Turning PIM practices into the art of crafting compelling product experiences

If you are an avid reader of this blog, have attended one of our conference sessions, or participated in our Akeneo PIM Summit, you have no doubt heard us say this before. We fundamentally believe that comprehensive product information and the ability to deliver a better product experience will become a critical component in retailer and eCommerce vendor strategies. Why? Because as brands and retailers compete hard for sales and market share, delivering a compelling product experience will become instrumental in increasing sales conversion rates and reducing product returns.

The proof behind this is in results reported by our customers:

• 4x increase in conversion rate,
• 40% reduction in returns, and
• many who report significant gains in catalog management productivity.

Product Experience Management (PXM) is not just about accurate and comprehensive product data.

Akeneo PIM provides the foundation and the workbench for marketers and catalog managers to assemble and organize data from various sources. Today we announced an update to Akeneo PIM and a new Akeneo Onboarder product. Together, this solution makes the product information management process simpler, more productive, and even more comprehensive. Now retailers and distributors can offer suppliers a secure, cloud-based PIM-like environment to provide product information from the most accurate source – the supplier! The combination of Akeneo PIM and Akeneo Onboarder will further streamline the process of getting accurate and comprehensive product data so retailers and distributors can, in turn, deliver it at the right time to the right place. With the time-savings and productivity this provides, marketing and eCommerce teams can now focus on creating an emotional connection with the buyer.

Consistency but no uniformity

Akeneo’s philosophy has always been to enable brands and retailers/distributors to drive consistency, but not necessarily uniformity. With our product experience management solution, you can build consistent product information but differentiate it based on sales channel, or locale. This contextual product information will be the future of PIM and the basis for PXM. Product experience management puts the customer at the center of every interaction and resulting transaction. As a result, the product experience you deliver significantly influences the customer experience.

A quote from our CEO Fred de Gombert sums up the importance of product experience management nicely:

As brands and retailers realize the power of personalized product experiences, PXM is going to emerge as a key category and practice and will add a new business dimension that was often overlooked in PIM. It makes product data even more strategic and helps marketers boost sales.

PXM can be a complex undertaking and its enablement will require purpose-built tools. We’ve got a lot more planned to enable our customers to make PXM a reality. We invite you to watch this space!