a business application that focuses on product specification and descriptions for sales and marketing purposes. MDM, DAM, and PLM can all integrate with PIM to support efforts for complete and accurate product information.
Looking for PIM?
Every PIM solution is different and includes a range of capabilities and integrations. Make sure you do your research to find the solution that will best fill your organization’s unique needs now, as well as in the future. Download our eBook Product Information Management 101 for a guide on how to choose the right PIM solution and how to convince internal stakeholders that PIM is the cost-effective product data management solution you need.
One Version of the Truth: A Better Way to Manage Product Data
John Russell, the ex VP of Harley-Davidson once said that “we don’t sell motorcycles. We sell to 43-year-old accountants, the ability to dress in …
John Russell, the ex VP of Harley-Davidson once said that “we don’t sell motorcycles. We sell to 43-year-old accountants, the ability to dress in leather, ride through small towns and have people be afraid of them.”
In other words, Harley Davidson sells experiences, not motorcycles. The same can be said of Product Information Management (PIM) systems.You might think a PIM system is just a neat way to manage your business’ product information, but the overall effect that a PIM system can have on your business and your organization can be dramatic and transformational.In the new Journal of digital commerce, John Evans, Product Marketing Director here at Akeneo, provides strategies for managing product information, to help you move beyond the Excel pivot table by looking at:
3 main challenges with product information management
How product information has expanded and evolved
How quality of information impacts online conversions
5 key tips for eCommerce Managers managing product information
The results – an Akeneo client example
The Journal of digital commerce is a professional trade journal from industry experts and technology partners to help you find your way in the digital jungle.Is time to drive things forward? Read our full article and download your copy of the Journal of digital commerce today:
It takes a lot to succeed in the high-stakes world of fashion: a keen eye for style, a feel for the latest trends, and of course, the ability to put i…
It takes a lot to succeed in the high-stakes world of fashion: a keen eye for style, a feel for the latest trends, and of course, the ability to put it all together to create a fantastic look.
But increasingly, it takes more than just an attractive product that keeps up with the latest movements in the marketplace to find fashion fame and fortune. More so than any in other industry, fashion brands and retailers must provide customers with compelling experiences if they want to make the grade. In an increasingly complex and competitive industry, that means your company is dealing with large volumes of product information. Dozens of dresses, a ton of trousers, an assortment of accessories, and oh so many shoes add up to hundreds of thousands of SKUs, each with hundreds of attributes and variants, from images to colors to sizes. It’s enough to make your head spin — that’s where product information management (PIM) comes in.
PIM is always in style because it helps brands and retailers organize product information, develop perfect catalogs and deliver fashionable experiences.
How can a PIM solution like Akeneo help you successfully manage ever-changing fashion catalogs and product assortments? Akeneo PIM can help you cost-effectively grow by providing your marketing team with an easy-to-use solution to collect, standardize, enrich, contextualize, and distribute product information.
Create a central catalog for all your channels
Fashion brands and retailers have huge volumes of product information and data at their disposal. Akeneo PIM was born to handle this situation. Our first customer was a luxury fashion brand that needed help providing customers with consistent product information across a range of channels while reducing time-to-market. PIM helps fashion companies by providing all of the teams inside your organization with a single source of product information truth that can be put into context for all channels and all locales. This ensures that your customers will constantly be given consistent product information across a wide range of shopping channels.In addition to being consistent, product information must also be compelling and create an emotional connection with your buyers. This emotional connection helps encourage sales, helps you build a relationship with the customer, and fosters impulsive and repeat purchases. Why is this important? If consumers don’t connect emotionally with your products, they’ll quickly abandon the purchase. This is especially true when it comes to high-priced fashion items — brands and retailers need to present compelling, consistent, and accurate content to convince customers to make a purchase.
Use PIM to efficiently create a single source of truth for all your product data and information to boost your omnichannel marketing efforts.
Pick up the pace
In the fashion industry, speed is everything. Consumer tastes are constantly changing — the “in” and “out” styles seem to change as often as the weather, and trends rarely last for more than a single season. Of course, fashion companies must also change stock frequently as new seasonal collections hit their shelves, — making time-to-market a key factor for success. As a result, fashion brands and retailers require product information solutions that allow them to change product data or add new SKUs at the drop of a hat. But if product information is trapped inside spreadsheets or stuck in silos, adding new SKUs can be a laborious, time-consuming process.Akeneo PIM speeds the product information management and new product introduction process so you can get your products to market faster — across all channels and regions. Plus, with Akeneo’s PIM Accelerator for Fashion, you can get a head start on your PIM project, reducing time to market even further and pushing up your go-live date.
Lengthy product creation processes and slow time-to-market can be cut up to 300% using Akeneo PIM.
Use variants to become victorious
Winter and summer collections, changing trends and styles, and a host of other factors mean that your fashion brand or retailer is dealing with a huge number of products. But those aren’t the only factors pushing the total SKU count skyward. Your team also must deal with hundreds, if not thousands, of products that vary just slightly — the same cardigan in a different color with several sizing options. Because these products are all based on the same base product model, much of the information they require — like product names, styles, care instructions, and price — does not change. But even with all of these similarities, variant products can be a nightmare for those in charge of product information. The best way to efficiently manage these products is with a capable PIM that handles products and their variants. Akeneo PIM allows you to define a product model and variants that inherit common attributes but allow you to handle different sizes, colors, etc. at the SKU level. Akeneo PIM gives you control over how products are grouped and linked, allowing users to copy shared information from SKU to SKU, eliminating errors and saving hours of tedious busywork for product managers.
