Did you know PIM can help you "position" your wastebaskets?

Positioning is a marketing strategy for establishing a unique perception of a company’s product in the minds of target buyers. It doesn’t involve any changes to the product itself, but only in how the product is perceived — particularly in relation to competing products.

Establishing the positioning for a product includes steps such as:

• Defining the market in which the product will compete
• Identifying attributes that define the product “space”
• Collecting information from a sample of customers about their perceptions of each product on the relevant attributes
• Determining each product’s share of mind
• Determining the ideal “vector” (preferred combination of attributes) and how your product aligns

In a series of groundbreaking articles in Advertising Age, which they later incorporated in their 1980 book, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, Al Ries and Jack Trout described positioning as coming to grips with “the difficult problem of getting heard in our overcommunicated society.” Louis Boone and David Kurtz, in their book Contemporary Marketing, describe positioning as the consumer’s perceptions of a product’s attributes, uses, quality, and advantages and disadvantages when compared to competing brands.

In today’s omni-channel (and omni-audience) world, the marketer’s challenge to establish a unique position in the minds of “overcommunicated” sales targets is a daunting task. Positioning has never been more critical.

Rethinking the PIM quest for a single version of product truth

Many people in the Product Information Management (PIM) field believe PIM technologies for data quality, data governance, data integration, and data maintenance are meant to collectively achieve an end-all “single source of product truth” in an organization. They consider the value of a “master data item” to be absolute.

But when you consider how a well-devised positioning strategy — in combination with effective PIM strategies — can yield solid results in marketing and sales, it becomes clear that blindly pursuing a “single version of product truth” is misguided, if not meaningless. Moreover, seeking a single version of product information ignores the true power of PIM in the real world of marketing and selling products.

A simple product turns out to be not so simple

Say, for instance, you market office products. Let’s take a look at one of those products: a wastebasket. Competing with dozens of other distributors selling the identical item, you reach out to potential buyers through online and print catalogs, Web sites, e-mail, social media, and many other channels. Determining which channels to use, how to use them, the frequency of use, and how much to invest in them is just one set of tactics to build on a solid foundation of product positioning. In the case of our wastebasket (certainly a simple, basic product), effective product positioning is likely to reveal that you have several distinct buyers.

Let’s pick just four possible ones:

• Interior designer
• Office administrator
• Building maintenance manager
• Janitorial service contractor

Now back to those selling channels for just a minute. One of them — your Website — displays four benefit bullets and six images for each product. Another, a monthly flyer, features single images with a 100-word product description. An outbound “preferred customer” e-mail has space for a 50-word product description, two benefit bullets, and an image. (Oh, and each of these channels — Website, flyer, e-mail — has different versions of this content tailored to each of the four targets identified above.)

What, then, is the “single version of product truth?” Does the interior designer care that the wastebasket can be custom silk-screened with a logo and a toll-free number? No, but a janitorial service contractor looking to build his service brand certainly does. Does a building maintenance manager care that the wastebasket comes in muted colors to match the office décor, or does it matter more to him that the wastebasket is durable enough to last five years? A price based on order quantity probably matters to an office administrator. But does it matter to the interior designer?

There is no single version of product truth, because — by necessity to a marketer — the “truth” varies widely by target, timing, channel, and dozens of other factors determined by the positioning of the product.

What makes PIM the marketer’s dream

Rather than expecting a PIM system to meet a goal with little practical value, smart marketers are making the most of what a PIM system does best — mixing, matching, and associating data and digital assets related to a product, and generating enriched content tailored to specific buyers.

Let the academics debate the almighty “single version of product truth,” say the marketers. We’re here to sell products.

— Bob Lewis, Enterworks President and CEO

In itself, PIM data is relatively limited in value unless users can draw meaningful information from it. An ideal PIM system should not only assist with that, but automate steps in analytics, telemetry, and machine learning to achieve business objectives and deliver greater value.

Building New Insights Using Machine Learning

An intelligent PIM system can provide a Product Auto Classification Engine (PACE) that uses supervised machine learning algorithms. It can predict the degree of similarities among items, based on the attributes managed in the product repository. It can, in fact, form a “network map” that provides a graphical indicator of how closely products are related, using algorithms similar to those used by LinkedIn and Facebook to identify different levels of friends and contacts (direct, second level, third level, and so on). Adding these capabilities in a PIM system can provide a complete, 360-degree view about any piece of information managed in the PIM system.

