Product Information Management: The Key to Success in the Digital Economy
As e-commerce becomes the new normal, consumer goods companies can't be caught flat-footed in their efforts to provide engaging, personalized, and on-brand experiences across every digital channel. Content must be compelling, complete, correct, and in the context of each channel — whether that's the web, mobile or social — and that content must be there at the speed the market demands.
Managing that data is, of course, a Herculean effort without the right product information management (PIM) technology. That is why in this CGT Roadmap we tap into the expertise of Winshuttle's Kristian Kalsing, to explore how CGs can quickly create and syndicate great product content across their digital channels while reducing costs and risk by leveraging a centralized, built-for-purpose platform.
CGT: Why is PIM critical to success in today’s e-commerce environment?
Kalsing: In an e-commerce environment, potential customers discover and learn about your products solely based on online information. Therefore, it’s critical to provide rich, compelling, and accurate product information in all the places your customers are looking. PIM is the underlying platform that enables you to efficiently collect, manage, enrich, and distribute all that product information.
CGT: What are the advantages of PIM over other data management platforms?
Kalsing: A PIM solution is specially designed to meet the unique challenges of getting rich, trusted product data and digital assets to a myriad of channels in a timely fashion. Websites, apps, and social media platforms have unique content requirements, and those requirements vary by the channel partner. PIM solutions are built to handle that level of specificity and enable manufacturers, distributors, and retailers to quickly get the right product information and digital assets to each channel while providing on-brand, accurate content. A PIM solution can also power point-of-sale systems and automate print publications, ensuring consistency and quality across customer touchpoints.
CGT: Why should PIM be part of every product’s go-to-market strategy?
Kalsing: Go-to-market strategies in today’s digital economy typically involve marketing and selling your products through many different channels. Apart from your marketing your products through your own website, you may be selling through various online marketplaces and other third-party outlets. To win today, it is essential to provide compelling, rich, and accurate and up-to-date product information across your channels. Doing that at the speed the market demands without a PIM in place requires an enormous and costly manual effort.
CGT: How does PIM help companies provide engaging, personalized, and on-brand experiences across digital channels?
Kalsing: PIM provides a single place to collect and manage all the data and content required to market and sell your product — making it easier to maintain brand standards. A fully-featured PIM solution also enables creative marketers to easily tailor product content by channel, region, customer type, or even at the individual customer level. One way a PIM solution achieves this is by surfacing up relevant data, such as product sales by location, to business teams within the PIM, helping them make informed and impactful marketing decisions.
CGT: What are the benefits of the Winshuttle platform across the business?
Kalsing: Just like other PIM platforms, we focus on enabling product-centric companies to get compelling, trusted product information across all their channels. But we realize that alone is not enough in today’s fast-moving digital economy. Our platform enables companies to go faster and get the agility they need to adapt to a dynamic business landscape. Designed with a configure, no-code approach, business teams can use our platform to quickly test and scale new channels or easily modify what product information is needed by channel. They can also automate processes like product launches, content updates, or localization efforts to get work done faster and more efficiently. One of the biggest benefits we see comes from the fact that companies who choose our PIM solution are buying into a multi-domain data hub. They can use this hub to improve the quality of their customer, vendor, location, asset, and other data and speed up key processes across the organization. We believe that our platform provides the solid foundation that product-centric companies need to transform their digital initiatives into a competitive advantage.