Variants can cause major headaches for product managers if your solution doesn’t allow them to group and link common information.
Localize and contextualize
Once you’ve created a single source of truth, it’s time to raise the bar on product information. The world is constantly getting smaller, and today’s consumers expect to be able to do business in their native tongue.If they reach your website and are unable to view product information in a language they can read and understand fluently, or greeted with images that aren’t relevant to their experience, they’ll go somewhere else to make the purchase. Sizes must also be updated to correspond with those of a given region or country. Even the products your company sells often vary from country to country based on differences in climate or culture. As a result, your product information needs to be localized to match the intricacies of different regions and markets, from languages to currencies and from photos to product selection.Your product information also must be presented in the proper context for the channel a shopper is using. After all, a website designed for desktop users won’t do much to motivate mobile shoppers to hand over their hard-earned money. Akeneo PIM offers over 200 pre-defined locales (you can make more if you need to) and allows users to combine regional and language data to provide customers with an experience that’s personalized for their location. What’s more, the PIM helps ensure all that information is presented in the proper context for the channel shoppers are browsing on.
Properly contextualizing and localizing product content can increase sales conversion rates as much as 400%.
Distribute data anywhere, anytime
Once disparate sources of product information have been combined to create a single source of truth, your team needs to send that data across their channels. Akeneo PIM allows you to spread enriched, complete product information to all channels and all users with the snap of a finger. The solution provides connectors capable of hooking into virtually any platform, including eCommerce, web, mobile, POS, and print, allowing users to efficiently store product information across a wide range of channels. This allows Akeneo to serve as product information central for your organization, giving control over the management and enrichment of data only to those who need it, making those teams more productive and efficient. That way, customers are presented with consistent, compelling information, no matter what product they’re viewing or what channel they’re shopping on.
Making data collection and distribution a simpler, easier process for your employees can pay real dividends, marketers 50% more productive.
Commerce is going cross-border, and providing opportunities for real growth along the way.
According to research recently published by Accenture, …
Commerce is going cross-border, and providing opportunities for real growth along the way.
According to research recently published by Accenture, more than 900 million consumers — or 45 percent of all online shoppers — will purchase products internationally on the web by 2020. But selling your products to buyers outside your country is a major undertaking — it requires careful planning and a well-thought-out strategy to deliver a product experience in context for each of these new markets. How do you prepare your product catalog for cross-border commerce? Of course, you’ll need high-quality translation and localization services to ensure your products are customized to each regional market. You’ll also need images that are appropriate for what buyers expect in their country, ensuring that assets conform to local norms and customs while providing an emotional connection with buyers in those markets, too. The most important piece, however, is ensuring that your team can manage your product information and put it into the context necessary to be successful in those locales.
Cross-border commerce is a massive opportunity for growth in B2C and B2B.
Akeneo PIM is an enabling technology that can help your marketing teams put product information into context to reach more markets through cross-border commerce. Akeneo PIM centralizes all technical, usage, and emotional information for your product listings and catalogs while also improving workflows and scalability, acting as the central product information hub suitable for use by both brands and retailers.A PIM acts as a single source of truth for all product data, allowing information to be efficiently translated, localized and put into context for each location and sales channel once complete.Here are four ways PIM can help your growing business reach new markets:
1. Take the pain out of translation
When it comes to expanding to new markets, acing the translation process is crucial to success. Cross-border customers expect to be able to do business in their native language, no matter where the company they’re buying from is based. To enable this, Akeneo integrates with popular translation agencies and tools like Translations.com and Textmaster to help brands and retailers manage 3rd party translations within the PIM. The PIM also automatically tracks items and fields that still need to be translated, ensuring no incomplete records are published. That way, you can be positive that your products will resonate with an international audience.
2. When in Rome…
Content must also be localized so that the information is not only presented in the proper language, but also the correct vernacular and context for a given area. Spelling “color” as “colour” in the United States, for example, could confuse customers.Images and other multimedia assets must be adapted to remain relevant and appropriate for buyers in these new locales. What’s more, brands and retailers must also convert product data, such as clothing sizes or product measurements, to units that buyers in these markets understand — displaying product information in a language or unit they don’t understand is a surefire way to lose a customer. Akeneo allows companies to more simply and efficiently localize product data for international markets. For example, marketers can perform bulk actions to set US shoe sizes in US channels and European sizes in European locales and channels. Putting your product data in proper context will make sure that product information will make sense for those customers.
