The advent of new age media, coupled with the presence of traditional channels, has resulted in enterprises depending on multi-channel marketing initiatives for reaching out to their customers across different demographic segments. Today, a wide range of physical products (i.e. automobile, clothing, electronic goods) and service-based products (i.e. telecom and internet services) are being advertised in media both new and old – in print and on the web, on mobile and through social networking – all to get most out of their advertising dollar. Amidst this rush to quickly reach out to customers, enterprises sometimes struggle in conveying a consistent product message across channels, thereby confusing consumers, damaging their brand and eventually losing market share. In this post we will be discussing the key reasons behind an enterprise’s failure to ensure product content quality.
Key Reasons behind loss of Product Content Quality
- Unsuitable content for newer channels: Most of the traditional product companies have been dealing with legacy content made specifically for print medium. Their ability to define a standard product definition, and ensuring its use across all channels, was not deemed a need in the earlier print-focused era where consumer experience was relatively transient. However, with the addition of more interactive channels such as web, mobile and social media, there is a strong need being felt for a consistent product definition across channels – as these channels enable consumers to retain the product knowledge longer. We have observed that existing attempts to maintain a unified product definition across channels has fallen short of meeting this need.
- Merger and Acquisitions: When one company acquires another company, along with its products, it’s not uncommon for the new company to have a different set of product definitions than the existing ones. As a result, the acquiring company will end up having product lines with different marketing and technical messaging than the customers are used to, which needless to say, is against the objective of providing a consistent customer experience.
- Unstructured content: The products of chemical or pharmaceutical companies usually have a lot of fairly technical attributes. For example, specialty chemicals have additional technical attributes related to their specific gravity, cohesiveness index, forms (granular, amorphous, color etc.), etc. Many of these attribute values are embedded in the form of a table within MSDS (Material Safety Data Sheet), which are primarily static documents (PDF or Word). Since material property value is usually static (we don’t expect the specific gravity of mercury to change every ten years!), the content in these tables are fairly accurate. However, since they are in a non-interactive form embedded within tables, these values can’t be used for parametric search by the end users.
- Inefficient attribute assignment: Organizations with too many product lines will have attribution problems. Too many products with similar attributes assigned to them results in a maintenance and communication nightmare. For example, one product line might have “Primary Benefits” as a key product attribute whereas another might have “Key Benefits” though their meaning is essentially the same.
- Lack of discipline from product Managers: Typically, each LOB (Line of Business) within an organization has its own marketing team. When a call comes to update the product content, it often happens ad-hoc, and in isolation without consulting the other product line teams. As a result, over a period of time, the organization ends up having multiple product templates.
In this increasingly content cluttered business environment, the challenge for organizations is to uniquely position their companies, through a sustained and consistent messaging program. Organizations should take notice of the above factors; for many companies, their failure to do just that leads to the dilution of their messaging objectives. A systematic and holistic approach for ensuring content quality will go a long way in creating a positive perception of the company and its products.
How have you managed the various challenges in ensuring content quality issues? Do you have a formal process for content audit and dissemination? In the next post, we will look at various mechanisms that organizations can adopt for ensuring a consistent “content” experience for customers.
