Retail and CPG brands Love DAM

Who needs DAM?

The short answer is – anyone who uses digital assets. But, specifically for retail and CPG brands, having a Digital Asset Management system, or DAM, is critical across the whole business. Some may view it as a marketing tool, but the DAM is much more than that.

In Retail and CPG, DAM is the central resource for every single asset related to the products on sale, the physical buildings, marketing campaigns – even the personnel. That picture of a beaming sales associate – that’s DAM for you.

All too often, retailers are still relying on shuttling assets between teams using email or messaging apps. Great ideas get lost in transit, the wrong images get picked up, people inadvertently trample over each other’s work. In short, you can end up in a DAM(less) mess.

Digital Asset Management for Retail and CPG can bring order to a very chaotic world and with margins on a knife’s edge, you want to make sure your systems are working for you in the most efficient and effective manner.

Did you know?

Mistakes like this one suffered by UK supermarket, Waitrose, are far less likely when you have a clear set of permissions, brand guidelines and workflow management. The sort you might find in a censhare DAM, for example.

Image Source: Bryan Roberts, Twitter

DAM in CPG and retail

A Digital Asset Management system, or DAM, centralizes, stores, organizes and manages any type of digital asset – video, image, text, reviews, legal rights – so retailers and CPG brands can create content quickly, effectively and accurately. It can link to other systems including Product Information Management (PIM) and Content Management Systems (CMS) to create a holistic, unified approach to omnichannel content.

5 steps to a DAM great experience in Retail and CPG brands

DAM can be used to great effect in any setting but, in the hugely competitive and fast-moving world of retail and CPG, it can really make brands shine. Here are the five key components of DAM that can transform the Retail and CPG omnichannel experience.

1. Metadata is your friend

By categorizing every asset with metadata, it makes your resource easy to search, while also making it simple to create contextual links between assets so you can create rich content. From text descriptions to customer reviews and all the media used in campaigns. Consistent keywords and tags make information easily accessible. You can update campaigns or release new ones rapidly, while it can also be linked to PIM so you can make decisions about inventory based on customer reviews or complimentary products.

2. Logical and automatic workflow management and permissions

No more hanging around waiting for permissions, or rogue interns making accidental changes to critical campaign materials. And with plugins like a translation module you can automatically request translations for localization without long delays or misunderstandings.

Did you know?

A British local authority sent a request for a road sign to be translated into Welsh so that trucks serving a local supermarket wouldn’t use a particular street. They emailed the request to their translator. Not speaking Welsh (which is why they needed a translator) they went ahead and printed the response.

What the sign actually says is “I am not in the office at the moment. Send any work for translation”. Since a DAM will never send an out of office reply in any language (unless you ask it to) you can have greater confidence that your translation does what it says.

Image Source: Snopes

3. Brand consistency and legality

Brand refreshes are frequent and using old brand assets doesn’t just double the effort, it confuses the customer – could this product be out of date, is it even the same product? Even more compelling, DAM manages and automates the expiration of image rights. When using images with a short shelf-life, brands need to be as alive to the moment that they need to take the images down as they are to the timing of posting them in the first place. DAM is as important a tool in making sure you don’t use images, as it is in making sure you do.

4. Ditch the daily grind with automation

Responsiveness is amazingly powerful. During the 2013 SuperBowl, there was a blackout. Oreo cookies already had some SuperBowl strategies planned so was ready to respond to ‘in the moment’ events, if not exactly this one. While it took them only a few minutes during that blackout to get the “You can still dunk in the dark” campaign together, the planning – assets, approvals, workflows – had all been set out years in advance. The culture was in place, the assets just had to do their job. And they did. The ‘dunk in the dark’ campaign turned into a “fire hose” of tweets, earned awards and is still being talked about a decade later.

Image Source: Oreo Twitter

5. Go personal but also go large with scalability, personalization and variety of content

Consumers interact with brands on a dizzying number of platforms. Even more importantly, it’s no longer a one-way street with brands pushing content and consumers… consuming it. User generated content (UGC), for example, is vital for developing brand trust, advocacy and relevance. Being able to identify UGC that would enhance your brand, gain the rights to use it, manage those rights and remove the content in a timely manner when they expire is key to a modern content-led brand strategy.

In summary

Retail and CPG success is as much about the quality of content and consumer interaction as it is about the products themselves. Customers want information and entertainment as well as form and function. The immediacy of today’s retail environment means they expect brands to respond in the moment.

To be able to deliver that experience effectively and accurately, retail and CPG teams need support – a Digital Asset Management system delivers that support, and much more besides.

From efficient workflow management to a rich resource of contextually-linked product and campaign assets, using a DAM means your teams literally have everything they need to create market-leading content – at the touch of a button.

To learn how DAM can help you create vibrant and market-leading omnichannel retail and CPG content, download our exclusive explainer, Omnichannel Marketing in Retail.