3. Simplify processes
Before you can translate and localize product information, however, you need to know exactly what information needs to be localized. In the modern age, time-to-market is vital, and time spent localizing information that doesn’t need to be updated can lead to delays. To help simplify this process, Akeneo ensures that both internal and external translation and localization teams see and edit only the information that needs to be adapted.These automated and simplified processes are crucial for success, so workflows to support them should be in place to ensure your cross-border sales efforts reach their true potential. Akeneo helps your workflow go global by allowing teams to collaborate using customized workflows that serve each specific product category and region. Every team member can see their next task within the PIM, eliminating the need for additional task management overhead. The PIM also reports on the progress and completeness of each item to ensure high-quality product information is ready to be published.
4. Feed the right information to the right locale
Once you’ve adapted and updated product information, it’s time for the task of feeding all localized product information to each locale your business sells in.With Akeneo’s export profiles, the final, localized product information can be easily distributed to the appropriate eCommerce platforms, marketplaces, print catalogs, and other channels and storefronts via a variety of connectors available on the Akeneo marketplace. With the ability to export the right information for the right locale and right channel, your localized product information streamlines the product information management process to more efficiently meet the needs of cross-border commerce. This will give your business better time-to-market and opportunities to pursue sales growth to customers around the world.Ready to grow?Contact us to learn more about PIM, get started by downloading our eBookProduct Information Management 101or read our blogWinning the Battle of the Brands.
Product Information Management Best Practices | Part 3: Get Your Products to Market
This is a multi-part series on the top 10 product information management best practices. This post covers how to get your products to market faster. I…
This is a multi-part series on the top 10 product information management best practices. This post covers how to get your products to market faster. If you need to take a step back and start at the beginning, check out part one to learn how to get started with your PIM project or read part two to learn how to gather and enrich your data.
Once you have set up your PIM, onboarded, and enriched your data, it’s time to push your product catalog to market. It may sound simple, but these last few steps are arguably the most important part of your PIM journey.Having complete and accurate product information is crucial to making the sale — but achieving this is often easier said than done. And even so, it’s not quite enough. Verifying the accuracy and completeness of product information before spreading it to all channels is a requirement for providing the right information to the right channel and deliver the omnichannel product experiences customers crave. Modern PIM solutions make this happen.Here are the PIM best practices that will help you get your products to market faster and ensure they look good across every channel.
PIM Best Practice #8: Implement Validation Processes
When managing information for hundreds, or even thousands, of products, it’s inevitable that human error will introduce inconsistencies into product descriptions.When listing the dimensions of a picture frame, for example, a user can easily transpose two numbers. When localizing for the United Kingdom, it’s possible to leave the letter “u” out of “color.” Even a simple typo can create a disaster: just a single character separates “Ugg Boots” from “Ugh Boots.”Errors are unavoidable; what matters is catching them before you publish. Benchmark research conducted by Ventana Research found that only 16% of organizations trusted their product information processes, while better data quality was the top issue motivating improvement in product information for 66% of organizations. A study by Shotfarm, meanwhile, found that 87% of consumers said they’d be unlikely to consider a retailer again if they received incorrect product information.Product information errors decrease customer confidence in the brand while also decreasing sales and increasing returns. A PIM solution offers easy-to-use features for verifying the accuracy of individual contributions to product data, as well as the overall completeness of that data. You can define the minimum level of quality and completeness required for a product to be published to a given channel and locale.The PIM can also track workflow and processes to ensure smooth operation in managing and creating better product data quality. This simplifies the answers to common questions like:
How do you know when the product information is complete?
Who decides if it is correct?
What’s the next step and who should take it?
Pro-tip: Include validation as part of your PIM workflows and utilize the automation features within PIM to streamline the process.
PIM Best Practice #9: Customize Product Information and Distribute it to your Sales Channels
Different sales channels have different requirements for product information. To list a product on Amazon, for example, you need to provide a different set of data than when you’re listing on Wayfair.There are many contextual variables across channels, from the character count of the product description to mandatory details about the size and materials of the product and even the dimensions and format of the media files. It’s a headache to keep track of, but essential if you want your products to look as enticing as possible when customers click.
When posting products on different sales channels, the number of variables can seem endless.
Export profiles
A key objective for merchandising is ensuring that your products look great across every channel. For example, in Akeneo PIM you can create an export profile within the PIM. This export profile lets marketers export only the data they need, and route it to the desired channel and locale. Marketers can filter export data based on several products and select attributes, families, categories, and identifiers.Export profiles can be saved for later use, or modified and saved for a different use, so you can export more products as time goes on. These PIM tools work together to save time, reduce errors, and save your team from a ton of aggravating and boring work.
Pro-tip:It’s common for organizations to use many export interfaces. Make sure you select a PIM solution that doesn’t charge based on the number of export profiles, or you could rack up an expensive bill very quickly.
PIM Best Practice #10: Collaborate, Track Progress and Evolve
The goal of PIM is to help organizations better manage and distribute product information and create a product experience that ultimately results in increased sales. While these tasks may seem somewhat exclusive to the product or marketing teams, the reality is that using PIM should be an organization-wide collaborative process. Ideally, you have configured your PIM to reflect your organization and how it works. To ensure it evolves with your company and is delivering business value, make sure you track the implementation and success of your PIM project across our organization. What’s more, your product catalog and sales channels are likely to change over time, andyour PIM processes need to support your business growth should change with them.Here are the typical PIM benefits that you should see in your organization over time:
Increase in product information quality and completeness
More efficient product onboarding and ongoing management
Create more product collections or assortments more quickly for promotional events and seasonal sales
Reduce your time to market
More easily launch new locales with market-appropriate product information
Increase your team productivity with task automation and streamlined workflows
Pro-tip: Implementing PIM is not a one-and-done process. Teams should work collaboratively to track progress over time, so you can adapt and evolve to support your business needs.
