Today, product data and marketing content have one of the coldest relationships on the martech stack.
Engineers care about SKUs, specifications, sizes, and materials. Marketers worry about pictures, videos, documents, and charts. Copywriters try to bridge the gap with descriptions, features, benefits, and sales messages.
If product data and content match across channels, marketers are either lucky or they use an integrated digital asset management (DAM) and information management (PIM) solution.
Not to mislead or fail buyers seems like a low (but technologically challenging) hurdle to overcome. The higher hurdle is that a brand is in line with its own mission and values - and thus demonstrates trustworthiness. Again, everything revolves around product data and content. At least that’s what I learned from Widen’s Connectivity Report.
Brands can no longer handle product data and marketing content in isolation, my teammates and I found. Accurate, comprehensive product data is critical to building trust, while emotional, interactive content is essential to increasing sales.
Both types of information are needed to tell how a brand lives up to its values, and a brand’s ability to tell that story may depend on new technology.
Trust from the product on
Marketers know intuitively that it is important to present accurate product information across all channels. But why?
For the Connectivity Report 2021, my colleagues and I surveyed 155 marketers and creatives from the USA and Great Britain between August and September 2020. Respondents represented 25 industries with employers ranging from Global 2000 brands to our local Wisconsin tourism agency.
Almost 50% of respondents stated product data as the type of information that has the greatest influence on building customer trust – well ahead of product photography (16%) and descriptive texts (11%), the runner-up. In other words, marketers find their own photos or videos untrustworthy because exaggeration is an art.
But product data is different. The falsification of nutritional information, material tolerances, safety assessments, etc. has massive consequences. Product data set expectations, convey authenticity and create a basis of trust. Online shoppers mainly rely on product data when there is no sensory, practical experience.
Still, most brands believe that “trust” is a top-down phenomenon. Every year the PR company Edelman publishes its Trust Barometer. In 2021, the confidence index of US companies fell from 62 in 2014 to 48 in 2021, despite the fact that the economy was the most “trustworthy” institution (ahead of government, NGOs and the media).
Globally, 56% of respondents agreed that “business leaders deliberately try to mislead people by saying things they know are wrong or grossly exaggerated.”
Does it make sense that “trust” depends on whatever the C-level executives are saying out loud? No. I think we need to build trust from the product instead.
But how?
Blurring of the data / content separation
Although our connectivity report respondents blamed product data for building trust, they agreed (72%) that digital assets like photography, videos, and product marketing content are the most important drivers of sales. They also said they haven’t come close to realizing the potential of virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and interactive experiences when driving transactions.
For example, a leading homeware retailer addressed the problem of selling expensive items online: “You would really like to see what that $ 1,000 chandelier in your dining room would look like using augmented reality,” said the interviewee.
To do this, product data and content would have to be linked to one another. Exact dimensions for each chandelier must coexist in a profile with 3D images and take into account the limitless variations of a single product (e.g. a black metal body versus a copper body versus …).
The augmented reality experiences could build confidence and excitement by showing what the chandelier would look like in a particular dining room. Perhaps with a smartphone at home, the buyer could add the dimensions of the dining room, wallpaper color and a 3D image of the table.
The point is, trust-building media experiences are at the intersection of product data and visual content that can no longer be treated separately – especially not for brands that want to tell a more meaningful story about their products.
A mission told in product data
During lengthy interviews for the Connectivity Report, a marketer attacked a challenge that dominates news cycles but doesn’t resonate with marketing technologists: environmental, social, and governance (ESG) reports. The marketer said, “The factories and manufacturers that the products come from follow responsible sourcing practices and are expected to meet or exceed environmental standards. These parts of the product data tell a convincing sustainability story. ”
The use case is interesting because so many companies have lost or gained trust through ESG measures. Sometimes consumers perceive ESG marketing as greenwashing or wokewashing, an example of “executives … deliberately trying to mislead people,” as Edelman put it. But when companies incorporate ESG reports into their product data and content, they could build trust that is safe from anything the CEO tweets at 2 a.m.
For example, technologists have discussed using forgery-proof distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) like the blockchain to document products through their supply chain.
In practice, a fishing vessel could scan a QR code to check where the fish were caught and the health of the species population. At each stop on his journey from Dutch Harbor, Alaska to a grocery store in Madison, Wisconsin, each QR scan added product data, such as the accumulated carbon footprint per pound of fish. In the end, an online shopper sees photos of the fish and the ship and crew that caught it. You would also find data documenting how the grocery store took steps to protect the environment and the end user through its procurement process.
The same could happen with textiles, mining products, petrochemicals, and the myriad of finished products that make them possible. What more narrative could be used to build (or restore) trust in brands that promote their responsible practices?
Inspired by values and driven by Martech
The marketing technology stack is a foundation for telling a meaningful story with product data and content. As already mentioned, DAM + PIM systems are already equipped to manage consistency across all channels. More advanced VR, AR, and blockchain applications will likely depend on the same system.
It’s time digital marketers moved from worrying about data consistency to integrity and trustworthiness. New approaches to the role of product data and visual content could create trust that even the most charismatic CEO or spokesperson cannot. And enriching product data with ESG factors and content would allow us to discover the hidden heroes that make our commercial paradise possible.
Brands that have nothing to hide should take the opportunity.
More resources on the role of product data in marketing
The challenges that Product Experience Management (PXM) can solve
The sources of information B2B tech buyers rely on most
How to create high-turnover descriptions for your product pages
