Digital Commerce for Brands

4 Ways Product Data Can Delight Consumers

How to use your product data to create lasting experiences

Maybe you never thought the words “delight” and “data” could go together in a sentence. That’s kind of like uttering “fun” and “waiting in line” in the same breath.

A specific kind of data you already have whole spreadsheets of does, however, create opportunities to delight end consumers. From the first time a user stumbles upon your brand all the way through a lifetime of product purchases, that consumer is on a journey. That overarching journey is one that’s been roped off into segments you’ve heard about before:

• For example, the “user experience” is the precise journey from the moment consumers land on your website to the moment they navigate away. This is actually a teensy piece of the puzzle.
• The “buyer journey” includes each “user experience” on your site, but also covers the many steps before it, from the first time a consumer realizes that a product like yours is a needed solution through the moment that consumer hits “buy.” Often, this is several ads and emails later.

These smaller journeys were pulled out of the bigger, lifetime consumer journey because there’s never been a practical way to look at something so complex in measurable and strategic terms. At least, that’s before the digitized catalog of product data equipped brand manufacturers with a new source of opportunity.

What is the Total Consumer Journey?

Kind of like a work of art, “you know it when you feel it.”

Think about the best experiences you’ve had recently buying products as a consumer. Ask yourself:

• How did the process make you feel?
• Were you delighted or satisfied?
• Did the emotional impact of interacting with the product and the overall process evoke something memorable?

A total consumer journey evokes something. A little time on a website with cool graphics and neat products isn’t enough. It’s the overall relationship with the brand and the understanding you have of your needs and desires — and the satisfaction of having that met like it was made just for you — that makes a consumer journey memorable.

Creating a lasting experience through delighting consumers generates higher conversion metrics and increased engagement, but more importantly, it makes your brand memorable.

Knowing how to produce these kinds of experiences does require a bigger look at the whole consumer journey. To do that, continue reading to learn how to use your product data to create lasting experiences.

1: Use Consistent Audio-Visual Assets

Humans are visual creatures. While we all know that, a brand has to take specific steps to give that visual requirement its due attention.

Product imagery creates the first impression with consumers wherever their first touchpoint with your brand is. Maybe it’s a video that shows up in their Instagram feed, your product renderings when they land on your product page, or a plug for your products on a seller’s email campaigns.

The question is, are you using the same images for the same products consistently everywhere? And are the images, themselves, consistent?

A brand can measure consistency across product imagery. Products in each product class or family should have photography with a similar look and feel. If a brand has images of one product in its intended environment, then every other product should show that, too. Professional product images should also share a look in the use of backdrops, lighting, and angles. This gives the collection of images a familiar and branded feel.

Tracking the consistency of product imagery is how a brand measures its visual message sent out to consumers. Whether or not a brand means to “say” anything with product images, consumers will absolutely interpret meaning in the professionalism, consistency, beauty, and even creativity of the images seen in your product catalog.

2: Product Data Optimized with Emotion

Your product data isn’t working hard enough for you if it’s emotionally flat. Product data does more than meet the eye. Product data, when truly optimized, reaches into a consumer’s heart and tugs. Product data optimized with emotion reminds people why they were looking for a product in the first place! It stokes the imagination of what other benefits the product can bring, some of which people never thought of before.

To do this, product data puts the product into real-life and relatable terms. Optimize your product data with language that puts a product in a person’s hands. Speak to the senses. Above all else, create product imagery that shows the product in its intended environment.

Using neutral terms and stock-perfect images against white backdrops won’t reach consumers through their senses, only their rationale. You’ll still get sales, but how to use your product data in ways that leave lasting impressions starts with setting a mood.

3: Product Data Optimized for Consistency

Most brands think of product data as the many product descriptions, colors, dimensions, and other attributes that they manage for hundreds or thousands of SKUs. This data occupies one or multiple spreadsheets, sometimes across departments, and always with a fair dose of human error and clean-up to be done.

There are two huge problems here:

1. First, thinking of product data as only text-based attributes is shortsighted. Product data also includes product imagery and other enriched data.
2. Second, products have to be displayed consistently to avoid confusion and to give a whole catalog a branded feel. No system of spreadsheets supports consistency.

Just think: a website has to have a consistent look and feel across each page, right? The colors, fonts, element sizes, layouts, and writing voice and tone all have to look and sound like they come from one source.

This same attention to consistency gives a product catalog a needed cohesive feel, too. A consumer should experience what it is to dive into your catalog and wade freely through all the products your brand has to offer. It should feel like the most natural thing in the world to browse from one product to the next.

Your audience actually wants this fluid experience as much as you do. Don’t cheat them from it with messy or inconsistent product data.

4: Use Product Images Everywhere

You use product images on your product listings, and probably on social media, too.

You can also use them in personalized emails. You can use them in blogs. You can use them in comments on threads as you engage with the public. Above all, you can use them often and repeatedly in customer service, whether to show customers what they need to know about a product they have or to show what else they might need.

Creating a memorable experience starts with recognition, not recollection. You’ll have to get in front of your audience repeatedly and echo your value proposition time and time (and time) again before it will stick.

Recognition comes before recollection. As soon as the first or second touchpoint, a consumer could recognize your product and immediately associate the value you’ve assigned it.

Using your product images everywhere is as important as the words and taglines. If you repeatedly use the exact same product images again and again with the same value statements attached, consumers will begin to associate those visuals with that value.

The biggest roadblock brands face in using product imagery as much as possible is that product photos and videos are stored out of sight and out of mind in folders on a cloud solution or shared drive. Still, only half the departments have access to it that really should. These repositories of “sort-of-organized” product images are not conducive to using images consistently and often.

Fortunately, storing product images along with catalog data is one of the very things that the newest PIMs (product information management systems) were designed to do. That’s part of another conversation where brands are finally moving past their clunky image databases.

Most brand manufacturers think their product data only supports their product listings. Learning how to use your product data in these ways, however, means your product information can also support:

• A superior audio-visual customer journey
• A way to evoke customer emotions
• A consistently branded customer journey
• And overall product recognition

Use your product data as the resource it is. Learn how to manage your product data better, too, on next-gen product information management (PIM) software. Your product data is an asset you already have, so put it to work for you and you’ll create delightful and memorable experiences for customers across the board.