Is localization important for PIM to deliver on customer experience? It depends on Context

Context for product information improves customer experiences and increases conversion and revenues.

The marketplaces targeted by today’s manufacturers and retailers aren’t limited to a single geography or a single channel. As consumers in different regions exhibit unique preferences and behaviors, a one-size-fits-all approach to product information can lead to missed opportunities and diminished engagement.

Sellers risk leaving money on the table if they fail to take advantage of the distinctive nature of each of the channels in which they sell and the way consumers approach shopping activities in these channels. By tailoring product descriptions, specifications, and marketing messages in their Product Information Management (PIM) solution to align with local cultures, regulations, and market conditions, businesses can enhance customer satisfaction, drive higher sales, and build stronger brand loyalty.

Context influences perception

Context is an important characteristic that is often overlooked when it comes to describing any entity. The same entity – product, person, location, etc. – would need to be described by different attributes based on what context it is being placed in.

Consider the hypothetical Robert Pimento, a manager at a furniture store. His employees call him Mr. Pimento. To his friends, he is Bob. His family calls him Bobby. His wife calls him Robby and his kids call him “dada”. He doesn’t stop being the same person in each of these contexts, but to the people in that context, Robert Pimento by a name other than what they know him as would be practically unrecognizable.

Further, if Robert Pimento were to describe himself in a way to endear himself to these groups, he would use different virtues for each context. His kids probably don’t care that he’s an efficient and productive worker, and his loving nature and ability to cook a great lasagna are probably not relevant to his colleagues.

How brands handle marketing in different locales

In a similar fashion, different attributes of the same product or brand might be more important to emphasize in one locale than in another.

For example, McDonald’s emphasizes their vegetarian menu in India while downplaying the beef-based options. McDonalds in France conveys a more upscale restaurant experience than it does in the US, so it adjusts descriptions of menu items to match that sentiment.

The wrong way to approach context

Most PIMs approach the need for providing context-specific product information by creating new entities for each channel or locale.

Say you’re selling a “Paragon Floral Bag” in France and Germany, and you sell your products through your app and your website. Assuming you want to have unique product descriptions for these channels, your database might end up with a series of entities like Paragon-Floral-Bag-Germany-Website, Paragon-Floral-Bag-France-Website, Paragon-Floral-Bag-Germany-App, Paragon-Floral-Bag-France-App, etc. In addition to causing an unwieldy explosion in the size of the database, this approach to handling context leaves your product information exposed to a critical problem: modifications to the description, dimensions or components of the Paragon Floral Bag would have to be made to each of these entities individually — a time-consuming task liable to introduce a slew of errors.

The smarter approach to contextualizing product data

A more robust data model approaches this need by including the capability to add a “context” to the attributes of each entity. Think of context (in the data model) as something that allows you to leverage inheritance (pass attributes, properties, or values from a parent entity to its child entities or variants) and localize information as necessary to meet different downstream needs.

Context in this approach can be defined as anything – different downstream systems, targeted demographics, locales, or more. Also, not only can the values in the data model be unique to each different context, but the data quality validations and workflows can also be made context-specific.
This allows the product owner, the head of marketing, or the channel managers to designate attributes or descriptions specific to all the contexts in which the product is sold.

Context can also be used to display different product content based on the channels used to display the content. For instance: shorter bullets and paragraphs for mobile browsing, more detailed text including longer descriptions for desktops.

So, if have different constraints regarding your product data for your e-commerce website and your print catalogs, by applying contexts, you can have your global values be inherited by both channels and maintain your single source of truth. But since your print solution has a specific restriction on how long the descriptions can be, you can localize that information with context. Similarly, when the same product is sold in two different countries, the product owner can set rules to inherit the global values or use country-specific descriptions as appropriate. Language locales can leverage prebuilt connectors to various translation services to make your content relevant around the globe.

Make managing context a breeze

Contextual modeling of data is a valuable tool that improves the accuracy of stored data, quality of analytics, easier change management, trackability/traceability, visibility of changes, confidence in changes to product lines, ease of rolling out change, and speed of rollout/NPI. Context also helps the data managers consolidate records into small numbers which are more efficient to manage. That’s why Syndigo bakes this capability into the foundation of our PIM to make adapting product information for any environment, device or channel easy and intuitive. Contact us to learn more about how you can leverage contexts with Syndigo PIM to maximize the effectiveness of your content.