Get Your Products to Market and Increase Sales with PIM
PIM is the solution to help centralize product information, streamline enrichment and spread contextualized data to your various channels to improve sales within your organization. It helps brands and retailers create the customized omnichannel experiences that customers now expect. Stop using outdated tools to manage product data and revolutionize how you handle product information with PIM.
Ready to see what PIM could do for you? Sign up for a demo.
Want to learn more about the basics of PIM? Download our eBook Product Information Management 101.
Need to start at the beginning? Check out Part 1 and Part 2 of our Best Practices series, or download our eBook Product Information Management 101.
Product Information Management Best Practices | Part 2: Gathering and Enriching Your Data
This is part two of a multi-part series on the top 10 product information management best practices that will help you get the most out of your PIM so…
This is part two of a multi-part series on the top 10 product information management best practices that will help you get the most out of your PIM solution. This post covers how to collect product data, create business rules, and implement a robust enrichment process. If you need to take a step back and start at the beginning, check out part one to learn how to get started with your PIM project.
Once you’ve determined your PIM project objectives and scope, identified and trained your PIM team and stakeholders, and defined your catalog structure, your next mission is to collect, standardize, and enrich your product information. Then, you must put your product information in context to deliver a compelling product experience that will be distributed to all channels. These next best practices will ensure you’re as efficient as possible in these steps.Akeneo PIM’s array of automated features allows your team to skip the tedious busy work of copying and pasting information and performing manual product data validation. That way, they can focus on the creative work of writing compelling product descriptions — this, after all, is the heart of marketing, and why you hired your team in the first place.
PIM Best Practice #5: Identify Sources and Collect Product Data
In order to make your PIM work best for your organization, you will need your management workflow to onboard product information from the right sources. Selecting the right sources will remove many of the tedious copying and pasting tasks required when working within spreadsheets.To effectively determine your best sources, consider the following:
What are your most trusted sources?
What is going to be the source of each part of your product data?
What sources have the best data for certain attributes?
What are the different formats?
Can I allow suppliers to provide product data?
Pro-tip: By considering these questions, you can be sure that you start the entire PIM process with the best data coming from the best sources.
PIM Best Practice #6: Automate Catalog Management With Business Rules and Bulk Actions
One of the main benefits of PIM is the variety of automation features your team can utilize to remove tedious and repetitive work, allowing them to focus on creating compelling descriptions.
Standardize and enrich data through business rules
One example of PIM automation is the use of a business rules engine to automatically populate attribute values that apply across many products and product models. This can lead to much higher quality data by removing human error, as well as expediting the enrichment process. Using business rules can automate actions such as:
automatically categorizing new products based on family
copying the value from one attribute to another
setting a default value to an empty field
setting a text attribute to another text attribute
assigning families to new products
Managing product data in bulk
Another example of PIM automation is the use of bulk actions to perform actions on many products at once. Bulk actions make it easy to complete a variety of tasks, such as editing and adding attribute values, changing families, adding products and product models to groups, adding categories and moving products to different categories, changing the parent of a product, and adding associations to a selection of products. The ability to mass add associations to a selection of products makes it easy to create product collections by allowing you to group together all products that match your selected criteria.Rather than handpicking items from your Excel tabs and risk forgetting an item or introducing errors when publishing, brands and retailers should automate the process of creating collections with a PIM. Let’s say your research shows that German men are favoring brown bomber jackets this season. Simply create a custom collection with the words “brown”, “bomber jacket”, and “men”, and all matching products will be grouped together. What’s more, as team members import new products, they’ll automatically be added to the list if they meet existing criteria. Similarly, you can create associations of other related products to create cross-sell opportunities – for example, associating matching brown leather gloves to bomber jackets.
Pro-tip: Work with your internal stakeholders to determine what types of tasks are a poor use of their time and create business rules and use bulk actions to automate them.
PIM Best Practice #7: Put Product Data in Context
The core of your marketing team’s time should be spent creating rich and emotionally compelling product descriptions and media. These details and images serve to create emotion, give your brand a distinctive voice, and encourage sales, so it’s crucial to make sure your team’s focus and incentives are aligned with this goal.
Enrichment is a core component of the PIM process. It’s important to keep the enrichment process focused on creating emotion in customers and ensure you deliver a compelling product experience.
Enrich and localize by region and for each channel
PIM can help support your organization’s expansion efforts with features designed to improve the translation and localization processes. This ensures that your product descriptions are translated correctly and have each of the proper elements that put product information in context for specific locales and the channels customers use to buy. In addition to translation, you may need to localize size charts (US vs. the UK vs. European sizes), media imagery (just the product, or showing the product in use), spelling (color versus colour), and display specific attributes in catalogs for local compliance, among other tasks.
