In 2008, Steve Jobs confidently dubbed the MacBook Air the “world’s thinnest notebook”.
What followed was a unified marketing campaign with bold imagery of Apple’s new product. Some ads featured the laptop slipped in a Manila envelope while others showed a hand gently holding it with a light grip. There were even images of the computer floating in midair.
To this day, the product’s messaging remains aligned with Jobs’ statement. Whether you’re shopping on Apple’s website or a third-party marketplace, you’ll find the MacBook Air described as the “thinnest, lightest notebook”.
Brands like Apple are known for providing consumers with a consistent user experience across all platforms. However, offering that level of consistency across various channels may seem overwhelming for brands that lack the same resources as Apple.
That’s why retail businesses turn to product information management (PIM) software. PIM tools help brands maintain a unified experience by centralizing e-commerce businesses’ product information. This allows brands to manage product information and ensure consistency across sales channels.
Product information management (PIM) refers to the process of managing information that markets and sells a brand’s products through various sales channels.
As the name suggests, product information management is the technology used to centralize all underlying information about a company’s products. PIM systems also manage any subsequent modifications or changes to those products, such as new packaging or product marketing language.
By using a PIM platform, everyone in your organization can access the same up-to-date information and collateral on any given product. This mitigates the risk of accessing different and potentially inaccurate versions of product descriptions floating around within individual departments.
While PIM has been around for decades, the role of PIM software has expanded considerably. Early PIM systems tracked basic information like unit measurements and specifications, whereas modern systems include a wide range of associated assets, including images, videos, and text descriptions. This level of product information within a PIM system is now central to the shopping experience for retailers like Amazon and other online distribution channels.
PIM systems also work as a workflow engine across a range of departments as a means to syndicate product content across an ever-expanding array of retailers. In essence, PIM systems act as a single source of truth for product information across an organization.
PIM tools are often confused with other product-focused software systems, including:
Product information management has its challenges, but that’s where PIM software comes into play. Instead of attempting to manually manage product information, you can simply utilize a PIM system to automate these complicated processes.
PIM software helps brands solve common product information management challenges, including:
Retailers rely on their digital presence to communicate their product and service offerings to consumers. This means it’s critical for modern brands to ensure their product pages across all sales channels are always updated with the most current information.
Brands use PIM software to manage all of their product info, from item dimensions and specifications to key marketing points and style guides. You can think of PIM software as a company's home base for all things product-related.
Although features vary from software to software, the following are the types of product content that generally live within a PIM system.
PIM systems include information that is directly related to a brand’s products. PIM solutions offer product information management for universal product codes (UPC), stock-keeping units (SKU), manufacturer part number (MPN), model name, and article numbers.
More in-depth product data can be stored in a PIM system, including product specifications such as age, group, materials, product dimensions, package dimensions, weight, color, and warnings. Design information, such as designer notes or style guides, can also be added to your PIM.
PIM systems also display suggested marketing messaging, including short product descriptions, marketing copy, and warranty notes. Marketers can easily utilize PIM solutions to share customer personas, keywords, and SEO-related information.
You can store rich content in a PIM system, such as reasons to buy, bullet points, individual product stories, videos, GIFs, and images. This information helps explain a product’s benefit or how it should be used.
PIM tools also store pricing info, user reviews, and testimonials so salespeople can easily access these resources during the sales process.
A product information management system can pull information from various data sources to store in one single location. PIM systems are great solutions for multichannel retailers due to their ability to create product language and descriptors for specific channels or locations.
A PIM tool can store text in various languages and adapt to regional currency systems to create a unified customer experience. Similarly, you can access it to view similar and complementary products. This is key for employees to easily find product catalogs, product relationships, and product categories in order to assist customers.
There are a multitude of benefits to using a PIM platform. However, the core functions of one are geared toward allowing brands to better execute across channels and provide experiences for customers that drive purchases.
A PIM platform acts as a central repository for all product content assets across sales channels. This is especially important with online retail channels constantly changing requirements and merchandising options for brands. This function also provides the ability to enforce content enrichment and accuracy within an organization.
Centralizing product content allows multiple teams who may be working with different systems for content production to get those assets in a single place for proper merchandising. Data can be added from multiple sources, such as an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, through integrations.
The ability to create and enrich a range of product content, including SEO tags, enhanced content, and product FAQs, is a critical piece of functionality within a PIM tool.
This allows brands to ensure quality and accuracy for every product. Centralized product information also helps marketing and sales teams effectively build product experiences that resonate with customers, and do so consistently over time.