Another exciting aspect of “smarter” PIM systems is to implement the crowd sourcing features (both solicited and unsolicited) of comments, reviews, and sentiment analysis, and doing it in automated fashion. This is a tremendous benefit to product managers and merchandisers, because it helps them understand why some products aren’t meeting sales expectations or generating interest — while others are off the charts in terms of popularity. Having this level of analytical capabilities (beyond the attributes of products already managed) can also provide significant benefits to the suppliers of these products. A “Super PIM” could evolve where information like competitor cross referencing is automatically indexed and managed with minimal human interaction.

Growing Value of a Smart PIM System

Once a PIM system is armed with these intelligent features, including analytics and telemetry, it can provide a good deal of value in the larger supply chain management workflow. It can become a living and breathing organism that improves predictions through stronger analytics as more and more data becomes available. It can integrate with POS system output, revenue figures, Google Analytics, and any other data that has a link or reference back to the product data managed by the PIM system.

Jai Misra
Enterworks Chief Technology Officer

Each customer, of course, uses their own industry-specific lingo — terminology that may sound like a foreign language to those outside their industry. Retailers worry about “showrooming.” Distributors ruminate about “vendor cost recovery.” Manufacturers talk about “scrubbing a BOM.”

So it’s no surprise that prospective customers always ask whether we have experience in their specific industry, because “our product information needs are unique in [insert name] industry.”

But are they really?

In fact, despite the differences among them, the issues that prompt businesses to seek a PIM solution are remarkably similar. That point really struck home this week when we got a list of “pain points” from a prospective customer.

Can you guess what industry this company is in?

Take a look at these pain points, which were supplied by the company that came knocking, and try to guess which industry this company is in:

• We have multiple sources of product data
• We don’t have any standardization or consistency of data in our product information
• Our product attributes aren’t clear or consistent
• We can’t link items, and can’t establish parent/child and other relationships
• Our legacy systems and apps that are managing product data aren’t scalable
• We have too many redundant and manual efforts needed to import and manage our product information
• We have to manually re-create marketing materials on a regular basis
• Our current systems don’t support multi-channel initiatives; our print and Web content is out of sync
• We have no way to store unstructured data like images, videos, PDFs, product specs, replacement parts, etc.
• We have no direct links to supplier information

Shortage of clues?

Is this a large manufacturer? A distributor? A retailer? The clues are nowhere to be found. Their reference to “marketing materials” could suggest a retail consumer is in the mix, yet large distributors generate mountains of spec sheets and other collateral for marketing to dealers and other retailers. Their reference to “supplier information” likewise sheds no light; every type of business has some sort of supplier — even suppliers! Their mention of “replacement parts” certainly could make them a manufacturer or distributor, but don’t retailers also carry replacement parts? An additional pain point mentioned later by this company referred to “multiple locations.” But no help there in solving the mystery, as some distributors have global locations that outnumber the outlets of some retail chains, as well as the production facilities for some manufacturers.

Nowhere in the list we were provided is there any word, phrase, or reference of any kind that would identify the type of business.

What’s the takeaway of this whodunnit?

It’s that the pain points that spur businesses to investigate a PIM solution are universal. Sure, the data models may vary widely and call for industry-specific attributes. The workflow may differ considerably from one industry to another (one including the role of a merchandiser, another including a regulatory compliance officer). The digital assets that are managed might literally be unrecognizable outside the industry. But the true pain of managing product information without a solution — the manual efforts, the flawed and incomplete data, the lost sales opportunities — are felt daily by every business, in every industry, that sells products.

But… there’s good news in all this

Is there good news in all this shared pain? Actually, there is. The lessons learned and the best practices established in the course of implementing a PIM solution in one business often are relevant in another business, even if the businesses are in completely different industries. Workflow innovations that eliminate errors in new product introductions in retail (an MP3 player) are applicable to new products acquired from manufacturers by industrial distributors (a 2-ton commercial air conditioning unit). A supplier simultaneously exporting product data to multiple distributors, sending uniquely formatted content to each, is using the same model of multi-channel publishing that a distributor uses to service multiple retail channels. So the good news is that a flexible and solidly performing PIM solution can work up, down — and across — industry verticals.

(Oh, yes… the inquiring customer above? It’s a retailer!)

Words make up marketing copy, tag lines, product feature bullets, product specs, product reviews, buyer recommendations, and detailed regulatory information. Item numbers, dimensions, prices, and discounts represent only a small fraction of the structured data that, combined with unstructured digital assets, is needed to win the sale. It’s the reason your sales channels pressure you to deliver an integrated mix of both structured and unstructured content.

