How to Customize Product Data by Brand, Market, and Channel
A brand manufacturer's product data serves many purposes. It provides technical details across internal teams. It helps the brand’s leadership plan. Product data is also the information people consume to decide whether they'll buy a product.
It's this last use of product data that’s most important. For brands, though, product information management gets even more layered at that step. Product data has to be optimized for different sales and marketing channels individually. The product data used on Facebook is different from the data used on an e-commerce website. In each case, the product has to remain recognizable and equally compelling as the product data molds itself to different platform requirements.
Product data has to be optimized for different markets. Maybe there are different sustainability requirements between jurisdictions. Or maybe different markets show unique trends in what people like to buy.
Then, there's even more product information management that has to be done for separate brands. Many organizations manage different brands under one company's umbrella, like Amber Engine’s client Sherrill Furniture. This adds a final layer to product information management requirements, and brands quickly become overwhelmed.
From the customization of product information management solutions to the implementation of a multifaceted data optimization strategy, manufacturers can follow these steps to customize product data by channel, market, and brand.
How to Customize Product Data—in General
A single piece of product data is like a solitary note wavering in a theater. Then, the notes pile on, and a song ignites in arpeggios of a melody. Each following note represents another piece of product data. The complexity of the notes—or data—together quickly draws the audience in.
On top of the melody, another instrument starts to hum, and then another, and another. Each instrument is like another endpoint for product data. Each has its own notes on its own sheet of music, and it all must ring harmoniously together.
Customizing your product data is how each instrument knows its part and the whole symphony finds harmony.
Just as a symphony demands this synchronization, customizing product data demands the same. That means ensuring clarity, consistency, and appeal to the end consumer across channels, markets, and brands. A symphony does this with its sheet music, and it also requires a conductor. In product data, the clean, complete, and compelling product data represents your sheet music. And your product information management (PIM) software is your conductor.
How to Customize Product Data for Sales Channels
Sales channels are the intersection of a brand's path to consumers and consumers' paths to a brand.
Some sales channels are direct to consumer. Others are indirect. There are many types of distributors, retailers, and online marketplaces that brands today partner with. Customizing the product data for each of those channels is key to the success of a brand's products on each channel.
These are the steps to manage your efforts in customizing product data for sales channels…
Step 1: Gather each channel's requirements
A brand must be clear on the product data requirements for each sales channel that its product information will be on. Different channels require different product attributes. Those attributes will also have different formats and character requirements.
The different channels will also appeal to different audiences of consumers. It's a brand's responsibility to establish—with the channel management team or with its own market research—what consumers tend to use that channel. Customization requirements for product data also include optimizations related to each channel's users.
Step 2: Assess the data
Think of the channel requirements you gathered as a magnifying glass. Now slide that magnifying glass over your product data. This is where product data analytics will give you an overview of what has to be done to make the product data meet the requirements for each channel.
Step 3: Delegate filling in the gaps
Product information management involves everyone and every team that touches product data.
- Product development has product specifications in CAD or design software
- The marketing department has product page titles, descriptions, images, and video
- The warehouse has product information related to shipping priority and logistics
Delegate filling in product data gaps, correcting or enriching product data to the people and departments who have the data that's needed. This kind of collaboration is made possible with user-by-user permissions and real-time updates to one global pool of product data. And that global pool is made possible with a next-gen PIM.
Step 4: Quality assurance
The next-gen PIM also provides built-in data scoring. Brands can personalize their own parameters for what product data needs to have. Then, each real-time update will move the needle on the quality score for each product.
Step 5: Export and distribute
This final step is downright satisfying after all the work that went into it.
Exporting product data for each specific sales channel is how product data is finally delivered or uploaded to each sales channel. In the next-gen PIM, brands can export product information to any template for the channels they manage.
How to Customize Product Data for Different Markets
Today's consumers can research products and make purchase decisions on their own based on whatever criteria they desire. Their options are global. Put it together, and consumer purchase power is greater today than ever.
Brands have the obligation of speaking compellingly to consumers. To compel them, brands need to get specific about what consumers want. Market-to-market, many consumer expectations change.
Here's how a brand customizes product data for different markets…
Step 1: Market research
Start with market research. What is the landscape of competition in each market? What products sell best in each market? What are the legal requirements for product sales in each market? The particulars of each market guide brands in the following steps.
Step 2: Make some decisions
Based on the opportunities and challenges in each market, take a hard look at product data next. Which products should be added to a market? Which products should be packaged together or sold individually? How should product descriptions, names, and other product page information change? List these details.
Step 3: Delegate the changes
Once again, the customization of product data can (and should) be delegated to the people and teams that deal most closely with the data being changed. User-by-user controls of who can see and change what is managed inside the next-gen PIM software.
When everyone moves forward together, a brand’s engine really gets going.
Step 4: Quality assurance
Brands set their own parameters for what product data is considered complete, accurate, and optimized. The next-gen PIM can apply those standards to the whole product data catalog in product data quality scores. This makes product information management objective and easy to execute.
Step 5: Export and distribute
Exporting product data for each market is as simple as adding a custom attribute to your product information management (PIM) software. Once you can sort products by what market the data is optimized for, you can easily export product data for each market individually.
How to Customize Product Data for Different Brands
This one's tricky. Not every company deals with this one.
Maybe your brand has a different name and identity in different markets. Or maybe you manage different brands because you've segmented products into different classes. Maybe you've acquired other brands, like in this case study about Sherrill Furniture.
If you’re managing product data for multiple brands, what does product information management look like?
The PIM software you use is essential here. Product data can be managed in independent lists that are either dynamic or static. As you dig into product data analytics, you can manage product data that’s segmented or overlapping across multiple brands with just another custom attribute.
That's the big differentiator between a next-gen product information management and legacy PIMs, mind you: custom attributes.
The steps to make these changes follow the same steps as customizing for managing your product data in general, starting with clean-up to identify which products go where.
Let Product Data Work Harder for You Across Channels, Markets, and Brands Product data analytics sits at the core of managing a product catalog across channels, markets, and brands. These are the layers of product information management because of the new changes in data requirements for digital sales.
Brands today know that product catalog data has grown. It's more than just a product description and the design specifications these days. Product data now includes data optimized for every endpoint that data is seen on in the sales funnel. Product data also includes new product images, videos, and countless other attributes.
Remember: consumers today have more buying power than ever. Product data customization has therefore become essential for any brand wanting to be seen by its target audience.
Product data can be customized to attract and delight each consumer at every endpoint. Take your own tour of how the next-gen PIM sets you up for success.