We’ve all watched e-commerce evolve at a breakneck pace. What once was a siloed channel is now an enterprise-wide challenge. In this new reality, PXM is as crucial to business success as CRM and ERP systems.
But PXM isn’t standing still either. It’s no longer just about presenting your products on the digital shelf; it’s about driving how companies scale and syndicate content across omnichannel experiences—globally and in an organized, automated way.
Unify the customer experience
More and more, businesses view product data through a PXM lens. It’s not just about data quality but about improving the lives of end customers. The question becomes, how can we leverage the foundations of good data to unify the customer experience while scaling across brands and channels?
This is a challenge, especially in industries like CPG, where businesses juggle multiple brands with unique properties like packaging dimensions and nutritional information. It’s normal to lack consistency from brand to brand. However, you don’t want customers to feel that pain, or drain your resources trying to overcome the issue.
During a recent webinar, I chatted with Salsify about the future of PXM and how businesses can leverage next-gen features to unify their data at scale. One example—part of Salsify Advance, their new PXM platform—is a capability called Universal Properties. It provides a flexible framework to establish common naming conventions and normalize data across the enterprise. This unification ensures that accurate, consistent data reaches the end customer without the need to create different properties for each brand.
Scale globally
Businesses are beginning to recognize that PXM requires bringing all regions and geographies under one roof. However, there are challenges to managing the nuances.
As new products are introduced, they require translation, enrichment, and syndication across channels. However, this process can vary significantly between regions like EMEA and North America due to differing approval pathways, digital asset requirements, and compliance standards.
Locale Awareness is another powerful PXM feature of Salsify Advance. It provides nuanced workflows and validation rules that allow you to tailor processes according to specific regional needs. With this functionality, you can create business logic that triggers and operates differently based on the region. This ensures that your product experience is both globally consistent and locally relevant—an essential aspect of PXM.
Leverage AI for automation
Imagine if you could treat every syndication endpoint with the same care and ensure your customer wins, no matter the channel. This is a hallmark of PXM, yet it often feels elusive. It’s simply too time-consuming to manually tackle enrichment for every product, on every endpoint. So, you settle for the top 10-20%.
This is where AI-driven automation makes a big impact. It’s not about reinventing the wheel, but about optimizing it. Salsify Advance, for example, allows you to integrate the AI services of your choice into your existing workflows.
This approach provides a significant advantage. We often hear concerns about how to leverage AI in a secure, safe, and governed way. By integrating AI into PXM workflows, you can test, learn, and scale improvements more efficiently and in a governed way.
Support new ideas and innovation
In the rapidly evolving world of PXM, it's crucial to have a platform that not only grows with your business but also fosters new ideas and innovation. To stay ahead, companies need tools that accelerate progress and adapt to industry-specific needs.
One way to jumpstart PXM initiatives is through industry-specific accelerators. For instance, Salsify Advance offers accelerators tailored to sectors like Grocery, designed to streamline end-to-end processes with proven workflows, attribution rules, and mappings. These accelerators provide a valuable head start.
Another exciting development is the App Center within Salsify Advance—a growing marketplace where partners and customers can share and access transferable use cases. This ecosystem encourages collaboration, enabling users to tap into collective insights and knowledge. It’s an environment where you can implement solutions independently or with the support of partners like Amplifi, driving continuous growth and innovation.
Prepare your business for PXM
In the excitement around PXM, it’s important to pause and consider these key questions:
Is your data ready? Every initiative should start by prioritizing data quality, enrichment, and governance. Centralized, well-managed data makes syndication and PXM implementation much smoother.
Is your AI strategy clearly defined? AI won’t solve problems at the click of a button. Start by considering: Have we identified the right use cases for AI? Do we understand their practicality? Is my data accessible for AI? It’s not about having perfect data but setting clear parameters around how the data will be sourced and used.
Are you prepared to accelerate? Accelerators can provide a great jumpstart, but they also require a solid enablement plan and training. It’s crucial to understand what they do, how they can benefit your business, and what kind of change management might be needed for adoption.
Is your solution aligned with your business objectives? The most successful organizations can answer with a resounding “yes.” If technology drives your business decisions, you’re on the wrong path. Keep business needs and objectives in focus and ensure PXM upgrades support those goals.
Have you considered a Salsify Health Check?
If you’re unsure about the answers to these questions - whether you already have Salsify Advance or not - a Health Check can be incredibly valuable.
Amplifi’s Salsify Health Check is a collaborative, value-add assessment of your business and data objectives and deep dive into your Salsify solution to help you get the most out of the platform as it grows and evolves.
We help you answer critical questions like:
- Do you need to rethink your organizational structure around product data and Salsify, or address process bottlenecks?
- How can you build an incremental roadmap that leverages Salsify Advance and demonstrates value to your leadership?
- How can these insights translate into actionable projects with clear goals that align with your business objectives, using Salsify Advance as a key driver?
Through a short, targeted engagement, we’ll help you set a clear path forward, ensuring you’re ready to leverage Salsify Advance and evolve with it as your business needs change.
