It is never to late. Most web shops guarantee delivery in time of you order before December 19. Here comes my brief summary if you are looking for fashionable gift for men.

Never wrong – from trending brands

Check out the links to order it:

Bottega Veneta® – leather shorts:

https://www.bottegaveneta.com/de/hosen-und-shorts_cod13306492rc.html

Rot Turtleneck Sw1027 form Suitsupply Online Store

https://eu.suitsupply.com/de/knitwear/turtleneck-rot/SW1027.html?cgid=Knitwear&oosPid=SW934&pdp=true

BURGLAR BEANIE: NEW YORK ROBBERY

https://www.newyorkrobbery.com/shop/burglar-beanie

Snap back or shirt from distorted people:

https://www.distortedpeople.com/?locale=de

Arm wrist with fragrance – Diptyque – Eau Rose

https://www.ausliebezumduft.de/diptyque-eau-rose-armband.html

Rolando Club:

https://www.instagram.com/rolando_club

Sapporo Coat Men – Wolfskin Tech Lab in Olive

https://www.wolfskin-techlab.de/sapporo-coat-men

In style: inspired by outdoor lovers

Go colored hiking or high street. Nike offers plenty of powerful colors. Also fancy: Kenzo beanie, yellow worker gloves, kill bill socks, shirt by Ralph Lauren, Adidas Yeezy Boost 350 V2.

P

Retail isn’t what is used to be. Listing to a podcast of Alex Graf and Erik Siekmann discussing the future of retail inspired me to share some examples of stores which impressed me or I heard about.

They try to truly reach the sense of consumers by new levels of store experience. The only way to use physical stores in the digital future.

1. Dover Street Market

Online at www.doverstreetmarket.com and on site in London, Beijing, NYC, Singapore and LA. Artist and fashion United.

2. 5 Carlos Place

Find it in London at the same address, where a town house combines restaurant, displays, personal shopping suites. Www.matchesfashion.com/5carlosplace

3. Hipanda’s

Tokyo – where else? A ghost house with a customer journey enriched my augmented reality. Www.hipanda.jp

What have you seen? What do you see happing?

Millennials are people born between 1980-2000 and seen as target group who is open to spend money on the good things in life, following new behaviors but with higher expectations in customer experience.

Has your shopping behavior changed in the last year? I like to share two of my recent examples which showed me that experience is changing and why establishes brands have to stay agile to not lose their customers. I have observed three success factors for success in sales with millennials.

#1 Fast & furious instagram marketing

A video paints a 1000 words. The old term needs to be rewritten. A simple video focused on style and the value has made me take a deeper look recently and buy new things. It can be that simple.

#2 New focused & innovative brands

My last two online orders are from brands I did not know before. Both reached me with Instagram advertising. L‘Estrange London promised a chino „I never want to take off“. 125 GBP is a fairly high price for an unknown brand and quality – but I can confirm I truly like wearing it. I even added a second one and now have navy and khaki. Both go well will white sneakers by the way.

The other one are running / sports shorts for only 17€ from Tee Shop, which is able to carry my iPhone in a smart way. The style reminds me of Nike, but I did not find a comparable product at Nike, which is my default and preferred sportswear. So far….

My learning is, switching from one brand to the other is an easy thing for me but a major risk for every brand.

#3 Be Aggressive

While sitting on an airplane I received the request accepting photos and videos of “Fabians iPhone 12“. Because of curiosity I accepted one and received a price list of Champaign from a bar in Mykonos.

Either the person was drunk or this is a new level of aggressive direct marketing with unknown target group, but focused on a group who is traveling to a concrete location. Is this smart or not acceptable? What is your view?

What can we learn from this?

Don’t sleep!

Try new things.

Do things differently.

Marketers are now living the dream of better conversions in e-commerce and less efforts in creating compelling content marketing with use of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. But without great master data this stays an illusion.

I had the pleasure to be interviewed by an innovator in this space (AX Semantics) on this matters. Please read the full interview in German or English here.

