Retail’s demand for content and information is relentless and both retailers and CPG brands need to keep up. You need to access accurate information and powerful assets in real time, all the time, turning them into market-leading content across every platform.
Learn how PIM, DAM and CMS together meet all your content needs, fueling market-leading retailers, and helping you exceed expectations.
More than just letters
Product Information Management (PIM) takes all the information about individual products that is needed for marketing and sales and centralizes it in a single source of truth. Everyone uses the same system, getting rid of silos, duplication and errors and improving efficiency.
Digital Asset Management (DAM) brings all your marketing and sales assets together into a single location. It organizes them and makes them accessible to the right staff at the right time, for the right reason. DAM promotes collaboration, reduces workload, improves workflow and creativity.
A Content Management System (CMS) allows you to easily store, create, edit, and publish content. It requires minimal technical knowledge meaning it can be used by people in a broad range of roles, making it quick and easy to update and change content, whenever it is needed.
In retail, the sheer volume of product information and the rate it needs to be updated can be daunting. Retailers potentially must manage thousands of SKUs every single day.
Mistakes aren’t just embarrassing. They can result in product recalls that cost money, time, and reputation. Trying to avoid mistakes without using a dedicated system can be time-consuming, frustrating, and difficult.
It’s not just about mistakes - consumers are more demanding than ever and expect to see a de range of information about their products. From how best to use a face cream to knowing the macros in ready meals, being able to supply consistent, up-to-date and comprehensive product information is a must.
Efficient product information management in retail means getting it right the first time, staying one step ahead of the competition, fueling creativity, gaining consumer trust, and beating market expectations.
The retail communication landscape is complex. From on-shelf to in-store, online to on TV, retailers must manage multiple ever-changing assets to communicate accurately and effectively with customers. CPG brands must work with retailers on joint communications as well as making sure their products stand out and speak directly to consumers, leaping off the shelf.
It’s not just about mistakes - consumers are more demanding than ever and expect to see a de range of information about their products. From how best to use a face cream to knowing the macros in ready meals, being able to supply consistent, up-to-date and comprehensive product information is a must.
Efficient product information management in retail means getting it right the first time, staying one step ahead of the competition, fueling creativity, gaining consumer trust, and beating market expectations.
We had high initial expectations at the start of the censhare DAM project and these have all been met. Our users are mainly creative people who are not system oriented, yet they are pleased with the new system. Users are satisfied.
Senior Director, Creative Operations, Lands' End
Retail content covers a wide range of needs, from on-pack information to in-store signage and digital ad campaigns. CPG brands create content collateral in partnership with retailers but are also increasingly building direct relationships with their end users.
The CMS can be used across a vast range of different departments, including packaging, merchandising, sales, marketing, and advertising, without needing extra IT or specialist support. Users just drag and drop the information they need into templates and pages.
Using a Headless CMS module, PLUS Retail managed to simplify the production of its local shelf cards without needing to train staff. Stores could replace their own cards rather than having to rely on head office, and with more than 250 stores, that was a significant saving in both time and money.
The flexibility of a headless CMS allows it to handle product ranges from tens of items, to tens of thousands, all with the same speed and accuracy - particularly valuable for retail and CPG businesses.
A content management system or CMS typically manages both the content behind the scenes and also publishes the front-end, or customer-facing part like the website. A headless CMS only organizes the content. The publishing is dealt with by another application and the two are typically linked by API.
Retailers and CPG brands might choose to use a headless CMS because it is more flexible when it comes to delivering content across multiple platforms, such as mobile, web, social media and print. It can also be easier to scale than standard CMS.
Some might prefer a full CMS because it can be cheaper and simpler to run because everything is in one place with pre-prepared templates to use.
With a single source of truth for product data, it is much easier to see where the information came from, who owned it and what it can be used for. Retailers can understand - in-depth - everything from their product’s supply chain to ingredients or components, usage guidelines and even disposal details. CPG brands can confidently substantiate product claims, for example about sustainability or nutrition.
In a PIM, there is only ever one copy of a piece of product information. When a detail is changed, there are no potentially erroneous versions left for people to use mistakenly. Permissions can be added to prevent unqualified staff from altering product data. This lowers the risk of inaccurate product data reaching the customer. This benefits everyone from a retailer’s promotions department to the CPG customer service as there is only one, comprehensive source of information.
A single version of product information reduces the amount of data entry, searching time and storage space needed to manage data. Retailers and CPG brands know exactly where to find pertinent product details for campaigns or creating packaging materials, making research and production faster. Organizations can allocate budget to other areas and employees are freed up to make better use of their time on higher value tasks.
Switzerland's no.1 retailer opts for censhare to reduce costs in advertising and marketing.
