Customer Engagement Through Product Data - Helping a Cooker Tell Stories
If you currently have a mental image of a cooking range perched on a stool, storybook open and alongside a child tucked into bed in rapt attention – this isn’t quite what we mean.
The power of storytelling in emotionally engaging consumers is well understood by brands and their marketers, but what about the power of the product itself? How easy is it to become emotionally invested in a kettle, for example, or in a cooker? Some might be surprised to discover that, with the right tools at hand, the answer is – very.
Product brand stories are critical, particularly in sectors where that product is seen as functional or the market highly commoditized. Technological innovations mean that comparing mechanical items purely on spec alone results in a fairly homogenous landscape. Marketers need to build in that product’s story to engage and stand out in the marketplace.
Take the cooker, for example. A broad story might be that it is at the heart of the home, turning out family meals day in day out. But delving into its segmented stories, there is so much more to discover. This is exactly the approach taken by BSH , a world leader in the home appliance market, as it chose to implement integrated content management , enabling product stories to come to life across a spectrum of target markets and customers.
Cultural differences, for example, lend new dimensions to the cooker’s brand story. The wok burner will clearly be of more importance in certain cuisines. A small, finely balanced burner ideal for an espresso coffee pot will be a key selling point for other tastes. For those of us in countries with a conscientious approach to climate change, the product’s sustainability credentials will loom large.
So when this approach is taken, what this means is that instead of just a range of brands, products, variants and price points to market across multiple channels, segments and geographies, there are now also different product stories to be told across those same channels, segments, and geographies. It’s a content explosion.
The challenge becomes exponentially larger if companies are to take advantage of the growing trend towards UGC, or user generated content. Platforms where consumers can express their opinions of products are growing all the time, from review sites to social media. Surveys even suggest that potential buyers trust customers’ own images over the polished versions created by the brand. Realism and authenticity sell.
Naturally, companies are keen to harness the power of UGC by linking to, reposting, or even hosting it. But, to do so effectively means being able to find, store, and organize this information – and do it over and over again at speed. Systems with embedded AI that can recognize and automatically tag and sort this content are therefore increasingly in demand.
Equally, this means that omnichannel is king and integration is key - something that is almost impossible to achieve if the organization is siloed, either culturally, physically, or technologically. With the right systems in place, geographical location and preference of channel are no barrier, but centralization is a must. Without being able to see what assets are available, how they interact with other properties, what elements they possess, and how they can be applied and modified across channels, the ideal of achieving contextualized, varied, and personalized content is simply out of reach.
If the prospect of integrating such a huge wealth of assets across an ever-growing range of channels and platforms seems daunting, we recommend delving into digital asset management (DAM) expert, Theresa Regli’s latest paper on integrated content management, Compellingly Connected.
Sponsored by censhare, this paper walks you through the basics of how content management systems like digital asset management (DAM), product lifecycle management (PLM) and product information management (PIM) can work together to identify and centralize the whole company’s assets, allowing teams to collaborate on a much more holistic – and effective – content strategy.
Download your copy of Compellingly Connected here.