Instagram launched a brand new ecommerce checkout feature for more than 20 top brands – including Kylie Cosmetics, Nike, Uniqlo and Warbly Parker. The checkout button on Twitter was not a success story, but Instagram has true potential. Why?

From my own experience I follow brands to get inspiration about shoes, watches or Ota he fashion styles. I also started to buy things based on instagram advertising, but I found it hard to connect from a nice fashion image to the web shop for ordering it. The new feature will allow me to make an order without learning the app. Smart.

What does this mean for merchandisers, digital marketers or e-commerce managers and their PIM / MDM?

Publishing an engaging image will now elevate from a branding to a conversation factor and measure-able revenue driver. A question to answer is: how much information will a customer need inside the Instagram app to take a purchasing decision? Am insta-style image, size, price will be basic requirements. What about other details like a size guide, fabric information?

The value of Product Information Management (PIM) for Omnichannel customer experience was always providing the flexibility to brands and retailers managing their full assortment and reacting to new sales and marketing channels needs with channel specific outputs. Companies now have to align what images and fields are needed to export to the FB/ Instagram business manager and the product catalog. As on FB, I expect Instagram will communicate an API for this as well.

Instagram just requires you to

• Have the Businessmanager and a product catalog.
• only offer physical products
• habe an instagram business account

Here is the guide provided by Instagram: https://www.facebook.com/business/instagram/shopping

What is next?

The next phase after selling is obviously connecting the dots even better: Which customer has shown what interest, what products have this customer purchased, what is the next logical offer to this customer. This requires companies to elevate their PIM platform to a full master data management (MDM) use by connecting products, bundles, customers and more to take customer experience to the next level.

How many contact request do you get every day?

In my view the rise of digital has not changed some key rules of direct marketing, which I learned many years back when we drove new client acquisition of new SMB accounts by well thought post mailers at Haufe Lexware. As a young marketer I learned great things from great colleagues like Andi, Andy, Dieter, Thorsten and many more.

1. Why is this person contacting me?

2. What is the value for me?

In the old days there had been more questions to be answered, like:

3. Who is contacting me? (Of course this is visible fast in today’s world)

4. From where do they have my address? (Today: do they have my double opt-in permission :-))

There have been more, but the top two still apply today on LinkedIn. I receive daily one or multiple contact requests without any context.

I would appreciate marketing messages, if they are relevant and if they explain in a simple way how I can profit from it.

What do people expect, who never have met me and who even don’t text me a word why they want to get in touch with me? I think Linkedin should not allow empty contact requests. What is your view?

Eine tolle Omnichannel Customer Experience, das ist was alle Marken und Händler heute bieten wollen. Tools von Mobile Commerce, Chat Commerce, E-commerce und CRM gibt es ohne Ende. Doch die Daten sind wichtig. Ohne sie geht nichts. In diesem Kontext gibt einen neuen Begriff der diskutiert wird: Product Experience Management (PXM)? (zum englischen Blog geht es hier.)

WTF sind all diese Akronyme und warum sind sie wichtig? Ich denke, es ist an der Zeit, meine Sichtweise auf die in der Datenmanagement-Welt verwendeten Begriffe zu formulieren. Vor allem, da die digitale Transformation oder die Vorbereitung auf das digitale Geschäftszeitalter die Bedeutung von Daten auf ein neues Level gehievt hat.

Meiner Meinung nach haben einige Softwareanbieter dem Begriff Product Experience Management (PXM) als reine Marketingstrategie genutzt, um sich als Innovator gegenüber etablierten Product Information Management (PIM)-Anbietern zu positionieren.

Wenn Sie im Web nach Definitionen suchen, finden Sie viele Blogs oder Websites ohne echte Details. Ich denke, der Unterschied und der Zusammenhang von Master Data Management (MDM) und PIM ist bereits besser etabliert. Aber immer noch haben Unternehmen, Business- und IT-Entscheider Schwierigkeiten zu verstehen, warum sie was brauchen.