PIM includes features that allow teams to specify which product fields need to be localized or translated, while all other product attributes are automatically carried over.
Using a PIM to ensure your catalog presents your product information in context allows your team to:
Simplify and focus: Use automation and rules so your merchandising teams can spend time on the value-added activity of creating emotion in buyers about your products.
Organize your workflow: PIM can help distributed teams work together to increase the speed of translation and localization and get your products to market faster.
Help increase sales and decrease returns: By ensuring that all product information is market-appropriate, regardless of location, you can easily increase sales and decrease returns.
Pro-tip: Ensuring your product information is in context for the locale and the channel will ensure you comply with local laws and standards, create better engagement with buyers, and, ultimately, increase conversions and reduce returns.
Improve Data Management with Streamlined Processes Using PIM
A PIM solution is critical to increasing sales and reducing returns – but it’s only as good as the information put into it. By setting up your PIM correctly, you can streamline enrichment processes and get your products to market faster. The days of managing product information in spreadsheets are over — brands and retailers should take advantage of modern features to help take their eCommerce organization to the next level.Ready to see what PIM could do for you? Sign up for a demo.Or want to get started with PIM? Check out Part 1 and Part 3 of our Best Practices series, or download our eBook Product Information Management 101.
Scenes From The Experience Renaissance: 5 Highlights from #APS2019
The Experience Renaissance has arrived. Earlier this month, Akeneo welcomed more t…
The Experience Renaissance has arrived.
Earlier this month, Akeneo welcomed more than 300 members of the Akeneo family to Paris, France for the latest edition of the Akeneo PIM Summit. Over the course of two days, partners, customers, and special guests gave attendees a look at how PIM is being used to solve omnichannel challenges, examined the ways PXM is reshaping the PIM market and unveiled innovations to the assembled PIM devotees. If you were unable to join us at Châteauform City George V in Paris, today’s your lucky day. Here’s your chance to look back at highlights from #APS2019 — and if you were lucky enough to find yourself in the crowd on February 6 and 7, now’s your chance to relive some of your favorite moments.
Fred de Gombert’s choice for the right outfit to open #APS2019 was neither an accident nor a fashion faux pas. Instead, the Akeneo CEO hoped to get attendees into the right frame of mind by donning some dapper, time period-appropriate threads as the Summit kicked off. It’s time for a change in the way we think about a customer’s journey through the purchasing process, Fred declared, and for a renewed emphasis on customer experience in retail; an Experience Renaissance, as it were. According to Fred, this rebirth and transformation of retail norms won’t mean the end of commerce as we know it, nor does it foretell the arrival of the so-called “Retail Apocalypse.” Instead, it will simply see companies in a wide range of industries combine the lessons learned, mistakes made, and successes sustained during recent years of retail upheaval to create a new, experience-focused offering. This transformation won’t be easy, he acknowledged, but will be crucial to the success, and even survival, of the retail industry. “There is no innovation without collaboration,” the Akeneo CEO told APS 2019 attendees. “We need to be humble. We need to share our data and collaborate. We need to work in full transparency with our peers. We need to unlearn everything we know to start innovating and differentiating again. This should start with the experiences we are crafting.”
2. “Work Is Theater”
Fred wasn’t the only speaker to center their thoughts around customer experience, however. After the Akeneo CEO left the stage, author Joe Pine appeared, ready to dispense insights from the modern retail market, or what he calls “The Experience Economy.”As Pine explained, having access to a source of raw materials was once a distinct economic advantage — but as these materials became easier to access, they became commoditized, stripping them of most of their value. Manufactured products and goods then became a driver of value, and when these also became commoditized, a service-based economy took their place. However, in recent years, service-based offerings have become yet another commodity, a staple of survival in the modern market. “Goods and services are no longer enough,” Pine claimed. Instead, brands and retailers must give customers a top-notch experience in order to stand out from the competition. Now, Pine said, the time has come for companies from electronics and makeup manufacturers to restaurants and retail stores to realize that “work is theatre.” And in the Experience Economy, brands and retailers that treat customers to a good show, along with quality products and services, will likely be the ones to come out on top.
Akeneo CEO Fred de Gombert wasn’t finished with APS 2019 attendees after his time-traveling intro, however. He returned to the stage, albeit without his Renaissance-themed attire, later on Day 1 to give the assembled crowd insights into the Science of Product Experience. While Product Experience is the key to success in the modern market, Fred said it would be a mistake to believe that building one consistent, all-encompassing customer experience across all channels would offer the compelling experiences that convert shoppers into customers. Instead, he opined, it’s important to realize that each touchpoint has its own rules and best practices. “There is no ‘One Experience to Rule Them All,’” Fred explained. “This is a mistake we already made in the early days of eCommerce, when we were trying to replicate point of sales paradigms in a website.”In other words, it’s impossible to deliver the same experience, or even similar experiences, via both a vocal assistant and a social network, for example. What’s more, most buyers aren’t looking for this level of consistency. To satisfy their customers, brands and retailers must create compelling experiences that cater to the context of each channel. That means using the unique capabilities and properties of eCommerce, mobile apps, vocal assistants, social media networks, and other sales channels to develop experiences that are distinct from one another while remaining consistent with a brand’s identity.