Brands use PIM tools to get their product content to every digital channel where it’s appropriate while meeting the unique requirements of each channel. Potential syndication endpoints include retail websites and marketplaces, digital catalogs, and advertising platforms.
Companies that use an omnichannel marketing approach work to engage customers across various sales channels. This means that establishing a cohesive brand is incredibly important. PIM tools make physical and digital product content management easier and allow brands to quickly make changes and launch content across channels.
PIM solutions mitigate the risk of inaccurate product information displaying on the various channels your brand utilizes, such as incorrect pricing or specifications. You can also convert measurement values to other units of measurement based on where you're selling. This helps ensure that customers receive a consistent and accurate user experience across all channels.
When it comes to omnichannel commerce, there’s no such thing as a standardized dataset. What is relevant to a business buyer through a digital catalog is going to be different than what's relevant to an end consumer through a direct-to-consumer site. This means your data model has to be able to adapt to the changing needs of each market that you participate in.
PIM systems are built on relational databases that are focused on reconciling core product data from multiple internal sources into a master record, which is highly valuable.
Using a PIM solution makes it easier to launch products or expand to new sales channels with efficient data management and automated workflows. A PIM platform makes it easy to access up-to-date product info for marketing and sales teams alike.
Marketers can combine product data in a PIM system to help drive campaigns with personalized messaging and targeting. Plus, all of the needed assets, such as images, videos, and messaging, can be found right there within the PIM platform.
Similarly, sales teams can find important materials via a PIM system. Sales reps can access approved product information via it to create custom presentations, without the risk of miscommunicating details to prospective buyers.
It's also important to drive data quality against market requirements, not just against internally defined requirements. Successful brands need both. By enabling more people within the organization to contribute, and opening up different methods to help them contribute, you can help drive improved speed to market.
Brands can invest in a very large, expensive database and think that they have data governance in place, but still won’t be there because the channel data is out in the wild and ungoverned. This creates a lot of risk for you as a brand, and it also creates a lot of duplication and inefficiencies, ultimately slowing down time to market.
In-app insights are a must for PIM solutions to support any commerce initiative. These tools are invaluable because they give you things like SEO keyword recommendations, brand compliance assessments, and buy box reporting. All of these things help you keep pace with the market, tell you what will be most effective, and help you detect the gaps so that you can correct them.
Importantly, analytics should be integrated throughout the PIM application in order to really operationalize those learnings. For example, clicking on a given suggestion within the application and creating an assigned task. If you can't do that, it makes it very hard to optimize continuously.
With the growth of online retailers, digital channels have become a buyer's best friend, and research bears this out as well. In today’s marketplace, if a product isn’t showing up at the top of search results, it might as well not even exist.
As buyers explore their seemingly endless options online, what's really resonating is high-quality content like video, images, 360 product visualizations, and other types of rich media.
The market has shifted dramatically because of these changes and offline leaders are struggling online. Most companies, even household names, strain to apply the same level of discipline online as they do offline.
The question is: what separates brands struggling to keep up from brands that are winning their category? A core component of achieving these goals is the technology brands use to manage product content.
Take suncare brand Supergoop!, for example. Like many modern brands, Supergoop! sells direct-to-consumer via their e-commerce platform and also employs a multichannel retail strategy to sell across different sales channels. The brand’s cross-selling strategy requires consistent messaging and product information to maintain a seamless user experience.
Sources: Supergoop! (left), Sephora (middle), Amazon (right)
The above image features the product pages for one of the brand’s most popular items on the Supergoop! website, Sephora’s mobile app, and Amazon’s online marketplace. As you can see, this product’s visual representation is consistent on all platforms, making it easy for consumers to identify the product and get familiar with the brand.
Similarly, the image below demonstrates how uniformed the brand’s selling points are across all of Supergoop!’s product pages. In this instance, each page mentions that the product is “invisible” and intended to be used “every day” – a consistent message for the brand no matter where the consumer is shopping.
Sources: Supergoop! (left), Sephora (middle), Amazon (right)
So what does Supergoop!’s brand consistency have to do with product information management systems?
Supergoop! likely utilizes a PIM system to ensure product descriptions and assets are current on every sales channel. In theory, the brand’s employees are able to easily access and update the above product information in one centralized location: a PIM platform.
But the benefits of a PIM solution don’t just apply to B2C products – the same goes for B2B buying. B2B buyers are effectively consumers in their modern lives, and they want to be able to quickly explore products, find the most up-to-date catalog, compare options, and have accurate product specifications.