In der Vergangenheit hat hybris ab ca 2010 (heute Teil SAP Experience Management) einen erfolgreichen Schritt getan, indem sie Product Content Management (PCM) positioniert haben, um einen besseren Zugang zu Marketing- und E-Commerce-Entscheidern zu erreichen. In der MDM-Welt hat Reltio ab 2015 Informatica und andere herausgefordert, indem sie MDM als “modernes” Datenmanagement titulierten um sich im Go-to-Market zu differenzieren. Gutes Content-Marketing kann dabei eine wichtige Rolle spielen.

Nun kam (seit 2017 etwa) der Begriff ist Product Experience Management (PXM) auf. Ist PIM nun tot? Wo liegt der Unterschied?

Mit diesem Blog versuche ich, diese Diskussion zu vereinfachen und lade euch alle ein, eure Kommentare und Erfahrungen zu hinterlassen.

Sie denken, dass einige Dinge in der anderen Box sein müssen, oder dass manche Dinge fehlen? Bitte lassen Sie es mich wissen.

Mein Fazit und meine Empfehlung ist, hinter die Kulissen zu schauen, welche Software wirklich was tun kann. Wählen Sie eine Lösung, die flexibel mit Ihren Geschäftsanforderungen in allen drei Dimensionen wächst, denn nur so kann Ihr Unternehmen erfolgreich sein. Achten sie nur darauf, dass sie nicht mit einem Tool blockieren, dass nicht auf die anderen Disziplinen erweitert werden kann, weil es sich um eine alte Plattformtechnologie oder eine zu simple App handelt. Ich bin sicher, dass ihr Geschäft alle drei benötigt. Die Frage ist nur wann, und wo starten. Am besten dort, wo schnell Ergebnisse gezeigt werden können.

Fußnoten:

• Bei der Recherche habe ich mich an zwei Blogs von Productup und Gartner angelehnt, die auch lesenswert sind.
• Mehr zu Riversand, die ein Cloud Platform für MDM, PIM & PXM anbieten, gibt es auf Riversand.com.
• Das Blog gibt es auch auf Englisch.

MDM. PIM. PXM. …. WTF are all these acronyms and why do they matter? I though it is time to write down my view on the terms used in the data management world. Especially when nowadays digital transformation or getting ready for the digital business era has taken the importance of (master) data to new heights.

Why does this matter? Companies who are in control of their data can realize new business models and revenue streams and create the next level of customer experience every CEO is dreaming of. Business models like Amazon, Spotify, Netflix, Uber or AirBnB would not exist without data.

In my view some vendors have put out word and claimed Product Experience Management (PXM) as a marketing strategy to position themselves as innovators over Product Information Management (PIM) vendors. When you search for definitions you find many high-level blogs or websites without real details. In the meantime PXM has started to evolve and Simon Walker from Gartner Research will try to define this market, as he told me.

I think the difference and correlation of Master Data Management (MDM) and PIM is established a bit more, but still companies and business and IT people struggle to understand why they need what.

In the past hybris (today SAP) made a successful move by positioning Product Content Management (PCM) to get better traction with marketing and e-commerce people. In the MDM world, Reltio attacked Informatica and others by calling out MDM as “modern” data management.

With this blog I am trying to simplify this discussion and contribute my view. I invite you all to leave your comments and experience.

You may argue that some things need to be in the other box, or some things are missing. Please let me know.

My conclusion and recommendation is to look behind the scenes who can really do what. Select a solution which is flexible to grow with your business need across all the three dimensions, because your business needs all of it to be successful. Just be careful that you don’t lock yourself down into a tool that cannot take you to the other levels because it is old generation platform technology, or too light-weight app-style. I am sure you may have the desire to have all of this.

*** Footnote ***

In research for this blog I found these two very helpful articles from Simon Walker (Gartner) and Productsup. Nadim Wardé publishes his view on definition here, by adding PLM and DAM to the list.

Find more about Riversand, my employer who addresses MDM, PIM & PXM with one cloud platform for mid size and large enterprises. Riversand just announced the strategic integration with Venzee for better Syndication & PXM.

There is also my German version of this blog, if you are intersted.

Discuss with me on this topics via Twitter or Linkedin, if you want.