It’s fair to say that Day 2 of the Akeneo PIM Summit kicked off with a bang. The day’s first keynote featured Akeneo’s Product Marketing Director, John Evans, and the company’s Head of Product, Emilie Gieler. The pair were on hand to introduce the latest addition to the Akeneo family: Franklin.As Gieler and Evans explained, Franklin is all about Product Data Intelligence and designed to offer brands and retailers actionable knowledge about products. Available as a standalone product known as Ask Franklin, or accessible from within Akeneo PIM as Franklin Insights, the AI-based product library brings machine learning capabilities to Akeneo PIM and automates the product information curation and enrichment process.Franklin’s subscription-based library dramatically increases the efficiency of catalog managers and reduces time-to-market, while giving merchants data-driven insights that ensure the accuracy, comprehensiveness, and effectiveness of generated product data.Franklin wasn’t the only solution to make its grand debut at APS 2019, of course. Gieler and Evans also unveiled Akeneo PIM Version 3.0, the latest update to Akeneo’s original PIM solution. This new release allows users to create and natively enrich reference entities, pieces of common information that are shared among products, like brands, designers, collections, colors, and more. This can help brands and retailers deliver deeper experiences to customers by providing richer product information while also reducing time-to-market.It also includes support for Single Sign-On using a SAML-based authentication system that allows managers to handle all user permissions in a centralized place, as well as a new and improved user interface designed to make the solution faster and more efficient.
Akeneo wasn’t the only company to have a chance to stand in the spotlight before APS 2019 came to a close. A trio of customers also had their moments in the sun, taking a moment to pose on stage with a trophy (and a Ziggy of their very own) after taking home one of APS’ four awards.Obelink, along with its partner, Induxx, were named the winners of the conference’s “Rising Star” award (formerly known as the Rookie Award.) This was Induxx’s first PIM implementation and was aimed at helping the Netherlands-based outdoor retailer Obelink improve the accuracy and consistency of omnichannel product data. The pair also worked together to implement more efficient workflows, increase collaboration across the retailer’s marketing, eCommerce and translation teams, and boost their customer experience.Meanwhile, Australian retail giant Myer and implementation partner eWave walked away as winners in the Best B2C Project category. As Robert Schwab, Myer’s senior project manager, explained in his keynote address on Day 1, Myer invested in a PIM solution in hopes of improving product information quality. The project also helped Myer, Australia’s largest and oldest department store, decrease time-to-market, make product enrichment easier and more efficient, and give customers a more compelling experience. But worldwide B2B lighting manufacturer SLV and its partners Portaltech Reply will likely go down as the week’s big winners. The pair took home two distinct awards — the Best B2B Project andthe People’s Choice Award — for their PIM implementation efforts, and their crowd-pleasing video submission. The pair worked to help SLV centralize access to data, improve distribution processes, and allow them to make processing and printing their annual run of hundreds of thousands of “Big White” catalogs easier and more efficient using Akeneo PIM.Thanks to all our customers, partners, and sponsors for making the 2019 Akeneo PIM Summit such a special event. We can’t wait to see you again next year!
The eCommerce space is changing. Customers demand a compelling and consistent brand experience wherever they shop. Product experience management allow…
The eCommerce space is changing. Customers demand a compelling and consistent brand experience wherever they shop. Product experience management allows brands and retailers to offer buyers these superior experiences, leading to increased conversions, reduced returns, improved customer satisfaction, and stronger brand loyalty.
Brands and retailers must deliver a compelling story across all digital touchpoints during the purchasing journey.
That all sounds well and good – but how do you actually do that? How can brands and retailers manage product experiences and provide compelling content in the proper context? And where does product information management (PIM) fit into this picture?
What is Product Experience Management (PXM)?
Product Experience Management is a new profession. It’s the subtle science of delivering product information in context, adapted and scoped by channel and locale to match the buying experience at every touchpoint. Having the right data and insight into the type of product experience buyers expect is the foundation for any great customer experience.
According to Forrester, 85% of customers rate product information as the top feature they want from a website.
What Happened to PIM?
PIM is here to stay. It provides the foundation needed to control your product information and is a cornerstone of eCommerce and omnichannel operations. PIM remains a critical component and enabler of the practice of PXM, focusing on the content portion of the product experience.
Why is Product Experience Management So Important?
Product experience management is how you make an emotional connection with your buyers. It’s the next stage beyond goods and services in the progression of economic value. PIM is the “what” you use to describe your commodities, goods, and services, while PXM is “how” you stage an experience. Joe Pine, author of The Experience Economy, does a fantastic job of describing this progression:
Content is the core of product experience management. Without complete descriptions, products won’t be found by search engines, meaning they also won’t be found by customers.
If they are unable to recall a product’s brand name, for example, customers must be able to find it using non-branded keywords. But if these keywords and details are not included in a product’s description, search engines and marketplaces won’t show the product to customers, significantly decreasing sales opportunities.
What’s more, simply being able to find the product online may not be enough. Customers often won’t actually make a purchase if a product’s description is not complete or relevant. PXM allows you to ensure that all products have a complete and compliant description before they are published, guaranteeing that customer will be able to easily find and learn more information about products.
