Back to the Basics can be Glamorous: Learning from L’Oreal in LatAm

Even within the highly competitive beauty category, where style and glamour is expected in every image, video and other type of Enhanced Content, it’s important to get the basics right. Seemingly simple things like the availability of color options or product contents are a huge influencer in a shopper’s purchase.

Beauty leader L’Oreal has focused their efforts on both, ensuring their Core Content is precise for all their online outlets, whether a D2C website or through one of their many retail partners around the world.

We had a chance to catch up with Ramon Xutgla, eCommerce Manager, Latam Zone for L’Oreal, and chat about some of the challenges of recreating an in-store experience online.

“For us it’s really important to have an omnichannel experience for our customers. — amon Xutgla, L’Oreal

“All the experiences that you can have in our boutiques, or even in the stores of our partners … we can recreate those into our D2C sites or even into our retailers or partner markets.”

L’Oreal have been investing heavily in advanced technology capabilities, including augmented reality that lets shoppers virtually “try on” a new color or shade of makeup or hair color, as well as other interactive other capabilities to help a customer narrow down and select the products they want based on their own skin tones and occasions.

“It should be a really fun experience (online)”, said Xutgla.

However, it’s not all about the latest technology. L’Oreal also is investing with great focus on the basics, which includes complete and accurate Core Content, and if it’s available, using customer ratings and reviews, plus analytics including share of search and pricing evaluations.

Right now we’re really invested, and have a focus on the basics… in all the content that we display in our marketplaces and our retailers.

In terms of future metrics, the current environment brought on by COVID-19 is also driving L’Oreal’s plans. “We really need to be smart investing in media,” continued Xutgla, “and there are two or three different KPIs that we will be looking at.” These include customer acquisition cost, Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Lifetime Customer Value.

Finding Efficiency in the Details: A Conversation with Prime-Line Products

If you are a person who likes to repair things yourself, or are one of the many weekend visitors to a hardware or home center, you’ve likely encountered a Prime-Line product, even if you weren’t aware of it. A manufacturer that makes replacement hardware for many household items like door knobs, window locks, bathroom fixtures and cabinets, Prime-Line is all about high quality repair solutions. And the vast number of items in the Prime-Line catalog makes content management a challenge.

Syndigo held a series of discussions recently with two of the company’s eCommerce leaders to learn more about the changes they have seen during the past year and the ways they are leveraging Syndigo capabilities to drive sales with their retailer business partners.

The Challenges… and Opportunities

For Michael Bailey, Digital Content Supervisor at Prime-Line Products, it doesn’t matter who the retailer or vendor partner is, they want to ensure the same content for everyone. By having “one source of truth”, it makes work much more efficient – especially for someone responsible for sharing their digital content with their retailer/vendors.

In the past, Michael and others at Prime-Line had to pull together multiple different spreadsheets – for each vendor – to distribute their content. With tens of thousands of SKUs to manage across their partners, it was nearly impossible to keep all vendors up to speed at the same time. And if edits to content were requested by one, the odds were low that they would be replicated across other spreadsheets. This obviously caused inconsistencies in data quality, in addition to a large amount of time manually working on the sheets.

By accessing data from one source, Michael’s spreadsheets are reduced to one content set in CXH, with the ability to add or update content globally. It has become a huge timesaver, which enables him to get more things done.

I can change one thing in Syndigo… and within 3 minutes, I’m done publishing upwards of thousands of items, to all of our different vendors. — Michael Bailey, Prime-Line Products

“With Syndigo, I spend less time trying to get the same information to all of the online entities we do business with,” said Bailey. “I can change one thing in Syndigo… and within 3 minutes, I’m done publishing upwards of thousands of items, to all of our different vendors. As a result, I have more time to make the content the best we can for all involved.”

Looking Ahead

Prime-Line, like many suppliers, is also focused on 2021 and how to share their content with more retailers and vendors which adds efficiency. Even if the vendor is not a current Syndigo partner, the capabilities Prime-Line has through CXH to enables custom information to be published directly there to their retailer

“Extending the aisle” is another objective for Prime-Line, according to Tony Meirovitz, VP Marketing, eCommerce and Customer Experience. Through this year the company has seen a strong increase in demand for their products, due to the increasing numbers of stay-at-home consumers who may have home repairs or upgrades on their minds.

