To stand out online, companies must nail every marketing dance step – by organizing and delivering product information in a consistent and differentiating way – say experts at Earley Information Science roundtable
It’s a new fact of life in doing business – personal interactions are increasingly not part of the marketing and sales process. By 2020, according to a Gartner study, customers will be managing 85% of their relationship with companies without benefit of a human. That means product information management (PIM) is taking on life-or-death consequences. Brand value will soar if customers can find the information and products that they need, when they need it – and the brand will be damaged, perhaps even destroyed, when they can’t.
And that leads to another new fact of life: how a company organizes, delivers and displays the content in its PIM systems is becoming every bit as important as the bread-and-butter products and services that it is trying to sell, according to a panel of knowledge management experts at an Executive Roundtable discussion hosted on March 15 by Earley Information Science Corp. (EIS), a leading consulting firm focused on organizing information for business impact.
Just like products and services, content also has to stand out through differentiation yet be consistently identifiable with the company brand. It also has to lend itself to customization (for each sales channel) and to updates and other modifications as time passes and conditions change. To pull all that off, the experts said, companies first need to adopt a long-term strategic marketing vision and then deploy new tactics, tools and timing that create and maintain high-quality PIM systems on a 24/7 basis.
“On the new customer journey, brand engagement always has to be on,” said Jeannine Bartlett, Chief Digital Strategist at EIS.
The roundtable discussion, “Brand Choreography: How Product Information Supports Your Brand Promise,” was led by David Hatch, Senior Vice President for Marketing at EIS. Besides Jeannine Bartlett, the panel included Tom Wavre, European Head of Product Database and Branding at ITW Construction, and Johan Boström, Co-Founder and Evangelist at inRiver.
“The choreography isn’t easy,” said Bartlett, given all the touchpoints and channels. For one thing, there are different “brand clock speeds” for each channel. The social media platforms are, of course, operating much faster than others. So the content for each channel has to be tweaked, or even recast, for each potential stop on the customer’s journey.
“It’s an omni-channel customer experience,” Bartlett noted, “and you have to get agile with end-to-end processes.” One essential is a “unified attribute framework” – for products, the brand, the merchandising and the customers – to trigger the appropriate “conversation.” Another essential is an information architecture that can deliver the “optimal brand experience” throughout a dynamic digital environment.
ITW’s Tom Wavre focused on cross-border brand messaging. The key there is to commit to a set of brand pillars that can control the presentation in multiple markets “without ignoring each market’s unique nature and required message.”
Three pillars – vision, mission and values – represent the traditional task of defining who you are and what you aspire to be. But there are three others that have a special role in the digital and cross-border context: positioning (what problems do your customers face and how do they view your solutions), personality (how are you different from your competitors) and visuals (what is the concise set of rules that determine the colors, style, image that give you your look). Add to the mix plenty of research to create brand stories to drive interactions.
Applied correctly, Wavre said, the pillars will provide “freedom within a framework” and enable your content to “boost your market presence.”
Despite all the changes going on around them, many companies are still hobbled by information inconsistency (thanks to silos) and the content spaghetti that comes from living in spreadsheet hell, according to inRiver’s Johan Boström.
But there is a way out, he noted. The first step is to define your needs in all of your relevant channels. Then figure out the content required by each channel and when it has to be delivered. At that point, you’ll know what the right processes and tools are.
That said, “there is no quick fix – don’t try to get to the end goal too quickly,” Wavre cautioned. “You have to strip down to the basics – otherwise you may have to do it all over again. Start with achievable bite-size chunks of information, so you don’t get demoralized by the size of the project.” “It’s pretty daunting,” EIS’s Bartlett agreed, while noting that machine learning can help fill in the gaps.
The bottom line, though, is that companies have no choice, Boström said. “You are as responsible for your content and brand product as you are for your physical product.”
The roundtable featured a real-time survey of the webinar attendees:
- Only 21% have a PIM system in place to unify data across all channels. Another 43% have started to coordinate product information; 21% use a variety of tools, but each is in its own silo; and 14% “live in their spreadsheets,” and are operating without a formal process.
- In describing their plans for addressing PIM, 45% said they are putting a budget and resources in place within the next 6 to 12 months; 27% are “just starting out” and have no plan in place; and 18% estimated they are more than a year away from taking action. Nine percent said they have no plans or need for PIM.
Please use this link to access the roundtable. And here is a related article on product data and the brand promise.