Too many organizations decide on a PIM before they articulate a PIM strategy. How can you tell if the time is right for a PIM, or if it’s just another shiny object?
As we were vetting thoughts on articles this week, someone latched on to this headline and said – I love this – it’s edgy. “Does my business need a PIMP?” I’m not 100% sure where they were going with that, but let me start by saying that if you are debating whether or not your business needs a pimp, you are most definitely on the wrong blog. And while under different circumstances I’d refer you elsewhere to find the information you need, in this particular case I wouldn’t have the foggiest notion of where to start. Best of luck. This article is for the rest of you.
As an organization’s digital strategy matures, the demand for content increases organically. Content is the foundation for building great customer experiences. And one of the strongest foundations you can establish for content is Product Information Management – or as his fraternity brothers call him, PIM.
Let’s distinguish between PIM as software and PIM as strategy.
PIM as strategy forces the organization to explore ways in which Product Information drives their operations, their customer experience, their market signal, their compliance and liability. PIM as strategy drives cost efficiency, reveals opportunities for growth and creates agility by establishing a single source of truth about products in the organization. In past roles, I’ve seen PIM strategy enable organizations to quickly consolidate warehouses, to take products from one corner of the business and introduce them to high-growth customers in another part of the business, to gather insights from one category and test them across another category, to trace and recall tens of thousands of products worldwide.
PIM software needs to function in service to these strategic goals. Oftentimes businesses build incomplete business cases for PIM strategy because the inception of PIM within their organization started with someone answering a call from a software sales rep (I love you all – no shade), and that sale went something like this: “are you managing all your product data in spreadsheets? Do you know where all your images are? Do you realize your account representatives all have different copies of product information with different versions of the truth?” And while all that is true, it misses the bigger picture.
It also misses the fact that PIM doesn’t have to be a 3-year, $3M project any more. Or require an army of consultants and IT. Even some pretty sophisticated systems are well within reach of a small- to mid-sized business: both in terms of cost and the ability to understand and implement them without highly technical resources.
Finally, when PIM software gets implemented without PIM strategy, the end result is discreet teams or individuals who have access to what is essentially a fancy, overpriced database. That is the worst possible scenario. In cases like that, the business hasn’t simply wasted a pantload of money. The implementation actually stands in the way of what PIM should mean for the broader organization, and it winds up hurting the business in the long run.
PIM as strategy can start small. It can be as simple as a single, centralized Excel spreadsheet or Sharepoint site. It can be an Access database. It can be the admin console of your Magento or BigCommerce website. (I think I actually just heard some of my former colleagues just smack their foreheads, but no – it’s absolutely true!) But the principles of PIM strategy dictate that the organization be of one mind. Your product master must act like the central nervous system for your business.
Does your organization need PIM strategy? I don’t care who you are (well okay, pimps aside). Everybody needs a nervous system. Every organization should implement some flavor of PIM strategy. Do you need a Product Information Management system? Read on, my friend. Read on.
As your organization begins to grow, simple and accessible tools like Google spreadsheets and Filemaker databases really start to show their limitations. And as product information is created and consumed by more and more people, enforcing PIM strategy becomes increasingly difficult without some type of information infrastructure to support it.
I’m not going to write your business case for you, or stub out an RFP in the next 5 minutes. (For more information about evaluating and implementing a PIM please contact us or become a professional member which includes project plans, RFP templates, business cases and more to get you started… and, then get you promoted.) But, I will give you some things to think about when considering whether or not your business needs PIM software.
The Ability to Find Product Information (Discoverability)
As your business grows, more and more people need access to accurate product data. Customer care centers need to answer questions from customers about your product. Consumers need to shop and compare products online. Distribution centers need to ensure the right product is packed in the right box in the right way. And all of that product information needs to be the same.
The easiest way to ensure that data is consistent is to pull it from the same source. And once you’ve established the source, you need to make it easier and more reliable to find data in your source than it is to make a copy. If the system (whatever you decide on) is too difficult to use, people will find an easier way. They always do.
If the system is too difficult to use, people will find an easier way. They always do.
Some small but forward-thinking organizations will start with a simple Access or Filemaker database, or a shared Google spreadsheet. That works for a smaller organization, but it gets more challenging when you need to control different levels of access to different types of information (e.g. who can edit what), connect other systems to your central repository (ERP system, inventory system, ecommerce platform), relate product information to other assets (pictures, videos), and other things that might be tedious or impossible.
The symptom of “discoverability” typically reveals itself in 3 ways:
- a mushrooming number of use cases for access to consistent product information,
- a proliferation of copies of product information around the organization, and
- a growing number of people who can’t find information they need.
The Ability to Find the Truth (Truthiness)
Proliferating copies of product information are the hallmark of two different problems: people not knowing where to put data, and people not knowing where to pull data.
When a business is small and product information is created by one or two people that’s easy. But when the number of people creating product information grows (engineering, marketing, agencies, chemical formulation, nutritional verification, pricing, packaging, inventory) this product data needs someplace to land. Without a centralized repository and a standard set of rules, data created by different parties lands all over the place. It also lands in different formats and in varying levels of completeness depending on who needs it.
