What's the next wave of PIM? Part 3

This is the third instalment of the series about the present and future of PIM. Readers are invited to take a look at the previous posts (here, here) and the interlude about the interplay of content and data.

PIM as a content and publishing platform

Longtime readers will be familiar with my approach to PIM. In short, PIM is a discipline, or at least the fundamental tenets of PIM are dictated by how businesses operate to bring products they sell to life, and not by technology vendors (that’s why it is a discipline). As such, it is a discipline that ties in a number of processes such as product introduction, product lifecycle management, supplier collaboration, customer conversion, etc. (being a discipline is a beautiful thing because it springboards innovation (but this is a different story…). Now, and this is the crux of the matter, to mature a product into a state where it can be sold across multiple customer touch points requires a systematic approach to developing and curating relevant and useful product content to make products part of the overall buying experience.
A few examples will exemplify this point.

Let’s take a look at Nike website which shows some interesting ideas though not all of them are fully realized. First off, I was looking for men’s shoes and I landed on “Nike Air Huarache”, which is the name of the style.
Defining a Style as a template is an important first step to create a container that will be filled with content. Each style has multiple variations. In fact, you can select the color of your shoes from within the “style” page (hint: take a look at the style number pattern on the page).
Images, description, benefits, more technical specification, is structured content not data. In addition, reviews are an important piece of content externally created and attached to products!

Another important feature is the management of collections. Again, a collection is a container of products for a specific purpose i.e. defining a theme. For example, “Limited Release”, or “Nike Air”, are collections of products to fulfill a specific purpose. Ideally, there would be content curated ad hoc for a collection, such as a video to engage consumers in the purpose of the collection. Also, products in the collection may have additional content attached to them on top of the standard product content. Eventually, you may want a collection to be a unit that can be measured against a revenue forecast.

Finally, Nike also sports the concept of “launch calendar”. Cool idea to create addiction to the brand. Shoes that are not still available for sales, can be marketed. A product content platform would allow to make the information about future products already available. This feature is not fully realized by Nike but the idea is nice.

These are just a few examples of how a proper content platform enables creatives and marketers to increase customer experience. By the way, Nike should improve some processes to better handle their product content ;-)

Obviously, PIM is more than that. Imagine to localize that content, to create product content specific for markets. Or to publish content on the increasing number of marketplaces that have their own “template” to publish products e.g. attributes, taxonomies, etc.

Without PIM all this would be the worst nightmare ever for brand marketers and retailers.

An holistic view
Slicing the PIM market is not an easy feat and the risk of oversimplification is real. However, there is a trend that I spotted. This space does not permit to deeply elaborate on this trend but a few strokes will do the trick ;-)

Typically, traditional vendors tend to target big businesses which generally suffer from a lots of data pains. Legacy is the enemy of these businesses so the top priority is to setup governance around the fundamental data domains such as product. In this scenario, a solid MDM/PIM is what you need. It also helps to fix the problem at the upstream of their value chain e.g. supplier collaboration.

Another family of PIM vendors are characterized by an interesting mix of data governance, content management (often not very sophisticated though), and a good and in some cases great end-to-end process coverage i.e. from product ranging in collaboration with suppliers, category management, content authoring, to product catalogue syndication across various channels. Their target market is still big business with notable exceptions. Often, traditional vendors that have embarked on a road map for innovation, land on this hybrid land.

Emerging PIM vendors are just that. They have the luxury to learn from what has happend in this space over the last decade. They position their PIM in the 'content marketing' context. They are focused on specific industries such as food, apparel, department stores, etc. basically, they are great at some use cases. As a result their solution is simpler. They inherently have the ability to live in broader ecosystems. These PIMs are seen as 'content machines' to feed marketplaces, websites, portals, etc. Creatives, marketers, and publishers just love them. 
In the next and final installment of this series, I will expand on some key aspects of this brand of PIM.

In the meantime, I tried to 'draw up' some of my scribbles that resulted in the following diagram, which I like to believe is self-explanatory :-)

Use-case driven PIM vendor market segmentation