In retail, things move so fast it can be hard to maintain consistency. A single source of truth for assets, combined with rigorous permissions and linked to all the relevant product details, means assets can be amended when needed, but only within brand guidelines.
Attractively presented products turn shopping into an experience and have a lasting effect on purchasing decisions. This applies to both the real and the digital world. A crucial requirement for the highest quality here is efficient and easy-to-use content management, and with the use of the censhare platform, BSH has created an essential prerequisite for accompanying BSH’s digital consumer journey.
CIO, BSH
Assets are referenced with the metadata needed to link them to information held elsewhere in the business so your customers’ preferences and shopping patterns can be linked to the best offers and recommendations.
Retailers need to respond to the zeitgeist. Whether it's just responding to a surprising change in the weather, or capitalizing on an emerging trend, the ability to create campaigns that speak to consumers is key.
With intuitive search functions and a centralized database, everyone can work together accurately and at speed to roll out campaigns, even adding local nuance and translations if needed.
The usability of censhare is ten times better than our previous system. For example, for a campaign we are able to see right away the selected images on offer level. In the old system it was one campaign file with all selected images, so checking all images on offer level took a lot of time.
Specialist Communication Processes, PLUS Retail
With a single asset library, staff can access the information they need easily, immediately aware if a new product image or video is needed. This reduces the number of duplicated images. Not only does this mean fewer costly photo shoots, but it also reduces the overall storage required and distribution costs, saving time and money.
Migros had a labor-intensive creative process that was prone to mistakes and expensive to manage. With a vast range of promotional collateral, including a magazine, print ads, posters, newsletters, catalogs and 10 regional variants, it seemed to be a huge task to manage.
Moving to a database that was designed to keep product information and digital assets in order, it made it much easier to link their own and their agency studios together. The creative became much more consistent, automation removed errors and costs dropped significantly - 70% from managing a database and 15% in agency costs.
6m
assets managed in the system
70%
reduction in hosting costs
15%
reduction in agency costs
1m
PDFs generated per year
14
weekly variants of Magazine in 10 regions
Both online and in-store, retailers have to constantly update information. Being able to easily create shopping pages, blog posts, emails, signage, and more is a must. As CPG brands are increasingly communicating directly with consumers, they too need a quick and simple way to serve up information.
75%
more efficiency in advertising materials production
100%
of previous potential pricing errors eliminated
100%
of images stored for weekly sales brochures
Today’s omnichannel consumer shops across devices. They even browse via mobile while shopping in-store. Both retailers and CPG brands need to optimize across all formats to be able to serve their customers the right information at the right time.
Being able to link your CMS to customer data is crucial so they can make the most of personalized offers, whether online or instore. Personalization is the cornerstone of loyalty for retailers and CPG brands.
The key to right communication, right time is analytics. Knowing what works and what doesn’t is easy to say, but hard to do without the right CMS. Getting insight into content performance leads to rapid optimization and builds ROI.
Censhare is a multi-layered technology that allows you to build content management capabilities that are uniquely suited to your needs.
As a censhare client you will get a powerful foundation - censhare base - that includes the core features and functions of the censhare platform, i.e. the semantic database, the collaboration features, the search engine, and so on.
Then, you can pick products that cover additional needs such as DAM, PIM, or CMS.
Finally, you can refine the functionality of your system by adding specific modules - for example localization and translation, or print production management. The modularity of the platform enables you to grow your censhare solution at the speed that your business requires.
Our proven omnichannel content platform lets you master your content in any language, locally or globally, to provide a consistent omnichannel customer experience.
Clients like PLUS Retail, Lands’ End, Migros, BHG and hundreds more rely on censhare to deliver brand-accurate, up-to-date content, and make the most of every opportunity to reach the right customer at the right time.
censhare has helped more than XX leading retailers and CPG brands grow and transform their business, delivering efficiencies and revealing future opportunities.
With over 20 years of development, censhare’s DAM, PIM and CMS offerings have evolved to meet the needs not just of today’s businesses, large and small, but has integrated leading technologies to ensure future compatibility.
censhare can be flexibly integrated with multiple input and output channels as required. We 'play nice' with other systems in a technology stack, making the most of today’s composable architecture. With dedicated retail and CPG subject experts on hand, censhare will guide you, every step of the way.
censhare’s DAM is one of only a few DAM solutions providers with a Graph Database. This semantic database technology makes it faster to find assets, finding results in associative data sets, and is particularly valuable when it comes to personalization and managing complex customer journeys.
censhare systems are scalable, meaning whatever the future throws at you – more platforms, more products, more customers - you won’t have to reinvent your software stack to cope.
"censhare provides a fast and extremely reliable platform which also provides excellent customer services. User interface exhibits great performance and has great features."
