If you rely on others to market and sell your products, your brand is your most valuable asset. Whether customers are browsing a retail outlet, an online marketplace or a distributor’s catalog, they need to instantly recognize your product as the one they should buy.
Building brand awareness and equity is only part of the process, however. Once you’ve done the hard work of building a brand that customers respect and have an affinity for, you need to protect those efforts.
Digital asset management (DAM) solutions have become an essential tool to allow consumer packaged goods (CPG) producers to expand product lines, markets and channels without compromising brand integrity and consistency.
DAM for product development
DAM solutions are typically thought of as marketing tools, but their use cases are far broader. There’s a big opportunity for CPG companies to use the same DAM they’re considering (or are already using) for marketing within product development departments, integrating into and enhancing product lifecycle management (PLM) processes. Rich media has become essential for accelerating the development process.
Virtual samples for faster, cheaper prototyping
Whether you ship samples to buyers (causing storage problems in expensive office space) or buyers must travel to the samples, you’re losing time and money. With the widespread shift to remote working, these challenges have become even greater. With a modern DAM, you can provide buyers with instant access to images, video and digital models from the design or production facility. This lets you replace some iterations with digital samples (or more advanced digital twins) and virtual signoffs, dramatically speeding up the process and reducing costs.
Keeping an eye on production
Your DAM can also be used to store and manage inspection content from production facilities. Working conditions, equipment maintenance and facility security content are easily documented, ensuring compliance with your standards and protecting your brand’s reputation.
DAM for packaging development
Digital asset management solutions can be incredibly powerful tools in packaging development—they help to increase speed, prevent mistakes and, ultimately, reduce costs.
Efficient multistage workflows
Packaging development is a multistep process involving many parties that must approve each part. Managing a chain of versions through email as they bounce between designers, marketing, legal and creative directors can lead to mistakes and delays.
A full-featured DAM can solve all these problems by implementing consistent version control, orchestrating parallel and sequential approval workflows, and sharing visibility of individual contributors’ feedback.
As a result, everyone knows what the current version is, everyone can see who has signed off and who hasn’t, and everyone involved can see feedback. That means less confusion, less time spent coordinating and managing the project, and a significantly lower risk of mistakes. In more regulated industries—such as food, cosmetics or healthcare—it can be a legal requirement to keep records of approval processes. Keeping the activity within a single system will simplify any future audit.
Easier localization
A DAM provides a single source of truth across markets, ensuring correct assets are used when regional packaging and marketing are developed. Atomizing content used to develop packaging (for example, product photos, trademarks, etc.) can dramatically reduce duplication of effort. Localized copy can be combined with global elements, rather than requiring complete redesigns.
DAM for POS marketing support
A DAM can be used to store, share and easily refresh point-of-sale assets like banners, promotional text, product images, assets for contests and a great deal more. Partners always know where to go for the latest version.
DAM for direct sales
The shift in retail behavior during the pandemic has accelerated the plans of many CPG producers to expand into selling direct to consumers online, becoming retailers for their own products. As proven by countless retailers worldwide, a DAM serves this goal by managing all the assets necessary to field a commanding e-commerce presence, either on owned channels or through syndicating to marketplaces.
Read this blog post about Maximizing online delivery with DAM for retail for more insights.
The DAM for everyone
OpenText™ Media Management excels in CPG organizations because it’s not just powerful—it can be many things to many people. Custom-branded user interfaces and workflows can be easily built for different teams, surfacing the assets and functions each team needs while drawing from the same single instance. Powerful integrations and headless operation allow other teams to access assets from within their existing workflows—making things better without making them more complicated.