Even in the post-purchase phase, buyers are going to ask for product care or troubleshooting information. That, too, has to be readily available to your sales reps.
Product information management software can help you manage your e-commerce product information and ensure your brand maintains consistent, accurate product data across all sales channels.
Brands should seek a PIM solution so they can collect and distribute their most current product data. A good PIM system automates workflow so you can focus on your brand’s product.
To be included in the PIM software category, a system must:
*Below are the four leading retail POS systems from G2's Summer 2021 Grid® Report. Some reviews may have been edited for clarity.
Akeneo is a PIM software that helps brands deliver a compelling and consistent user experience across all sales channels. Akeneo is an open-source PIM and product data intelligence features help improve product data quality and simplifies catalog management.
“The creation of attributes, families, categories, assets including images, videos, 3D-Models, and PDFs are a straightforward to-do in Akeneo PIM. The import & export capabilities meet the demand of the majority of end-user needs – especially the export with filter options. Plus, the support from Akeneo's helpdesk, customer success manager, and product team is instrumental in helping resolve any day-to-day issues that might arise from our PIM.”
- Akeneo PIM Review, Jagdish (Jack) R.
“Some attributes are "global" and not specific by locales. In our case, the attribute is visible on the front end. Also, it’s not easy to find information and why some products are not active on some domains. It will be helpful to have the possibility to create automatic reports for some points we need to follow up.”
- Akeneo PIM Review, Géraldine B
An agile PIM system, Sales Layer allows users to create personalized product experiences on the market. Sales Layer PIM is a single source tool that empowers businesses to host all of their product information as well as automatically update products across all connected channels.
“What I like most about Sales Layer is that we can gather all product information in one place, but with the specificity of each department. This is very important for a multi-channel sales company to have the same access to update items. On the other hand, we don't have any loss of data since every change and every user who has intervened is recorded.”
- Sales Layer PIM Review, Stephanie V.
“As a PIM, I expected some functionality about forms creation and, at the moment, there is none. We managed to solve this problem using third-party software but in the future, I expect this as native functionality. We use several tools to update our data and it will be helpful to have the possibility to call external APIs using a button on the product page.”
- Sales Layer PIM Review, Daniel V.
The Syndigo Content Experience Hub lets businesses manage and distribute product information and digital assets from one single platform. Syndigo ensures consistent product information across all e-commerce and store partners.
“This is the first time our organization has a one-stop-shop tool that integrates not only standard webpage content but also gives us the ability to create enhanced content, manage our data accuracy, and gather insights on how our products are performing. The migration from our previous providers to Syndigo was supported extremely well by various members of the Syndigo team.”
- Syndigo Review, Tammi H.
“The platform shows our product readiness score as 100% but it also says we're missing required taxonomy for all of our items. Every time I look for the missing required taxonomy, I'm unable to see what's missing. I'm also unable to determine if our recipients are not subscribing to our data because of this. Plus, we think the price is a little much for what we need.”
- Syndigo Review, Matt T.
Plytix is one of the most popular PIMs on the market for small and medium-sized businesses. Plytix boasts a user-friendly interface, cost-effective price point, and focus on customer satisfaction.
“Plytix is a great product, it's not full of bloat and just makes sense. It's been a breeze to also train users who've never even heard of a PIM before too! The team and support network when onboarding and aftercare are second to none. They also have an excellent system where you can make suggestions and vote on product development on their roadmap. Most importantly, it has brought order to chaos and has made our lives so much easier. The product, not the process, is now the center of our business again.”
- Plytix Review, Andrew B.
“It's great that files can be linked to various products and attributes. Unfortunately, the file storage itself does not keep the category of the products and gets a little messy if you aren't careful. In addition, you can't just open files that are linked to an attribute. If you want to open it you need to go to the file’s header of the specific product. There is the option to create a PDF template, but due to its limitations, I can't recommend it.”
- Plytix Review, Lucas U.
There’s a reason the MacBook Air has a strong reputation for being the thinnest, lightest notebook: strong, unified product assets and a cohesive user experience.
Remember, it all relates to the buyer's journey. Your PIM platform should act as a way to craft product experiences for your buyers. After all, a seamless journey is what consumers are demanding online.
Differentiated experiences demand content, ecosystem connectivity, and retail analytics to work together. Now that you know what product information management can do for you, your brand can easily and continually create unified product experiences that matter for your buyers.
Take control of a product’s lifetime - from concept to delivery. Learn to sell faster and smarter with the help of product lifecycle management software.
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