73% of customers inform their buying decisions based on the manufacturer’s product information and descriptions.
2. Get Up To Speed
These days, it’s all about speed. If you can’t get your products to market fast enough, then you’ll miss out on sales. It’s especially critical to get to market on time if your products are sold on a seasonal basis, or if you regularly add new products and models.
A good PXM solution enables your team to publish and update product catalogs in a timely way. It provides workflows to optimize and streamline processes, helping brands and retailers quickly add new products or channels. It uses business rules and automation to reduce manual work, freeing up time for marketers to write emotional product descriptions, while managing product images as well as text. With improved, streamlined processes, marketers can create complete and compelling product experiences across all channels.
Automating and optimizing processes using PXM can decrease time-to-market when adding new products or channels and help marketers create better, targeted content and improve your customer experience.
3. Meet Customer Expectations
Customers have more options in their buying experience than ever before.
In addition to physical stores, buyers can now access global marketplaces with the touch of a finger, no matter where they are. This has made customers expect relevant and specific products and information — and an enjoyable buying experience — to be available with just a click. While the buying experience will be different in-store and online, the need for consistent information and compelling product experiences is a universal requirement.
PXM helps organizations provide customized experiences across all channels and allows customers to get their products through their desired methods.
What to Look for in a Product Experience Management Solution
A robust set of capabilities is required to enable true product experience management.
Collect: Product data typically resides in many different sources, both internal and external to your enterprise. To access source product data, your PXM solution should provide connectors, APIs, and import capabilities to collect data from various applications. The best PXM solutions even provide product content directly from trusted sources. If you are a retailer, look for an integrated capability to onboard product data from your suppliers.
Standardize: With product content coming from multiple sources, how can you standardize information to create a single trusted record? Look for a PXM solution that uses business rules to ensure standardized data populates product attributes. Make sure validation workflows exist to deliver the most accurate data possible.
Enrich: The core of a PXM solution is a need to drive the enrichment process to manage text attributes, but images as well. Your PXM solution should allow you to enrich products by channel, by locale, and in the correct context.
Contextualize: Where will your buyers access your product information? What language do they read? Are all images relevant in all markets, or are different images needed in different markets or countries? Putting product data in context for each locale and each channel is not to be underestimated. Getting this right is the only way to ensure a compelling product experience, which will help you make the emotional connection you want with your buyers.
95 percent of our purchase decision making takes place in the subconscious mind.Prof. Gerald Zaltman, Harvard University
Distribute: Now your product information is complete, accurate, and in context. Make sure your PXM solution can easily deploy your catalog to the desired channels. The final pieces required for a complete PXM solution are connectors, APIs, export profiles, and capabilities to create catalogs that work for all channels – print, ecommerce, POS, marketplace, vocal assistant, and more.
Product Experience Management with Akeneo
Product experience management is the solution to creating the customized experiences that customers expect. By implementing a PXM solution, brands and retailers can stay competitive in the eCommerce market and increase conversions with relevant and complete product information.
Interested in learning more about how Akeneo can help you improve product experience management in your organization? Contact us.
2019 Arrives with Questions AboundIt is customary at the dawn of a New Year to offer the traditional prognosis on the trends that will contrib…
2019 Arrives with Questions Abound
It is customary at the dawn of a New Year to offer the traditional prognosis on the trends that will contribute to growth in our industry over the next twelve months. This is always a risky exercise, but especially in these times of great uncertainty and change, which often transform enlightened prognostications into esoteric predictions.
One must admit that 2018 was an eventful year for the retail and eCommerce ecosystem. Giants like Toys’R’Us or Sears collapsed, while others like Dollar General or Warby Parker thrived. Amazon, meanwhile, keeps growing, but is now doing so by replicating traditional brick-and-mortar sales models. The democratization of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies are intriguing and sometimes worrying, as voice assistants gradually settle into our homes. What’s more, this is all happening in a geopolitical environment that has perhaps never been so unstable and tense.
It is difficult in this context to predict what will happen in 2019, as contrary signals abound. Who can guess whether we will see a retail apocalypse, or a useful and necessary industry transformation? So, instead of playing Nostradamus, I prefer, at the beginning of this year, to pause and reflect on our role as technology companies in this great upheaval.
Technology to the Rescue?
Although we have known for a long time that even the best spot is never a given to strike gold, we still turn to technology as a miracle solution, especially in these times, when brands and distributors are urged to act quickly and innovate. Not a year goes by without a new trend or technology appears, destined to revolutionize the customer experience only to add to the growing list of false promises or poorly executed concepts (remember chatbots?). Ready-to-use fast-innovation is a lure, an empty promise. Technology itself has never made innovation. A CRM will not find customers, an eCommerce site will not sell products by itself, and a PIM will not manage your product data for you. It takes time, investment, both human and financial, and strategy to reinvent oneself. Technology has a crucial role to play and can become a great catalyst for this transformation, but there is an urgent need to rethink how it is built and shared.
Hyper-Transparency is the Real Solution
Now more than ever, we need the fundamental values of transparency and collaboration provided by open source offerings to stand up to the challenges of tomorrow. The biggest threat facing the world of retail and eCommerce today isn’t Amazon, but black boxes and technological obscurantism. This time must come to an end.