The challenge, however, is that no physical store can allocate space for all their items. “It’s a very SKU intensive business…inevitably, you have something that you need to replace… and you talk to the associate, and sometimes they [have it] and sometimes they don’t,” commented Meirovitz. “And when they don’t, that’s where we come in from an eCommerce standpoint, because we want to make sure our entire catalog is available on our b-to-b customers’ website,” in order to enable that complete experience.

Content is king with a SKU-intensive business, especially when many items may look identical online. Meirovitz noted that having accurate and complete item details is critical for ordering supplemental parts online, both to give confidence and reduce returns. In addition, the company found that it helped their b-to-b customers by providing simple line diagrams for every item, which helped to increase the response and viewing by consumers.

Take a look at our discussion with Tony, to learn the other elements of successful product listings, including photography and video capabilities.

A Conversation with Church & Dwight

For Syndigo’s most recent Content Excellence Award winners Church & Dwight, the road to good content was a multi-year experience. Over the past two years, the consumer goods leader in household and personal care products set on a course to improve their content processes through a company-wide approach that resulted in a more complete content set and better overall consumer experience.

Syndigo had the opportunity to meet with several of the Church & Dwight content leaders responsible for their transformation to understand the important elements for developing a winning content program; some of the challenges along the way; and how a focus on both core and enhanced content can help bring an in-store consistency to the online experience.

Church & Dwight has partnered with Syndigo

Here are Josh Rosen, Senior Digital Strategy Manager and Holly Pfeifer, Global Digital Marketing Technology Manager, discussing the importance of tying the in-store and online experiences together and the role that Product Information Management plays in that process.

The team’s drive to improve didn’t come without challenges, obviously. Church & Dwight worked together to ensure that they were not just filling in existing information gaps, but instead working from the ground up to build a content process that could expand as their needs for sharing content grew.

Even though you have that ‘infinite canvas’ [online]… You have to be disciplined with what you create…You have to be prepared to be able to offer more information if a consumer wants to dig in. — Josh Rosen

Bringing “in-store” online is now an essential part of the Church & Dwight content strategy. As consumers continue to search, shop and order items from mobile devices or remotely from a physical store, the Product Detail Page has become more important. PDPs today must serve multiple needs – the need for item fast recognition, as well as the ability to host in-depth information including comparison charts, usage videos and customer reviews, to drive the ever-important add-to-cart rates.

As the need for content grows, business users also need more intuitive user interfaces that can manage all the information efficiently, whether ingesting new content, managing and syndicating existing content, or using analytics to optimize PDPs. Here, Frank Rosario, Retail eCommerce Manager, and Holly Pfeifer discuss consumer needs and the data challenges that occur as a result.

Speed is the name of the game, especially in the current climate that we’re in… We’re able to get our customers the content they need, as quickly as possible. — Holly Pfeifer

In addition, using analytics to improve content health were key to the Church & Dwight plan to drive results. Here are some insights from Josh Rosen and Frank Rosario on the importance of working to ensure good recipient data, and the importance of support within the organization.

Church & Dwight set many specific targets to improve their overall content, including activating Syndigo’s eCommerce analytics solutions; training cross-functional teams on the new processes within the organization; increasing the average number of images by more than 50%; and improving their overall Content Health score to 91% in six months – one of the top improved clients across Syndigo’s more than 14,000 customers.

We wanted to ensure we were raising the bar and ensuring our content was helping drive conversions, as those consumers made purchase decisions on our products. — Frank Rosario

Finding Efficiency in the Network: First Quality leverages syndication to deliver content and sales

Paper products are part of numerous shopper product categories, and the variety available makes them seem ubiquitous. That’s why, in a pandemic-inspired shopping spree, some paper categories (such as paper towels, and bath tissue) are seen as so essential it can create a shortage. In other cases, items such as adult incontinence products are considered “shy to buy” categories – ones where consumers would prefer to purchase discreetly.

In both cases, the need to have product available directly for the consumer as well as in stores, is a powerful motivator for businesses. For First Quality, a manufacturer of premium quality absorbent hygiene and household paper products it was the push that accelerated the company to develop a more complete content program, eventually gaining them a Syndigo Content Excellence Award.

The Challenges bring Opportunities

According to Christa Reese, who manages digital content for First Quality, the company’s approach to managing and syndicating product information was restricting their capabilities and desire to grow. The company’s processes for content syndication were manual, which meant that a great deal of resources were spent maintaining and managing their existing content, which impacted their abilities to optimize and expand their content capabilities to create a more engaging product experience for shoppers.