Trying to manage unstructured digital assets has sent many product companies in search of digital asset management (DAM) software. Smaller enterprises find standalone DAMs useful for archiving and searching digital assets, transforming image formats and resolutions on the fly, and managing digital rights. For publishing and media giants, complex and expensive DAM platforms have become the must-have solution for digging through enormous stores of high-resolution images and high-definition video clips.

Your Digital Assets Need to be in the Same Business You are: Selling!

But you’re in the business of selling products, and that means you have to generate a continuous stream of persuasive structured and unstructured content through your sales channels. And that requires a new approach to managing digital assets: managing them within a master data management (MDM) environment.

The value of unstructured content grows tremendously when it’s managed in a fully integrated manner with structured content. Rather than simply managing digital assets in relationship to each other, MDM leverages relationships between those assets and multiple MDM entities, such as products, suppliers, customers, channel partners, locations, and more. Instead of using two disparate systems to manage structured and unstructured content, you can combine the two types of content into a powerfully persuasive force managed in a single system.

Structured Content + Unstructured Content = Selling Power

By managing your digital assets as an integrated part of your MDM strategy, you’ll:

(1) Deliver superior search results. Online sales rise or fall based on whether buyers can easily find what they’re looking for, but too many product companies spend time and money trying to fix a search problem, when the real issue is a data problem. Unlike a standalone DAM system, MDM optimizes product data integrated with the associated digital assets for search results that satisfy buyers. MDM enables the management of multiple taxonomies and product hierarchies, always associating the best images, videos, and other unstructured content with each product delivered in search results.

(2) Increase add-on sales. You’re in the business of selling, not running a library. If you’re simply organizing your digital assets in a DAM system, you’re missing out on the power of up-selling, cross-selling, and add-on sales that all your images, videos, and more can generate. Under the management of MDM, the metadata of all your assets is closely linked to all products associated with the base product.

(3) Better collaboration. Many DAM systems offer some form of workflow. But product companies must move quickly on inbound product information to review, approve, attribute, and get it into sales channels as soon as possible. MDM ensures that digital assets can be included in the same collaborative enterprise process that gets products “sales ready.”

You’ve invested in your digital assets. It’s time to do more than just organize them. The power of digital asset management within the MDM environment can add up to new sales in all your channels.

According to the PIA’s press release, “The technologies receiving this prestigious award have been judged as truly innovative and are expected to advance the performance of the graphic communications industry.”

As we’ve said several times in this space, print is alive and well. Our solution, Enterworks Enable, helps companies leverage and integrate their marketing content in print catalogs, Web sites, and other media as part of a complete multichannel marketing initiative.

We’re privileged to be a part of the continual evolution of the print industry through the development of best practices and new technologies that advance the state of the industry. And we’re thankful for this recognition by the PIA.

You don't have to go as far as Alvin Straight to find a site search solution.

So last night I went to the e-commerce site for his brand of mower to find a replacement.  It’s a well-regarded brand for tools and lawn care products, diStributEd by an internAtionally known retaileR, both in storeS and online.

One of the top-level navigation choices is “Lawn and Garden.”  Click that and you’re offered “Lawn Mowers” among many other related categories.

Click “Lawn Mowers” and you get… every product they offer that relates to “lawn mowers.”  Hundreds of products over many pages.  Air filters.  Pull cords.  Wheels.  Engine oil.  Replacement blades.  Drive belts.  And, oh yes, if you look long enough, you eventually find fully assembled lawn mowers.

(I’m surprised they didn’t offer DVDs of “The Lawnmower Man” and “The Straight Story.”)

(On the other hand, I wasn’t surprised to discover that the same thing happens when you use their keyword search tool to find “lawn mowers.”)

You can “narrow the results by brand,” so that you only have to fish through the hundreds of parts for a particular brand.  You can “sort by prices, high to low,” so that you can at least start with the couple dozen incredibly expensive mowers that you aren’t interested in.

But why put customers through that?  Why not make it easier for them to find what they’re actually looking for?

Ironically, I discovered that the best way to find this maker’s actual lawn mowers was to go to Google and search for this maker’s products.  It’s ironic because Google is now outsourcing long-tail search to Web merchants.

Here’s the deal.  If you’re going to use taxonomic or parametric search on your e-commerce site, you need a product information management (PIM) system to organize your product data to take advantage of those capabilities.

You need a flexible way to categorize products so that customers can find them where they expect to.  And you need to be able to manage your product data so a parametric search returns sensible results to begin with instead of every product that matches a specific parameter regardless of context or relevance.

According to a study conducted by interactive Web design firm Enlighten Inc., users who have inadequate site search results were three times as likely to leave the site. Which means you risk losing the sale if a customer (like me) abandons a product search when they don’t get the results they expect.