Invariably one team will need information generated by another team. Product packaging needs nutrition details. National accounts needs product dimensions to win placement on store shelves. And as soon as someone hits “attach” and “send,” a copy is created. Like pouring water on a gremlin.
When people don’t know where to pull data, they start asking around. And are they sent back to the source? No. Like water, product information will take the path of least resistance to market. Climbing to the top of the mountain every time takes too much time and energy. Stakeholders inevitably pull data from the copy at the lowest possible altitude, not the source.
- The symptom of “truthiness” shows up in 6 ways:
- so many copies of product data are created and maintained that it’s difficult to accurately pinpoint the source
- the source doesn’t matter and/or the source of truth must be blended with alternate “truths” because you can’t unwind the information that has made it to market
- departments actively resist being interdependent on one another, believing it takes too much time to collaborate and thus duplicating effort and data
- different data points mean different things to different people – things like “height” and “pack quantity” and “explosive” (well, hopefully not explosive)
- a culture of “trust, but verify” forces marketers and product managers to check 11 different sources to have confidence that the information they are sending is accurate
- when inaccurate or off-brand product content makes it to market, it’s difficult or impossible to determine where that data originated from
The Ability to Respond to the Market (Market Agility)
Market agility encompasses your time to market, your ability to sense and react to the market and the sophistication with which one channel interacts with another. Now that’s heavy, so let’s treat those as three different topics.
Time to market
From the moment your channel partner agrees to sell your product (or when your business decides to start selling a product on its own website or through a marketplace like Walmart or Amazon), the clock starts ticking. With every passing day, you forfeit opportunity cost. You could be making money, but you’re not because you’re busy finding and creating product content.
Look for frustrated national account managers who have landed a deal, but can’t activate it for months.
You’re also forfeiting something more valuable in the long run: category share. The earlier you are able to launch your product, the faster you are able to capture consumers in your category. The faster you are able to dominate the market messaging. This is particularly important in this time when 74% of shoppers are buying items they “usually would not buy online.”
The symptom of “slow time to market” is easy to spot. Look for frustrated category or national account managers who have landed a deal, but can’t activate it for weeks or months.
Sensing and reacting to the market
As you discover what product content drives conversion, how equipped are you to make changes quickly and easily to that product content online? Can you refresh the content at various retailers quickly?
Another way of considering market agility is to ask whether or not your business is tuned to your customer’s path to purchase. How do customers find your product, build confidence in your brand and consummate a purchase, and is the product content at each phase of this journey adapted to that customer in that space? This may sound space-age to some, but the brightest, best equipped and most competitive organizations are finding ways to short circuit the buyer journey, meet their customer where they are, and enable transactions wherever their customer is found. It doesn’t require a ton of money, but it does require thought and planning and a centralized system that makes it scalable.
You can spot an inability to react to the market by anemic growth in your national channels, and a plateau (or loss) in category share. This happens because the consumer conversation has shifted (often caused by a competitor controlling the conversation) and your business lacks the ability to stay in front of it.
One channel learning from another
One of the most exciting developments of the last 12 months is the explosion of Direct-to-Consumer webstores like Pepsico’s snacks.com and pantryshop.com. Platforms like BigCommerce and Shopify have seen sharp growth of sites launched by some of the world’s biggest CPG and apparel companies.
These sites capitalize on three different things. First, they take advantage of a shift in consumer buying behavior during the pandemic. Salty snacks are one of the biggest contributors to consumers’ digital baskets. Sites like snacks.com give consumers a path to purchase during a time when finding items stocked consistently has been challenging.
Second, direct-to-consumer strategies can be more capital efficient and margin-rich. Not only does the manufacturer capture every dollar on direct digital sales, but they can also more accurately predict demand and control production.
Third, they give businesses clear line of sight to consumer buying behavior. Manufacturers who traditionally relied on data from secondhand sources such as Ascential Edge and Profitero to benchmark their item-level sales, share, traffic, and conversion rates against their competition can now monitor these trends directly. Moreover, direct-to-consumer webstores are the single-greatest source of product ratings and reviews – reviews which are one of the most important drivers of product conversion (second only to price) in other channels.
Companies like Nike have famously pursued a direct-only strategy rather than continue selling through retailers and third-party marketplaces. However, the majority of manufacturers continue to implement a multi-prong approach, selling through a portfolio of channels. The most effective organizations capture insights from any number of these channels, centralize them, and leverage those learnings across their internal teams to drive impact across the entire organization. They build feedback loops with their ecommerce storefronts, with the sales associates on the floor of their physical stores, with their delivery drivers, with their sales representative, with digital product performance at their retail partners.
Key Takeaways
PIM strategy should always come before PIM software. And PIM strategy doesn’t have to involve pricey software and service contracts, and shouldn’t be written by a vendor’s sales engineer. Having said that, if you’re still asking yourself if a PIM system is right for your organization, the following three questions should provide a foundation for your business case:
- How easy is it for everyone in my organization to access accurate and complete product information?
- How many copies of product data exist, does this slow my time to market, and does it frustrate my partners and consumers?
- Am I able to quickly learn from my consumers across various channels and reflect those learnings across all channels?