The basics of Product Information Management System (PIM): WHY should you use it, and HOW to use it

Recently, the number of companies implementing PIM increased drastically. The marketing environment accelerated the speed of PIM development.

Support Modern Consumer Complexity:
Television and printed media used to be the dominant information launcher, people followed and relied on these resources for collecting product information. But nowadays, customers are the active role players. The ubiquity of the internet and smartphones helps customers collect information and compare products across a wide range of channels, including social media or review sites. In this case, keeping the consistency of product information of different platforms will be an essential requirement for the sellers. PIM serves as the vital link here, synchronizing data across all channels to meet the demands of a complex marketplace.

Deal with the New Style of Product Life Cycle:
Product lifecycles are shrinking every year due to the rapid technological innovation. The sellers have to distribute their products accurately and speedily to adapt to the vigorous market change. While PIM streamlines the processes of product management and information update, significantly accelerating time-to-market.

Why can sellers distribute the product so quickly after implementing PIM? It is because the data is well-managed, you can search what you want easily, renew the information promptly, the “trivial” advantages help sellers to embark the promotional campaign and distribute the product much faster. PIM is a platform that gives you an efficient workflow.

Highly Synergetic to Omnichannel Strategy:
Omnichannel Strategy is critical in the decade of digitalization: customers purchase what they want not only in physical stores, but also on e-commerce sites, mobile apps, and social media. It is a taboo for marketing activity that product information on all the platforms are disparate which greatly affect the credibility of a company. But using PIM can unify all the information in all platforms to reduce the risk of data discrepancy and brand damage.

Beneficial for Overseas Business Activities:
The global firm may be the group which requires PIM the most. The reasons are simple: the number of product data they are processing will be double of the local firm. Besides, a product needs multiple versions with different language, currency, law and regulations information based on the requirements of different countries or regions.

But PIM is the best solution for the challenges. Even if the product data increased drastically, or there are differences of currency or regulations, PIM can still help you to manage the data properly. And like what has been mentioned, PIM is capable of processing multilingual information, users can create multiple localized versions of information promptly and distribute it right on time. Once you implement PIM, you do not need to deal with the global information by manual anymore.

We have introduced some remarkable merits of PIM, and there is another question: who is/are recommended to implement PIM? In fact, PIM is a strong solution for every company. However, we strongly advice the stakeholders/companies below implement PIM:

• Global Firms, or the companies who are likely to expand their overseas market
• Companies that managing tremendous amount of product information
• Sellers who have to update their product information rapidly
• Businessmen who are approaching omnichannel strategy

So, what is the best way to use the PIM system? In fact, integrating PIM with DAM is the most preferable option. Digital assets, encompassing promotional videos and product images, must be centrally managed to ensure operational efficiency and brand image strengthening. Which DAM is a user-friendly and an optimized solution for managing your critical data systematically.

On the other hand, the product information stored on PIM will be distributed to different EC channels and social media platforms ultimately, for any kinds of promotional campaigns. It included not only text information but also the media data. However, PIM is NOT a solution for managing media assets. In other words, users have to use another solution other than PIM if they need media data management, and monitor two separate systems at the same time for managing both text and media information. As a result, unnecessary workload for data mapping and information distributions increased and it affects productivity and product quality.

Thus, rather than using PIM solely, integration of PIM and DAM is important, so that both product information/specifications and media data can be managed collectively, facilitating asset reuse and information localization. As both text and media information mapped automatically, it degraded the risk of wrong information while launching the promotions, and you no need to combine the output data from different systems manually. The fusion of PIM and DAM is a core pillar of marketing activity and a decisive move to strengthen market competitiveness.

CIERTO is the homemade product of VPJ which includes both DAM and PIM systems. The most compatible point of CIERTO is the seamless integration of DAM and PIM, that images, documents and Adobe data on DAM can be mapped with PIM directly on a single platform and system. It reduced the redundant workload of your team, and ensured all the stakeholders can check the updated information as all the changes on DAM or PIM will be shown instantly.

Finally, we introduced the purpose of PIM and recommended you to have integration with PIM and DAM. A good use for both systems can streamline your workflow, and ensure an accurate and successful promotional campaign. If you are interested in CIERTO DAM and PIM, feel free to contact us.