To overcome this period of uncertainty, we must enter the age of hyper-transparency and collaborative experimentation. Benjamin Franklin understood it well, even in colonial times. He refused to patent any of his (many) inventions, believing that they could, and should, eventually be improved by his peers and future inventors. Innovation must be done collectively, which requires us to share our knowledge, victories, and failures, and feed each other, allowing everyone to grow and experiment.
This necessary revolution in the way we design and consume technology has already begun. This has been proven by the recent acquisitions of open source players, including Github, acquired by Microsoft, Magento, purchased by Adobe and Mulesoft, bought by Salesforce.com. You can count on us to proudly carry the torch in 2019.
Top 5 New Year’s PIM Resolutions to Support eCommerce and Retail Growth
It’s a New Year! Have you thought about your resolutions yet? While self-development is important, now is a great time to also think about your comm…
It’s a New Year! Have you thought about your resolutions yet? While self-development is important, now is a great time to also think about your commerce goals and resolutions too.
It’s All About Products
As an eCommerce organization your focus is always on the products you sell:
A top priority for all eCommerce organizations is to ensure that product information is accurate, complete, and compelling to make an emotional connection with buyers. This sounds good in theory, but collecting, managing, and enriching product information is an ongoing challenge for many organizations. Ensuring completeness for your entire product line is difficult, and if you’re still managing this data in spreadsheets it’s nearly impossible – but it doesn’t have to be. Product information management (PIM) is the solution you need to improve the management of your product data and achieve your other business goals.
We’ll let you in on a little secret – if you make implementing and efficiently using a PIM solution your top resolution for the year you’ll more easily accomplish many of your other commerce goals.
Resolution #1: Take Product Information to the Next Level
Always Deliver Accurate and Complete Product Data
Improving the quality of product data may not be a new goal for your brand, but it’s always an ongoing effort. By implementing a PIM solution your team can have more high-quality and comprehensive data included in product descriptions across every channel. With better information, customers will be more likely to buy your products, and less likely to return them since they know what they are receiving. Besides basic data, PIM can also help you provide contextual data based on specific channels.
According to a study by Shotfarm:
78% of consumers said the quality of product information is very important when making purchasing decisions.
87% said they would be unlikely to make purchases again if they receive incorrect product information.
Resolution #2: Provide Customers with the Omnichannel Experience They Deserve
Contextualize Product Information
To stay competitive, you must be where your customers are with relevant product information. As product data goes, there is no one size fits all. This is a challenge for many brands as every new channel and platform has unique product data requirements. Use a PIM to provide contextual product data across all customer touchpoints. PIM gives your team the tools you need to enrich and export the required data and optimized product information for every channel and every platform to succeed in your omnichannel initiatives.
Ensure your product information is delivered in context on every platform and every channel – no matter where your customers are.
Resolution #3: Expand Product Lines and Target Markets
Grow Your Product Catalog
With a PIM, your team can be more efficient in onboarding new products and spend less time managing current ones. Easy-to-use tools quickly organize products into families and automatically populates shared attributes and descriptions. Bulk editing allows marketers and catalog managers to mass enrich or edit products and utilize business rule-driven automation to assign values to products, groups, and categories.
Expand into New Markets
With all other aspects of product enrichment optimized, you can spend more time growing and expanding your business. PIM smooths out the complicated and manual aspect of translating and localizing product information for new regions. Automated workflows help move remote teams seamlessly through the entire enrichment process. Teams can even connect the translation tools of their choice and easily review and approve localized information without ever having to leave the platform.
Resolution #4: Work Smarter, Not Harder
Remove Tedious Work and Automate Processes
Your product marketing team’s mission is to create compelling and exciting product descriptions to entice buyers. However, too often, product and marketing teams spend most of their time copying and pasting information between spreadsheets and various applications.
A PIM can remove this tedious, manual, error-prone, and repetitive work, by automating many of the repetitive tasks that take up so much of your team’s time. Let your PIM streamline your product data management and enrichment with bulk edit actions, completeness checks, automated import of data, and workflows that guide team members through their assigned tasks.
PIM helps you speed up the time to market by 3X to 4X.
Resolution #5: Innovate More
Take Advantage of the Latest Technologies
Comprehensive product data doesn’t just impact the point-of-sale. With new digital technologies becoming mainstream, you need to organize your product information in a way that can support the latest shopping methods such as chatbots and vocal assistants. You also need to be able to prepare and create the customized experiences that consumers now expect. These strategies and solutions require structured data. PIM centralizes and organizes data, so it is both available for these new technologies and vastly simplifies the process of deploying new sales tools and marketing initiatives.
Support Your New Year’s Resolutions with PIM
PIM is your most valuable asset to support your omnichannel commerce goals and deliver a 21st-century customer experience. With the right solution in place, you can improve your existing operations, easily expand your activities, and prepare for the technologies of the future.
Ready to start 2019 off on the right foot? Contact us to learn more about PIM, get started by downloading our eBook Product Information Management 101 or read our blog Winning the Battle of the Brands.
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