Dr. Lu-Lam Pham is truely one of the thought leaders and advisors of the digital business era. In his video he talks about how the cloud has enabled many companies such as Netflix, Spotify, Slack or others to entirely new business models, based on data in the cloud.

If you think this is relevant for the success of your business, register now for Riversand Confluence 2019 in Amsterdam on October 16 & 17. On this event our team, partners and customers will discuss how data, cloud and AI will transform the way companies work in their digital strategy.

Lu-Lam will speak in good company with speakers from marquee brands like Beiersdorf, Saint-Gobain, Pewag, Orkla, Maxeda (Europe’s CIO of the year) and many more to come.

The last add the list of thought leaders and hot of the press is “The Data Whisperer”, Scott Taylor. More details I will add to this blog soon.

 

Vor gut zehn Jahren schrieb ich mein erster Whitepaper wie Produktinformationen Retouren senken können. Heute ist das Thema relevanten den je, wie der aktuelle Artikel bei Etailment ziegt. Ich habe mir erlaubt ein paar Zitate davon hier zusammenszufassen.

1. Produkte detaillierter beschreiben

Die Angaben von Herstellern müssen für Kunden nicht verständlich sein: Modefarben sollten in Tagesschau-Deutsch übersetzt, Größenangaben detaillierter eingegrenzt werden. Aus Taupe wird Hellgrau, aus Nude Beige oder Hautfarben, der Hinweis „fällt größer aus“ oder „ist eher eng“ wirkt bei Bekleidung Wunder. Technik wird durch die Erklärung von Funktionen sowie von auftretenden Macken für Kunden einschätzbarer.

2. Bilder sagen mehr als Worte

Kunden wünschen sich mehr Bilder, Detailfotos oder Rundumansichten, um Waren beurteilen zu können. Verlinkungen zu Erklär-Videos ergänzen die Darstellung von Geräten, Ersatzteilen oder Funktionen und Material. Neue Technologien wie Augmented Reality vermitteln außerdem einen lebendigen Eindruck, machen beispielsweise Größenverhältnisse besser schätzbar oder unterstützen bei der Einrichtung oder beim Handling mit Ersatzteilen. 

Everybody in our industry talks about disruption. If you are tired of it, maybe looking at it from the eyes of a football fan may help. For me this Champions League season Ajax Amsterdam is THE force of disruption. What can enterprises of any size, learn from it?

In my view these are the things Ajax is doing great this season and it is relevant for all of us.

1. They have a game plan & a concept: Having a strategy and execution plan seems to be obvious for you business people and readers. I think some companies and people still act as they do not have a plan. And if you think you have on, you may consider challenging if the plan is the right one. In times where all talk about data driven disruption and the ambition to act like AirBnB, Amazon or Uber, companies need to have a concept (some call in governance) and a platform how to deal with their data as strategic asset, being ready for growth and unexpected change. For example what happens if a new merger happens and you have to merge two product portfolios and two customer groups together?
2. They have speed: Yes young players, usually have the power to run faster. Not a surprise right. But Ajax, has not only young players on the pitch they know, when they have to bring speed, and when tactics into the play. Speed in business today is a do or die question. For example if you want to realize real-time recommendations or IoT based tracking and customer service. In the business world, new big data technologies allow this speed.
3. They can adopt fast: A famous Germany head couch (Sepp Herberger) once said “the ball is round so that the game can change direction”. Hope my translation make sense. Also our brains have to be flexible to change direction, much more often than ever expected. Adopting to a new situation like being under pressure after your opponent has score a goal, requires to deal with the new situation. In a the data driven world this means you should have the flexibility to create and adopt new things, even it is not on the roadmap of your software vendor.
4. Thy have automatisms: The talks about use of articial intelligence in business is more than omnipresent. For an athlete, in my view this is similar to train your body and brain at once. Many do this with Life Kinetic to be able to react fast and automated in complex situation, as I have seen it from Joachim Klopp (the current team coach of Liverpool FC) or Felix Neureuther (a German Ski racer, who just ended his career).

What is your view? Let me know. I will be meeting like minded people shortly in Olso on May 2, in London on May 14-16 and Berlin on May 16. Would be happy to see you there.