For Sima Delafraz, Executive Global Leader of Sales & Marketing, “COVID forced us to fast-track what we knew we already had to do. In order for us to grow from where we were, we had to find a way to better organize, maintain and monitor our content.”

By extending their partnership with Syndigo, First Quality was able to manage both Core and Enhanced product content, on one integrated platform, Content Experience Hub. And the relationships Syndigo has with the largest network of major retailers meant that their content could be syndicated more easily, with less overhead and to each retailer’s specifications. “The fact that they pay attention to the growing needs of our retailers and the insights into content excellence made it a partnership we wanted to invest in,” said Delafraz.

“The majority of consumers are engaging with product content at some point in their buying journey and you absolutely must invest and focus on e-commerce to stay in the game.” — Christa Reese, Digital Asset Management

Hear Christa and Sima describe how the pandemic impacted their old way of managing content, and ultimately how they were able to use Syndigo’s capabilities to build their content programs for the future.

A Solid Foundation for the Future

For First Quality, content is incredibly important because it allows shoppers to make the best purchase decision, quickly. With products in more “shopper shy” categories, it is part of the brand promise to provide shoppers with all the information they need online in order to choose the product that is right for them, with comfort and confidence.

For John B. Sanfilippo & Son, Inc., a publicly traded (NASDAQ: JBSS) but family-controlled business, tradition and values are important. For nearly 100 years, JBSS has been driving results the “right way” – while innovating every step of the way.

As a producer of premium quality nut products and snacks under brands including Fisher®, Orchard Valley Harvest®, Squirrel Brand®, and Southern Style Nuts®, JBSS carries a large portfolio of items across many different channels. This means that it can be a challenge to make sure all their product content is easily monitored, up-to-date, and accessible while it is delivered to a wide variety of retail partners. Establishing consistency in quality, type, and number of images across the portfolio is critical.

Partnering with Syndigo, JBSS defined three key challenges it needed to address. First, JBSS needed content that is appealing, accurate to scale, and consistent, including product visuals and renderings. Second, they needed a way to store and organize the digital assets. And finally, a user-friendly means to syndicate the assets was important. This was the biggest issue – how get their high quality content to all recipient partners efficiently, including third parties such as Instacart, without added headcount.

Together, Syndigo and JBSS implemented a consistent way of organizing and managing digital assets through CXH, or Content Experience Hub, a single platform for product information management. From CXH, the team syndicates assets directly, without having to log in to multiple different partner portals. Since upgrading their content capabilities, JBSS has seen a 62% growth in eCommerce sales, aided by Syndigo-optimized product assets.

Listen to Senior Manager of Digital Demand, Michael Wellner, as he discusses some of the familiar challenges the company encountered, and how Syndigo helped JBSS create renders, store and manage them, and finally syndicate the cutting edge images to grow the business.

NewAge Products produces modular cabinets for work and storage – for kitchens, garages, laundry rooms, patios and other outdoor spaces. These products can be combined with one another so customers can create a distinctive space that is just right for them. As a primary leader in their industry, NewAge provides high-quality storage and lifestyle products, sold through major online retailers such as The Home Depot, Costco, Amazon, Wayfair, Lowes, and Sam’s Club, as well as their own eCommerce site.

However, with so many SKUs and retailer partnerships, NewAge also needed to be able to manage a large amount of data and relationships, which was a challenge.

“There wasn’t ‘one version of the truth’. We had data sitting all over the place,” said Shay Carriere, Creative Director for NewAge. “People had misinformation internally because we didn’t have that kind of built-in framework.”

Together, Syndigo and NewAge were able to reduce operational inefficiencies, which allowed them to bring products to market faster across all retail partners. This provided a more consistent user experience across different retailer website requirements.

“We made a conscious decision to find the appropriate tools that met all our needs, and cut the rest,” said Carriere. “Automation, reporting and analytics used to be a way more painful processes, and they limited our ability to drive improvements.”

Today, the company has a more streamlined process that aligns with their online ordering, making it faster and easier for homeowners to purchase their high-quality organizational products. NewAge is able to spend less time looking at the data and comparing sites, and instead understanding more about how the content is performing, where there are deficiencies, and planning how to improve and drive forward change.

We spoke with Shay Carriere to learn how his team approaches building content for their customers to engage with, as well as how they have partnered with Syndigo to improve their data quality and speed to market with content that engages their target consumers.

How Accurate Product Information Keeps People Safe

Every three minutes, a food allergy sends someone to the emergency room in the US. Most of the time, it’s due to accidental exposure to a known allergen. Things as simple as bread that contains sesame, or a dessert that included a last-minute ingredient change to peanut butter, have been fatal.