Want to learn more?  Request our free white paper:  Accelerate Your Site Search with Better Product Data.”

That’s when Mark Evans, director of content publishing and technology applications at United Stationers, will present “How To Manage Content and Cross-Media Campaigns Like A Rock Star” at eTail Palm Springs 2012, being held at the JW Marriott Desert Springs in Palm Desert, California.

Mark’s session will provide you with “actionable information and strategies to employ as soon as you return to the office.” A few topics Mark will cover at this 3:00 p.m. session:

• Effective content management from product and beyond
• Cross-media publishing and campaigns
• Innovation vs. cost cutting — persuasion is not a commodity
• Real-world case studies
• Driving change in a large corporation

United Stationers is a $4.8 billion retail distributor of office supplies and workplace products and the nation’s seventh largest multichannel merchant. Mark is a compelling speaker and an expert in leveraging marketing content in cross-media campaigns for greater retailer success.

We should know; Mark and United Stationers are Enterworks customers, using Enterworks Enable to manage and publish their content for “marketing campaigns that support customer retention, new customer acquisition and sales growth,” as a recent Internet Retailer article put it.

The article details how Enable lets United Stationers dynamically assemble marketing collateral and other sales material to help their retailers sell the products it supplies them. Using Enable, Mark’s team can

…manage the product information and associated rich media assets, like product photos and videos, for all of its products. [It can also] manage the brand assets of its resellers, such as their logos, messaging themes and local selling information so it can create marketing collateral that appears custom-made and targeted to retailers’ customers. It also can distribute the marketing campaigns on retailers’ behalf, such as via an e-mail blast to customers.

If you’re a retailer or retail distributor, you won’t want to miss Mark’s session.  Put his session — February 27 at 3:00 p.m. — on your eTail Palm Springs agenda and say hi for us when you see him.

During the holidays we had friends and family over to play games, including “Taboo.”  It’s a game where you have to guess a word based on your partner’s description of the word.  But your partner is forbidden from using the word itself or a list of related words.

My partner was a Gen Y’er (the boyfriend of one of my daughters). He started out describing the secret word as “an old-fashioned, obsolete way people once used to purchase products.”

Can you guess the secret word?  It was “Catalog.”*

I’ve gotten over people thinking things are obsolete or old-fashioned when I think there’s still plenty of life left in them.  But it did strike me as interesting that these attributes would immediately come to a Millennial’s mind when describing catalogs.  (It doesn’t seem too long ago that I blogged about my wife’s teen-age cousins gushing about the advantages of print catalogs.)

In fact, there was a vigorous point-counterpoint in DM News just last month on this very topic.  Nancy Sloane, principal at marketing agency Zoom IQ2, came down firmly in the “anti-print” camp for cost, performance, and environmental reasons.  While conceding the value of “small quantities of printed brochures and catalogs with a specific and purposeful distribution,” in general, “print catalogs are antiquated and should be eliminated.”

On the other hand, “any online marketing effort, especially in the retail space, is made more effective by having an ancillary print component,” according to Rob Reif, president of space broker Media Networks Inc. That was also the conclusion reached concerning the B-to-B space by Jonathan Bein and Jim Tenzillo of Real Results Marketing in a study conducted for Modern Distribution Management magazine:

Catalogs and e-commerce are critical individual components in distributors’ marketing arsenals. Distributors that have taken advantage of clear synergies between the two are reaping huge benefits, including cost savings in product information management and marketing. What’s more and, perhaps most important, they are making buying easier for their customers by allowing them to purchase when and how they want.

In another study for MDM magazine, these same authors asked rhetorically, “Is print dead? Do distributors need to stop producing paper catalogs?”  Their research revealed that “over 65 percent of distributors who produce a catalog for their customers find that catalogs are an effective channel.” They cited flexibility and branding effectiveness as being among the advantages of print.  In fact,

We believe that for many companies, print catalogs are in fact underutilized. They can provide competitive advantage in many sectors if properly utilized. Coordination with e-commerce programs can provide even greater return on catalog efforts.

On that note, Lois Brayfield, president of catalog consultancy J. Schmid & Associates, spells out strategies for leveraging print catalogs as a multichannel vehicle in a Multichannel Merchant magazine article.  By changing the way you think of your catalog as a marketing tool, Brayfield suggests, “your print catalog has a unique opportunity to engage at new levels while enhancing your online activities.”

