Since one year the world of customer engagement has moved toward the digital transformation. Despite the horrible consequences of the COVID19 in the world, on the customer side a lot of habits have changed, The approach to engage the customers by mainly brands had to move faster in a very short time. The impact of COVID19 in the digital strategy is varied for large brands in retail or CPG, independents and of course online stores.
Due to the numbers of lockdowns customers switched to nearly 100% e-commerce. The customer experience and personalisation are even more important today as we can see in the excellent survey from Nuxeo :
When it comes to start this strategy, the DAM system is the very first milestone to consider and not trying to play with something that looks like as a DAM but will not be able to play the enterprise role.
In this ecosystem the DAM is much more than the single source of truth. Yes the DAM is the foundation to streamline the content in all the organisation, from the PIM, CRM and the CMS.
Business requirements for retailers and CPG :
- Managing a lot of rich content from large Tiff to 4K video or 3D files.
- CPG Brands have to manage complex files with color accuracy, PDF with spot colours and transparency or complex Adobe CC files.
- Data is KING ! Every retailer needs to merge their PIM data model and custom metadata alongside the standard XMP. The metadata for every retailer is changing very often to adapt the strategy of their products line.
- Advanced and custom workflow (BPM) to manage the approval between all stakeholders with different roles and profiles and able to track their projects.
- B.I to measure the performance of their marketing campaigns beyond activity report of their assets
Which DAM system to tackle challenges ?
1 - A DAM system is an engine for the assets and the metadata. During a POC you need to stamp the vendor with your own files through demo scenarios, with bulk ingests and check the performance of the system in the BO and the FO. Scalability is a key for such markets. We know retailers playing with 30 000 of Raw files per day, with 50 To of storage and thousands of users connected. this is the reality !
2 - Today most DAM system cannot support complex and very large files. It is not all about jpeg files but complex PDF packaging for CPG, or very large Tiff files for retailers. At the top 4K video is the KING to engage customers and 3D files. At that stage any drive mechanism, SFTP are welcome to connect with your production system (check out in) or Adobe CC plugins.
3 - Workflow is also too often weak for the new DAM vendors with very limited milestones or simple workflow just to publish the assets. What customers needs is a real workflow engine - BPM ( Business Process Mapping) that the customer can on the fly customise on his own to get the approval of all the stakeholders.
4 - When publishing products you have to mange revisions of your assets and able to support large scope of renditions. It is important to compare revisions, mark up the files before the approval.
5 - The ecosystem of the DAM is also important to connect with the PIM or CMS system driven by API or custom content picker to facilitate the streaming of the content to brand portail.
6 - At the end of the day customers will need a nice dashboard to follow their projects alongside the workflow to check the bottlenecks and measure the performance of the life cycle of their products.
7 - Rights management to secure the brand content and able to monitor them as soon as distributed.
8 - Your DAM system has to let you customise on your own all the metadata set, taxonomies, rights, roles and profiles, renditions, workflows and some of the personalisation of the BO and FO in order to get the ROI.
Change is the one given in 2021 !
In order to facilitate the change you can put in place design services to help organizations design their services from the perspective of user needs.
95% of success is people, 5% is technology
All retailers needs to adapt their strategy and be flexibly. This cocktail is the key of the success.
As you can see it is a long path to select the right DAM system to provide performance, customer experience and flexibility with the best ROI.
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