Why Retail Marketing Production Gets So Complex
Retail keeps expanding across stores, e-commerce, and regional variations. The real challenge is keeping every moving piece aligned in a single workflow without creating bottlenecks or inconsistencies.
Retail marketing production has become fragmented, to put it mildly. Not only are there multiple regional stores with unique customer needs, but also the sheer number of communications and commerce channels has grown rapidly—with no sign of slowing down.
It gets worse. Product information and digital assets are often stored in separate, siloed data repositories. This forces marketing operations into time-consuming (and costly) tasks, including manual information searches, manual hand-offs, and increased production
What are the added costs of having product information and digital assets stored in siloed data repositories?
errors. The result is added labor costs, slower time-to-market, and eroded brand trust.
Why is retail marketing production becoming so complicated?
Today’s large retailers must manage more products than ever before. These vary in many ways—from color, size, and features to price and regional demand. Unlike smaller marketing teams, enterprise marketing operations must manage more campaigns across more channels—each with its own complexity and regional variations. With each new store or e-commerce site, the need for customization grows exponentially.
How can marketing operations teams cope with the increasing complexity of promotional campaigns?
This creates trouble for marketing operations when product data, creative assets, pricing, campaign plans, and production tasks live in separate systems. The only way to cope with this growing complexity is to adopt a “single source of truth” model for retail marketing production systems.
What is the source of workflow delays and production risk?
In an age of consolidation, many retailers have inherited legacy systems from acquired partners. When these systems were created, they usually met the marketing needs of the moment. But too often, they couldn’t scale or adapt to new conditions. Disconnected spreadsheets, email-based approvals, shared drives, and one-off project tools created complex marketing workflows that couldn’t scale and were hard to track or control.
Understandably, these Rube Goldberg-like systems create significant pain for the design and production teams—especially when the potential for change and growth is high. Disconnected legacy systems often lead to outdated assets and incorrect pricing. Due to
How do complex marketing workflows cause delays and create undue risk?
their isolated nature, they also lead to duplicate work, missed approvals, version confusion, and inconsistent campaign execution. All of that reduces profitability and erodes consumer confidence.
What is the path to simpler marketing production execution—at scale?
Many of the tools needed to create multichannel campaigns already exist. Product Information Management (PIM) and Digital Asset Management (DAM) systems can empower production designers who use powerful layout tools like Adobe InDesign. However, many of these data and design systems are often disconnected from each other. They are also disconnected from the overall planning, proofing, approval, and feedback process required for large-scale marketing.
How does an integrated workflow enable large-scale marketing operations?
However, when these systems are reliably interconnected, a simpler, more streamlined workflow is possible. By connecting these parts in a meaningful way, each role has better visibility, fewer manual steps, cleaner handoffs, and greater control of the
entire process. Such a system can also use a predictive data model, including artificial intelligence, to fine-tune product offers based on purchasing behavior patterns.
Smart integration and interconnection of key systems are the secrets to overcoming marketing production complexity. When done right, this enables your teams to manage those workflows effectively—and stay focused on the overall mission.
Even as campaigns, channels, and versions expand, retail marketing production does not have to remain fragmented. Schedule a demo to find out how Comosoft LAGO gives retail teams a more connected way to manage product data, creative assets, approvals, and production workflows. With LAGO, large-scale marketing can move faster, with fewer errors, and achieve your company’s goals more effectively than ever.