For people with food allergies, these serious reactions are most often due to either inaccurate or inadequate information about the ingredients in the dish that person ate, according to foodservice operator SAGE Dining.

We all understand the importance of accurate information from a business perspective, but it’s also important to understand the serious – sometimes life-or-death – consequences of poor-quality content. It’s a central focus of the service SAGE Dining provides, and while SAGE is not the only service provider focused on accurate product information, they serve as an important reminder for all.

“food allergies are actually an epidemic – one in ten adults and one in 13 kids has at least one food allergy.”

— said SAGE Dining Director of Nutrition Leslie Vogel (also a Registered Dietitian).

“That means in every classroom, there are one or event two students that are navigating one or more food allergies. And that’s true in every school across the nation.”

Currently there are a reported 32 million Americans with food allergies, and of that group, more than half of adults and 42% of children have experienced a severe reaction because of their food allergies. It’s also a growing problem for foodservice businesses – claims of allergic food reactions increased more than 300% between 2007 and 2016. It’s clear that any supplier of food must require a high standard of production and monitoring, as well as accuracy in identifying what’s in the food they manufacture.

SAGE Dining provides more than 40 million lunches every year to more than 240,000 students and faculty across the facilities they serve. And that includes the more than 17,000 students with food allergies.

“We believe they (the 17,000 diners with food allergies) deserve to come into the dining hall and have a safe meal with their friends,” said Vogel.

In the latest episode of our Podcast, Jason talks with Leslie Vogel and Lisa Chertok, Director of Supply Chain for SAGE Dining. Listen to Leslie and Lisa discuss the daily issues that SAGE must manage in order to keep their customers safe across the more than 300 private schools and colleges they serve – and how suppliers can help them and other providers like them deliver high quality food with complete and accurate information.

The only way to avoid a dangerous reaction is to avoid the foods, and the way they do that is to either check food labels, ingredient lists, or ask about the product information on the foods they consume.

This is where suppliers can help, according to Vogel.

“We’re the ones who have to communicate accurately to our guests… Our system relies on our ability to give accurate information, which relies on the information from all of our manufacturers to be accurate as well.”

The Continuing Journey – Making the Best Use of Data

The company motto for Schreiber Foods, a leading private label supplier for foodservice and retail, is “Doing Good Through Food”. For Erin Buntin, Foodservice Sales Director, and her team, the department motto could be “Doing Well Through Data.”

The team at Schreiber Foods has definitely undergone a transformational and evolutionary journey by using more – and better – product detail to drive performance and sales. And Erin has had a lot to do with it.

As a global supplier of dairy products such as yogurt, cheese, and plant-based beverages, Schreiber manufactures products for other brands, which means the Sales team members often “operate out of fear,” according to Buntin. What she means is that as a company managing another company’s brand, every attribute or asset they use can make the difference in getting a sale, as they are competing against branded competitors.

Thankfully, the Schreiber team has embraced the usage of product content as part of their sales process, even though it has been a bit of a journey. Early on, as the concept of GS1 and content consistency was starting to take shape for suppliers, it was crucial to show the organization the importance of how information would drive business decisions. Buntin noted that coming from a retail background where there was access to product data, she worked to show how to use information to drive better decisions by incorporating it into both the selling cycle and customer engagement.

Buntin also noted that organizational adoption can be challenging, especially coming from something unknown that may require new or different resources. However, as a strong advocate internally, she made sure people understood that the future would be more reliant on content, not less, and adopting when they did was a move to strengthen the company.

And now they can’t live without it! Where once Schreiber started with a few images or descriptions, they now work to add more storytelling elements as a way of making the content connect more with the viewer. For example, highlighting the proper ratio of cheese to put on a burger helps users gain the expectation that they go to Schreiber as their “one source of truth,” rather than reaching out to multiple salespeople for various pieces of information.

The team at Schreiber sees their data journey as never finished, and they stay in a “never satisfied” state with the information as they recognize there are always improvements to be made. But while it was hard in the past to get product information distributed, today it’s a requirement to sell.

“The best word to explain how we got to where we are today is truly, ‘evolution’… We’re proud to be at a point to see how integration of more data is a game changer.” — Erin Buntin, Director, Foodservice Sales

See what else Erin and host Jason Gunn discussed about Schreiber’s journey to digital dominance, how the hard data helps them to connect through better storytelling, and how it all comes together in service of better sales.