“The first step in exceeding your customer's expectations is to know those expectations.”

Perhaps you’ve heard this quote by marketing guru Roy H. Williams. Even if you haven’t, you will most likely agree with it. Knowing who your customers are and what they want makes perfect business sense, since customer feedback can drive product direction, pave the way for better customer experiences and help identify new business channels and partners.

But how do you get to know your customer if you sell exclusively through distributors or retailers?  Are manufacturers disadvantaged by being disconnected from their consumers? How do they overcome this?

The consumer packaged goods (CPG) industry faces a number of challenges relating to data, e-commerce and time-to-market. This is a recap of a recent webinar that you can listen to now or continue reading.

This blog post is a summary of our recent webinar “Digital disruption for Product Information Management” presented by Darren Cooper, Director of Industry Solutions, Stibo Systems. To get even more insight on this topic, hear the full webinar (30 minutes) on-demand, and for free, here. 

It’s no surprise that product information managers’ jobs are getting a little more complicated these days. Products, offerings and services are becoming more complex to design, sell and monitor.  For companies who want to support digital disruptive products and services, Product Information Management (PIM) processes will need to evolve quite significantly.

Given the current state of data growth and the brink of Industry 4.0, the importance of organized data is greater than ever. The way your organization adapts to the large amounts of data about your suppliers is crucial to your success in the industry.

Whether their customers are individuals or global enterprises, all industries now face a range of challenges and opportunities presented by a ‘digital-first’ world. As a consequence, traditional companies are looking for ways of complementing and differentiating their product-based business models with value-based services.  A recent Frost & Sullivan estimation foresees that 70 percent of Fortune 500 companies are expected to develop new business models that provide product-as-a-service.

Data Governance. It’s kind of like going to the gym. You know it’s really good for you, but you just don’t do it (Sorry Nike!). The same applies for many organizations today when it comes to data governance. They know that it can add real value to their business, but despite that, it is and always has been difficult to sell internally. Concepts such as technical and business-related metadata, data quality, information models and data ownership often lack funding for implementation.

Digital Transformation has been a trending strategic initiative for most companies for quite some time now.  Some have almost completed their journey, while others are just beginning. The results of a recent study show that only 19% have adopted or are leading digital transformation in their companies, 34% are in the planning stages and 47% are just starting to wrap their heads around the topic.

When opening the internet for commercial use in 1995, the idea was that technology could help consumers and producers make markets more efficient. Soon after, the idea of replicating the flea-market garage sale concept and other traditional markets in the online world grew in the minds of entrepreneurs.

The first successful attempt to create an online marketplace on a large scale was eBay.com, which was mainly focused on peer to peer transactions, allowing anyone to become a seller and consumers to access a broad assortment of products.

The impact of the digital economy has created new opportunities and challenges for all CEOs particularly for those in the retail sector. What began as a quest to create the perfect customer experience, retailers quickly turned their attention to creating a superior omnichannel environment to keep up with the proliferation of devices and to meet the ever-changing shopping habits of consumers. Digital tools are disrupting the business environment and require significant changes in operations, communications, and selling…and it is about to get much worse.

The Chief Data Officer… Maybe your organization already has one or maybe you’re thinking about hiring one soon. It is a title that used to raise eyebrows, but now it's becoming the norm, and for good reason. This year’s Gartner Enterprise Information & Master Data Management Summit has an entire – and brand new – track dedicated to the role of the CDO. In it, Gartner will reveal the findings of its 2015 CDO Survey and explain the increasing value of the role.