Single Source of Truth (SSOT): 4 Benefits That Transform Retail Marketing
The primary goal of IT is to have every data element “mastered” in one place, with all elements linked and easily updateable. Retailers can benefit significantly from an SSOT-style product data approach even with their legacy data systems.
Now more than ever, retail business runs on data. The larger the operation and the more products sold, the greater the dependence on reliable product data to keep the company profitable. Each product has multiple data elements from many different sources. The problem is that too many retailers need help managing such massive volumes of data effectively.
Too many retailers struggle to manage massive amounts of data effectively.
Data about each product received from many manufacturers are typically stored in a Product Information Management (PIM) system. A separate Digital Asset Management (DAM) system stores all the images, videos, and other files related to each product—or even to a multi-product group or category. On top of that, retailers often have separate databases for pricing, inventory management, sales history, national and regional marketing management, and other cost centers.
The SSOT Ideal
While the pure SSOT ideal is difficult for most retailers, a form of it can be achieved.
With so much data to manage and so much potential for data duplication and costly errors, it’s no wonder that companies and their IT departments strive for an effective, unified approach. For many, the “holy grail” is the Single Source of Truth or SSOT model.
Ideally, SSOT is a practice where every data element is stored and edited in only one place. Master data are never copied in editable form; references are made on read-only copies in related databases. Unfortunately, this pure ideal is difficult for most retailers. However, SSOT can be achieved by linking product data in meaningful and governable ways. By creating a unified, accurate, and consistent set of master data across an entire organization, retailers can ensure data consistency across multiple systems, achieving a Single Source of Truth without keeping all the data in a single location. This approach, often referred to as “Master Data Management,” is the approach used in Comosoft’s LAGO system for handling complex product data.
Retailers’ data requirements are unique because their products constantly change, and their manufacturers and supply partners often have wildly different definitions for each data field. When data are imported into a retailer’s PIM system, vital information may be missing or incomplete.
LAGO links product data from multiple sources, to create a Single Source of Truth for retail organizations.
Product images and other digital assets from the manufacturer—or their creative partners—can quickly become outdated or mislabeled, making the efforts of the retailer’s marketing and advertising directors’ tasks extremely difficult.
What retailers need—more than a single, monolithic database—is a unified, well-integrated data source.
Worst of all, large retailers typically have regional stores or branches with different seasonal or promotional product requirements. Each of these variations require “tweaks” to a product’s galaxy of data used by the retailer’s production and creative service managers. Having all of that information
residing in a single, monolithic database is not realistic. What they really need is a unified, well-integrated
data source, to reduce the potential for costly errors, automate campaigns, and make marketing and
advertising directors’ decision-making more accurate, flexible, and measurable.
Integration Advantages
There are three major benefits to having a unified data source, whether or not it fits the narrow definition of SSOT. With so much product and product-related data to manage, an integrated system provides greatly enhanced efficiency. This goes well beyond marketing and advertising.
Every retail department (not just marketing) will be more efficient with an integrated data source of product information.
Every retail department—from procurement to inventory management to customer service to ecommerce—benefits from reducing manual data entry time (by fifty percent or more) while still knowing anything they need to know about any product.
Related to efficiency, a unified, integrated source of product data also provides drastically reduced error rates. These can be costly. Joel Ross’s “1-10-100” rule states that if the cost of preventing an error is $1, the cost of correcting it is $10, while the cost of dealing with a resulting process or system failure is $100. Clearly, a data system designed to reduce error is worth every penny.
Another benefit for retailers is an improved customer experience. With so many information channels available to consumers, maintaining consistent product data across all of them is essential. Fortunately, Comosoft LAGO accomplishes exactly that, feeding consistent information to multiple versions of print catalogs, as well as output to online, mobile, and other digital channels. If a data point is changed or updated, the print and digital channel workflows are updated automatically.
When detailed, product-level data is readily available to all departments, strategic decisions can be made faster and with greater success.
Finally, a unified, integrated source of all product data can revolutionize product development and offer planning. When detailed product-level data is readily available to all departments, strategic decisions can be made faster and with greater success rates. When sales data are incorporated into a system like LAGO, the results can fuel AI-enabled offer planning that measurably improves sales.
Multichannel Mastery
Bestselling author and marketing guru Jay Baer famously said, “We are surrounded by data but starved for insights.” This is increasingly true for retailers, who must juggle mountains of product and sales data from multiple sources and are under enormous pressure to promote those products in a crowded media universe. With so much chaos, good insights are hard to come by.
But there is a way forward. Beginning with a single, reliable, automatable source of product information—and everything else related to those products—retailers can gain the right insights and make great business decisions.
Find out more about Comosoft LAGO and its potential to transform your retail data and marketing strategy. Or book a demo to see for yourself.
