With omnichannel selling on the rise, a robust product content strategy is required to scale the marketing and selling of products and win on the digital shelf. Brands sell on both the physical and the digital shelf, yet a customer looking at a digital PDP cannot touch and feel and read the packaging and product in the same way. Attempting to create a consistent experience for your shoppers means ensuring that the content that contains information and assets (visuals/videos) about your product needs to be managed.
The content you put in from of both your customers and consumers needs to be consistent, accurate and complete.
Meeting these standards is pretty tough without a technology platform with governance rules and workflows for enrichment and validation in place to do so. Particularly if you have large amounts of products, across multiple markets and brands. In today’s dynamic landscape, a robust platform is not just important; it is a critical business application.
"PIM is now a core capability for any enterprise that sells products in market. The macro trend shaping product information’s criticality is that consumers find online shopping more convenient than offline in stores."
- The Forrester Wave™: Product Information Management, Q4 2023
PIM OR PXM?
PIM is primarily concerned with the behind-the-scenes of managing your product information. It’s all about gathering, organizing, and preparing product data. The focus of PIM is on operational efficiency, ensuring that product information is consistent. This makes PIM more of an internal practice, anchored in the needs of the business and the information tends to be structured in a single schema (one set of attributes).
- Ensures consistent and accurate representation of products accessible in a central source for internal business users.
- The collective landing point for evolving content to the needs of various channel selling and thus presenting product to customers and consumers.
PXM goes beyond managing information with a focus on enriching the content for the purpose of enhancing the customer experience. It revolves around how product information is presented to engage customers across various channels.
While PIM is about operational efficiency, PXM is customer-centric, concentrating on the customer's journey and interaction with the product. It uses the data structured by PIM to create compelling product experiences that resonate with customers. It allows for collaboration of structured data with digital assets (from DAM) and supports production of enhanced content/below the fold content.
- Enables the content to be distributed effectively across channels (marketplaces, retails, social-commerce platforms etc).
- Assists in tailoring the shopping experience to influence purchase decisions and customer loyalty.
- Provides improved speed to market and market share by meeting required attributes.
- Acts as both a system of work and of syndication.
The Key Stages of PXM:
The PXM journey takes content through several key stages
Centralisation allows the storage of a golden record that can act as a central source of truth; although it also allows for multiple versions of the record to meet the needs of each channel.
By validating these records against the schema or attributes, you can effectively transform your content. Using collaborative workflows, people across the business or third-party agencies can work to transform content as required for downstream channels. This is where automation can play a role, with alerts to support change requests or AI generator triggers to transform content.
Syndicating this content out to wherever it is that you sell on the digital shelf, as well as Global Standard Data Pools (GDSN) gets your content to market faster, in whatever mechanisms each channel allows for.
Once content is out and facing your customers and consumers, you can also use data analytics to measure performance and continually optimise content.
