The retail world is decidedly digital. Our clients have shared their challenges to managing product data content at e-commerce retailers and ensuring that it is compliant, effective and helps drive sales. We hear you! And we have chronicled your challenges in our e-book that addresses Ten Pain Points in E-commerce to Overcome.
Challenge #10 is that finding partners to help is the key.
There is no question that digital commerce is here to stay. It is growing exponentially and contributing to overall omnichannel revenues for manufacturers in multidimensional ways. Whatever the challenges, there is no turning away from the end goal. As one client put it to us bluntly: “We have to win at digital! Can you help us?”
Even as many of the category and brand management tasks associated with the digital shelf fall to internal teams, the need for savvy external partners is growing. This is particularly true as it relates to optimizing the content on the PDP that will make or break consumer choices on the digital shelf.
In this exploration of e-commerce pain points, we established the challenges of retailers making the rules complex and unique across platforms. We found that there ARE guidelines for success and partners providing software platforms to facilitate the population of text-based content that nominally is compliant with e-tailer requirements, but not so in the world of digital product imagery. We identified the reality that there are often hundreds of pieces of deficient content to fix every day in the life of the e-marketer across scores of online trading partners. And mistakes can be costly, if not fatal.
The gap in the marketplace seems to fall in that subjective area of making product visuals “compelling.” No resources are defining what characteristics and elements of product visuals are either conveying benefits that propel your brand and product forward and which introduce behavioral barriers that stop shoppers in their tracks on the digital path to purchase.
Research tells us that 80% of all purchase behaviors are driven by shelf impressions rather than the cognitive processing of text. As challenge #5 articulated: Consumers buy what they see. And if what they see on the digital shelf isn’t conveying benefits, worse introducing barriers, “subjective” criteria for decision support relating to image optimization is never a recipe for success. Decisive KPIs for optimizing visual content is ideal, with a scorecard for predictive image optimization based on reliable normative data. Few partners can provide that.
Additionally, not all image-related norms are created equal since what works for cosmetics is not necessarily optimal for influencing shopper choice in pet food on the digital shelf. The partner who provides you with trustworthy recommendations for digital image optimization on the PDP will need category expertise across CPG category groups and a historical understanding of how packs perform on the physical shelf. This is essential to providing truly reliable guidance that moves the needle in digital shopper growth.
Then there is speed, cost, and the need for always-on access to effortlessly understood actionable recommendations that can be delivered at scale and implemented quickly and efficiently. Providing this requires the application of powerful computational capabilities, leveraging image recognition AI technology that can measure PDP image content against established norms rapidly and reliably.
Are there partners who can provide this ideal in the fast-moving timeframes of PDP content management?
The Solution? Flash.PDP™!
Behaviorally is the leading digital partner to help brands drive shopper growth. We developed a solution that leverages visual recognition AI, knowing that these challenges exist for our clients. E-commerce teams who want to win in digital retail can take advantage of our extensive database of shopper marketing content, our unique behavioral framework, and decades of category expertise with Flash.PDP – an always-on alert system to identify and optimize product images on the PDP that will convert to sales and drive shopper growth. It addresses category and retailer-specific metrics that provide easy, efficient ways to monitor and optimize images that will lead to increased sales.
To learn more, contact a Behaviorally digital retail expert today here.
