PIM Point in Malmö is so far the world largest product information management (PIM) event. I’m not saying it’s easy, but with a category specific event in a niche market it doesn’t take that many people to be the biggest.
But with that said, PIM have become a mission critical cornerstone for a lot of large companies. Great work by Inriver in creating this event and thereby more or less removing this option for similar players.
Inriver CEO Niels Stenfeldt set the agenda early on by focusing on Circularity and sustainability. This was the theme throughout the day. A vision probably setting them apart from competitors. But the only way forward. During the sessions we could see how well they tied this together.
Well done Inriver.
Traceability is key!
Digital Product Passport (DPP) will be bigger then GDPR. EU regulations might mean 1000 of fields of attributes for each product. You need a dynamic data definition to handle this. This means PIM wont be just a “support system” for e-com. DDP is something anyone within or close to e-com or product needs to address within the next couple of years.
One is the way forward
One of the speakers talked about the need to consolidate what you have. One PIM, one DAM, one e-com. If you don’t consolidate, the organization and its processes will fragment.
Consistency builds trust. Trust is what sells. The One approach will enable seamless workflows and cost efficient integrations.
Digital Shelf Analytics
Inriver crawls and scrape 40k sites for SKU to inform Inriver customers about external marketplace stock, product display consistency and a thousand other things.
This is a way to secure brand compliance. Smart! They even preflight data validation on its way to marketplaces. Enabling and getting a feedback loop on what is published.
Know your customer customers
Inriver does end customer survey of 6000 persons each year. We’re not talking about Inriver customers. We’re talking end consumers. Knowing your customers customer is really good. By doing this, they know what problems Inriver customers need to address and solve. Smart!
Syndication
Coming from the newspaper industry I’ve worked with syndication for many years. Interesting to see the concept within PIM and e-com. With a new content delivery API which standardizes the way in which data is delivered we’re getting close to zero friction integration. Customers can also do base mapping of relevant entities on their data model. Enabling each customer to map to a base model. Inriver then maps their base model out towards different marketplace providers.
Partners partners partners
Inriver made it clear throughout the day that partners is key to growth. Simply put it; fastest way to grow is through partners. Customer success for example work closely with partners. This helps CS deliver better and faster. It also gives added value to customers as partners often know the specific industry or a geographic area better.
One of the most obvious evidence of their commitment to partners might have been the full house of C level people taking part in partner breakout session.
All in all it was a really interesting day with a lot of takeaways.
I’ll for sure take some of these into our product.
On a personal note. The venue was, during the 90th and maybe still at weekends, a nightclub. In the partner breakout room is where I danced with my wife for the very first time. Inriver unknowingly selected the very best place, at least for me, to meet partners.