Technology continues to catalyze transformations around the globe in every vertical. Given the momentum at which technology is evolving in these uncertain times, enterprises must plan ahead, keeping track of the trends and innovation. This applies to every technology function in businesses, including product information management.
Product information management (PIM) has advanced remarkably. It has come a long way since its early days when only large organizations could afford to invest in advanced analytics tools to boost productivity and manage product data and data syndication. According to recent research by MarketsandMarkets, the PIM market is expected to grow from $12.2B to $23.8B by 2027, with a compound annual growth rate of 14.3% during the forecast period.
The rising need to manage increasing volumes of product data owing to steady growth in e-Commerce and retail businesses has resulted in the growing adoption of advanced PIM systems. It’s fair to say that as technology continues to evolve, it will be critical for enterprises of all sizes to stay abreast with the latest PIM trends.
Here are the key PIM trends that can help product information management
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More Personalized Product Experience Management
Customers today have access to a pool of information and data that can help them make better purchasing decisions. And as they become more connected digitally, customer expectations for a personalized experience are rising—proactive service, personalized interactions, and connected experiences across digital channels.
Unlike a few years, how customers interact with products is changing, making personalization the center of customer experience. From tailoring the content customers see on a business website to providing customized product recommendations, the need for personalization has paved the way for product experience management (PXM).
Product experience management (PXM) may be a relatively new term in the business world, but it’s quickly gaining traction. PXM is the practice of using customer data to create personalized experiences for individual users. In the coming years, enterprises will delve more into PXM to provide customers with a personalized, dynamic, and targeted experience — enhancing the experience and better managing store variations of items and product descriptions.
In addition, enterprises will further enrich product information with automation, so their customers get an idea of the product, its use, and how it can benefit them. More enterprises will deploy automation across different channels and platforms that customers might use to find products, enhancing the personalization capacity.
The future PIM systems will be analytics-enabled, making it easy to centralize, manage, and distribute product information, enabling businesses to deliver compelling and satisfying product experiences.
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Intelligent PIM Will be More in Demand
Today’s consumers expect companies to provide them with product information quickly and update it in real-time. However, providing that information to customers can be challenging if the product information is locked within files, spreadsheets, and other disconnected repositories.
Cloud-based PIM systems are a great asset to businesses that seek to manage an extensive product portfolio while adhering to the latest retail and e-commerce trends. More companies will be adapting cloud-based PIM platforms — deploying intelligent solutions to make better decisions and strategies at all stages of creating and managing a product catalog. The need to migrate to intelligent cloud-based PIM will be in a rapid phase in the coming year.
Intelligent product information management is like a database
Intelligent product information management is like a database with an advanced interface that allows businesses to enrich simple descriptions with precise characteristics and images if a company connects its solution to a PIM or digital asset management (DAM) tool. Such solutions make it easier to decide what information is needed and where data is required. Then enterprises can distribute the structured data to all their eCommerce channels with the help of in-built algorithms.
At the same time, a spreadsheet could be a simple table of an unstructured or semi-structured data source. Leveraging cloud-based intelligent product information management solutions can empower businesses to improve customer experience, save time and effort, and gain better revenue. In the coming days, enterprises must deploy cloud and automation to optimize business, creating an intelligent product data ecosystem.
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Increased Demand for AI/ML in PIM Data Management
The PIM industry is wrapping its head around the idea that AI/ML will upend the legacy data management and distribution practices completely — this is a good thing. The technology has been available for decades but has only recently become affordable. Deploying AI/ML-powered PIM systems will not only allow enterprises to centralize large volumes of data but also helps improve the quality of information to make it publish-worthy across channels.
The advanced technology will be seen revolutionizing the legacy PIM paradigms by bringing in accuracy and reliability. Moreover, leveraging AI/ML will help businesses to track customers’ search patterns and journeys and collect the data. Companies will use the tech to analyze the data to understand how customers consume the product information from the different touchpoints, allowing them to improve product information for different target groups and channels.
Implementing AI/ML helps enterprises get a bigger picture of customer needs and behavior, optimizing online business visibility and various sales and marketing methods more effectively. Delivering high-quality product information to customers will remain a top priority for organizations. AI/ML-enabled PIM solutions will be crucial for enterprises to achieve better insights and a competitive edge.
The confluence of automation, AI/ML, and conversational commerce is shaping new possibilities for businesses and revolutionizing how they manage and enrich product information. These PIM trends can change how brands optimize product information and automate operations, omnichannel distribution, and brand experience.
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Next-level Data Visualization and Product Data Analytics
Data visualization is an integral element amid the efforts to become data-driven. This ability to turn raw data into clear, comprehensive insights is helping businesses exceed competition with tangible business outcomes. With the development of modern techniques for analyzing large data sets, data visualization and product data analytics have become increasingly crucial in PIM.
To make sense of the vast amount of available data, data visualization and product data analytics are essential tools for making informed decision-making. These tools are more than just charts and graphs; they are the ways to find hidden insights and the key to making better-informed decisions. Data visualization and product data analytics can help reduce costs and improve customer satisfaction and loyalty by digging for customer behavior insights and patterns.
In the years to come, enterprises will be more focused on leveraging these visualization and analytics tools to understand trends, identify opportunities, and make decisions. In a nutshell, by understanding how to use these tools, enterprises can gain insights into product data they never thought possible. A business can track product performance, understand customer behavior, and make better product development and marketing decisions.
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More Complementary to Product Data Management
The role of PIM in product data management (PDM) has been and will remain central to the business. Even though PIM and PDM are separate systems designed to manage product information, the tools and processes they use to manage product information are changing along with it. As companies are still figuring out how to make the best out of their data, they see much value in combining the two to improve their workflows and meet their business goals.
As PIM and PDM combine they will bring out new integrated systems and capabilities that will allow the two systems to be used together more efficiently while encouraging best practices that help productivity and efficiency. One major trend the PIM industry will see in the next year is a shift towards more PIM-PDM integration, fastening the product development process, leading to faster time-to-market and cost reduction.
Product information management will become more complementary to product data management, a standard capability that often is part of or incorporated into the product life cycle management (PLM) market.
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A More Comprehensive Range of Master Data Domains
eCommerce data is nuanced and complex, originating from many upstream and downstream systems and sources. However, the data amassed around products, suppliers, locations, and customers are connected. Understanding these connections unlocks incredible intelligence that can be leveraged in transformative ways.
When companies deploy a single-domain solution, they will likely sign up for added cost, resource strain, and fragmentation later. That’s because the need to scale and evolve is inevitable. In the coming years, enterprises will be implementing multi-domain approaches, giving businesses scalability with a long-term solution to manage their data and add additional domains as their needs change.
PIM will start supporting a more comprehensive range of master data domains and related use cases to expand the scope of PIM beyond the core use case of catalog management to include master data domains such as customer, vendor, and product.
Exploring and Keeping Up with the PIM Trends
Technology is rapidly evolving; by understanding the potential impact of relevant trends in PIM, businesses can create a roadmap to help achieve strategic goals. Whether an established player in the industry or a startup, enterprises can chart a course aligned with these trends to become more relevant.
In days to come, the future of PIM will be more rooted in technologies like advanced analytics, AI/ML, and big data automation, playing a significant role in predicting customer behavior and enhancing personalized experiences.
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