The Key to Establishing a Long-Tail Merchandising Strategy

Master Data Management Helps Overcome Long-Tail Challenges
In an effort to provide consumers with a more personalized experience, retailers continue to offer larger selections of products to satisfy individual tastes, preferences and curiosities. However, they're quickly learning that manual data entry and spreadsheets no longer suffice. Solutions such as master data management (MDM) enable retailers to manage the implementation of a long-tail strategy by automating and managing processes, product information and digital assets in a centralized system. More products can be offered with more efficient operations, ultimately accelerating time to market.

When introducing new products and maintaining existing ones, a MDM solution eliminates the hassle of manually receiving and validating product information so retailers can do the following:

• easily manage common products across multiple languages and brands;
• effectively onboard and maintain product and asset data to reduce data errors;
• improve collaboration and visibility with suppliers by giving them access to see and maintain product information for their existing items; and
• quickly increase SKUs by extending product information across the entire supply chain.

Customers Expect a Seamless Shopping Experience as Options Broaden
The ability to easily classify product information automatically, consistently and accurately across different brands and channels in multiple hierarchies is key to achieving a successful long-tail initiative and meeting the increasing expectations of consumers. A MDM solution generates accurate and reliable product information and enables retailers which operate multiple websites under different brands (but use the same product set) to automatically and efficiently assign new products to these websites. Manufacturers and distributors which produce electronic catalogs where products are categorized into many different standard hierarchies can also benefit by automatically maintaining links within the various hierarchies.

MDM enables retailers to publish product information seamlessly to all online and offline channels from one system. By generating feeds for affiliate platforms while maintaining specified hierarchies using auto-classification, retailers can easily promote and sell products on sites such as Google Shopping, Amazon and others. More importantly, by implementing a long-tail strategy in concert with a MDM solution, retailers can achieve better results thanks to higher margins, more offerings, faster time to market and increased automation of business processes.

Jennifer Krizanek is director of global product marketing at Stibo Systems, a provider of multidomain master data management (MDM) solutions.