The role of the print catalog continues to evolve in the omnichannel marketing environment.  It isn’t dead yet, and it certainly isn’t taboo.  Retail and B-to-B marketers would do well to “infuse new thinking as you evolve your own catalog program,” as Ms. Brayfield puts it.

(*The full list of “taboo” words for describing “Catalog”: Shop, Order, Merchandise, Buy, Mail.)

Modern Distribution Management (MDM) magazine has published the third in its series of articles examining the state of catalog marketing and e-commerce in wholesale distribution.

It includes results from a survey conducted for the article by MDM and Real Results Marketing.  These findings reveal the synergy between print catalogs and Web-based e-commerce.  For example:

• 85 percent of companies with a successful catalog believe that their catalog helps drive Web sales

• 73 percent of companies with a successful e-commerce channel believe that their catalog helps drive Web sales

The piece also details other benefits of an integrated e-commerce/print catalog strategy, such as a consistent brand image across all marketing channels and the power of the print catalog to support other sales channels.  A notable quote:

In most industrial businesses, when a computer is not available, catalogs are, and customers needing a product solution reach for the company’s with which they feel most confident. Again, the multi-channel marketing distributor has the edge in getting that business…

The customer call that begins with “Hi, I am looking at your website and I have your catalog opened to page …” is becoming more common. This may happen even more with customers who are not quite sure of the right solution.

The article also specifically calls out the value of product information management (PIM) systems for maintaining a central repository of vetted, sales-ready content for all marketing channels:

The information required on each product is similar whether it goes into a print catalog or onto the Web. Clearly, this provides enormous efficiency for distributors that use both Web and catalog channels.

Because it helps ensure complete and accurate product data from all suppliers in all channels, a PIM system is critical for effective multi-channel marketing.  The survey found that nearly three of four distributors with successful Web channels and 60 percent with successful catalog operations consider their product data to be highly complete; in addition, 82 percent of successful catalog distributors report high product data accuracy.

This piece is an outstanding summary of the value of sound product information and the ability to manage that information across all marketing channels. If you’re an MDM subscriber, you already have access to the full December 12 issue.  If you’re not, the issue can be purchased singly.  You can also read the article by itself at the Real Results Marketing Web site.

(This blog post should not be construed as an endorsement by Modern Distribution Magazine or Real Results Marketing of Enterworks offerings.)

We’re in the midst of several significant milestones in the history of the Internet, computing, and communications.

Ten years ago last month, Apple brought the iPod to market – the progenitor of the iPhone and iPad, and arguably the precursor to the explosion in mobile computing. In August, we passed the twentieth anniversary of Tim Berners-Lee publishing the first Web site.  And 20 years ago next month, the first Web server in the U.S. came online.

These milestones bring to mind some of my earliest experiences with leveraging online computing and communications for commerce.

In the early 1990s I worked for a large electronics component distributor (semiconductors, memory chips, etc.).  We had read this small article about Mosaic, the Internet, and a guy name Marc Andreessen at the University of Illinois.

There were no illustrations in the article to show what a “Web site” looked like, so we sketched a few pictures and faxed them to Marc to confirm that we were in the right ballpark.  We then created the HTML pages (in HTML 0.4) and launched our first site. This eventually led our company to become one of the first to offer B-to-B e-commerce over the Internet and one of the first companies, if not the first, to do Internet seminars (what are now called “Webinars”).

Fast forward nearly two decades, and it’s astonishing to consider that today we enjoy high-speed Internet connectivity and massive computing power almost wherever we go.  We were amazed in the late 1990s when we could first get on the wireless Internet at 4800 or 9600 bps.  Today we take multi-megabit access for granted in most urban and suburban areas.

It’s also remarkable to think that your cell phone has more computer power than all of NASA back in 1969 when it sent the first astronauts to the moon, and that the birthday card you receive in the mail that sings “Happy Birthday” has more computer power than all the Allied Forces of 1945. A recent blog post describes how the capabilities of the iPhone would have required a wheelbarrow or even a truck for mobility a generation ago.

What is important, endures.

But some things never change in e-commerce.  The key to our success on the Internet in the mid 90′s is the same as it is today.  And that’s the need for sound product data and related content.

Product information needs to be governed according to rigorous data quality standards and centrally managed for use by all people, applications, and channels to ensure customer satisfaction and accurate transactions.

And especially as businesses and consumers rely more on social and mobile media to gain immediate access to your product information, it’s essential that the information be clean, current and correct.

Product information is a relationship builder and the single most influential content for raising purchase intentions.  Due to the emergence of social media strategies, the primary job of a brand Web site is to provide product information.  The strength of new media is in referring customers back to the Web site to finalize the job of cementing consideration.