Digital Asset Management Scenario #4 in RSG's newly-updated roster of DAM vendor evaluation criteria is an essential use case for enterprises whose assets are directly related to products they sell.

Product Asset Management

For some enterprises, everything revolves around their products. Most notably, retailers, CPGs, FMCGs, and manufacturers all manage assets that are directly related to individual products and product families.

On the simpler end of this spectrum, assets need to be tied explicitly or implicitly to products or SKUs. On the more complicated end, a DAM system is the authoritative source for all assets, data, and content related to a product, functioning as a DAM and product copy management and product information management (PIM) tool.

Other factors to consider when employing a DAM for this scenario are:

• Seasonality: Intense seasonality necessitates accurate content delivery in a timely manner across multiple customer touchpoints. You just can't have your winter line coming out in June. Does your DAM system allow you to group products by season?
• Scalability: It's normal for events to cause spikes in content creation and content delivery. Some of these spikes can be anticipated like Fashion Week, Black Friday, and the Holiday rush. But other spikes like a celebrity mention on social media can cause demands for more assets to more channels than expected.
• Partner Demands: Brands who supply their wares through third parties are having to jump through ever-greater hoops to provide their content in the ways that the 3rd parties are demanding. Amazon, Walmart, Nordstrom, Macy's, and an ever-increasing list of smaller e-commerce outlets crave assets from brands, but they want them in their custom formats on their custom schedules.
• PIM integration: Assets alone are not enough — product specs, descriptions, and many other dimensions need to be delivered alongside assets to a multitude of experience channels. Thus, retail enterprises need build a strong connection between their PIM and DAM systems. With these types of integrations, you need to be cognizant of the challenges with the technical connection between the systems, but don’t underestimate the challenge of incorporating your business rules. For example, when do new products get moved from the PIM to the DAM? Nightly, real-time, another trigger? How do you handle products with slight variants (like shoe size)?
• Direct-to-consumer: CPG companies that traditionally went to market via retailers now have new opportunities to sell directly to consumer; to be sure, some brands have always done this — think fashion brands with stores in luxury shopping districts, or firms with a longstanding catalog business. But in an era where you can purchase customized M&Ms directly from Mars, all the traditional lines between CPG and retail are officially blurred. This requires a much more sophisticated mastery of upstream and downstream digital asset pipelines.
• Consistency of experience: Ensuring that the right assets get to the right place at the right time is critical for brands who want their digital experiences to match physical in-store experiences. Having a single source of truth for assets is an essential piece in ensuring that the in-person experience matches the online experience.
• Not just digital: Digital asset management is not just about "digital" experiences. Printed catalogs, in-store signs, and physical displays are still very important sales tools.
• Product families: Does a product inherit metadata attributes from its parent product family? Are you able to override this inheritance for exception cases?

 

 

Typical adopters:

• Retail companies
• CPG
• FMCG
• Hospitality brands
• Manufacturing companies
• Ecommerce channel partners

Is Product Asset Management one of your scenarios?

Find out which vendors are best suited to the Product Asset Management scenario by using the RealQuadrant Shortlist Generator as part of your DAM research subscription.

Other Posts in This Series

Brand Management:

• Basic Brand Management
• Multilingual Brand Management

Marketing Asset Management:

• Advertising & Marketing Asset Management
• Product Asset Management (you are here)
• Integrated Marketing Content Hub (coming soon)

Enterprise Asset Management:

• Work-in-Progress Creative Management (coming soon)
• Photo / Asset Library (coming soon)
• Media-based Knowledge Management (coming soon)
• Highly-regulated Environment (coming soon)

Publishing:

• Digital+Print Publishing (coming soon)
• Periodical & Catalog Production (coming soon)

Video & Audio Management:

• Media Library Review & Approval (coming soon)
• Media Editing & Assembly (coming soon)