Q&A: Alan Porter, Director of Product Marketing, Nuxeo
Alan Porter is an industry-leading content strategist and Nuxeo’s Director of Product Marketing. He is a regular conference speaker, workshop leader, and author and will also be joining us at our Future of Retail Marketing event tomorrow.
Can you tell us a bit about your background?
I’m the Director of Product Marketing at Nuxeo. I’m a regular writer and industry speaker on various aspects of customer experience and content strategy. Author of several books including “CX Trinity: Customers, Content, Context” and “The Content Pool.”
What does your company do? / What is your USP?
The Nuxeo Platform enables companies to manage, access, and use all of their digital and rich media assets. Nuxeo allows companies to leverage their creative assets to increase their customer experiences, gain operational efficiencies that reduce time-to-market and increase revenue.
With industry leading digital asset management functionality aligned with enterprise scale, federated search capabilities, sophisticated metadata management, and artificial intelligence, Nuxeo is the preferred solution for CPG, apparel, cosmetics, food & beverage, and luxury brands.
What’s special about the platform and your approach?
In the world of retail and consumer packaged goods, manufacturers rely on large and ever-changing product portfolios. Traditional marketing DAM systems lack the flexibility and sophistication CPG companies need to manage the full creative lifecycle and they can’t adapt as business needs change.
Nuxeo DAM goes beyond marketing to allow Retail & CPG companies to bring products to market faster , with a solution that unleashes the full power of their business’s complex content ecosystem. Nuxeo helps them rethink, re-engineer, and revolutionise their content supply chain.
What advantage does it add?
Nuxeo DAM allows Retailers and CPG to:
- Break information silos
- Improve their customer experiences
- Accelerate time-to market
- Innovate faster
- Automate their process with AI-infused functionalities
How are retailers using your systems to gain competitive advantage and what does best practice look like? Can you share a case study with us?
Let’s take the example of how Nuxeo DAM helped one of the top 15 global apparel companies take on the unique challenges presented by managing digital assets for an array of clothing and accessory brands worldwide.
Apparel brands depend on images—a lot of them, sourced internally and externally. Nuxeo’s global apparel customer faced high external photoshoot vendor costs, from requests for both new shoots and existing assets. The customer wanted a globally-deployable digital asset management solution that could enable self-service search, promoting re-use and distribution of current assets by ecommerce and marketing teams.
Using Nuxeo Digital Asset Management, our customer centralized assets to eliminate over a dozen digital asset management silos, reducing request times and cost per search.
Staying on-brand visually was also a major priority. Looking good, with user-friendly and accessible design, formed a core part of their corporate approach—whether for corporate marketing or for their retail partners. Before Nuxeo DAM, retail partners had to use a bare-bones file transfer service to access assets, and could potentially gain access to assets exclusive to their competitors.
With Nuxeo digital asset management product, the customer was able to create a separate branded portal for retailers to make accessing current ecommerce photography easy and trackable. Retailers see only the images they are allowed to use, and each retailer’s exclusive content can remain fully secure.
Are there other companies you partner with?
Nuxeo partners with Global Retailers and CPG around the World as well as Fortune 500 companies to address their modern content challenges.
What challenges and opportunities do you see in UK retail for 2021 / What challenges are retailers facing in 2020?
We see multiple challenges in 2021 for the retail sector:
- Keeping up on digital experiences and delivering the right product information.
As e-commerce is rising, consumers are increasingly willing to have easily digestible access to information about products, including text, pictures, videos and much more. Our latest UK survey results show that 58% of UK shoppers would go elsewhere if a retailer had poor product information on its website. Online, consumers increasingly want to be able to view products from different angles, to replicate as much of the physical shopping experience as possible.
- Photo shoots and remote working
How to address the new reality of producing new content while everyone is working from home? The idea of a traditional photoshoot seems to come to an end. Creatives will need to get creative, and innovative to explore new and exciting ways to get the work done.
- Innovation and process automation
Retailers and brands struggling to bring new product innovations to market quickly, or to respond in a timely way to new trends, risk losing valued customers to rivals. But delivering such an experience is no small undertaking.
In many cases, it can take brands and retailers many months to bring a new product to market, with all the positioning and promotional materials required to support the launch and subsequent sales.
How will you address these challenges and turn them into successes?
With a coordinated approach to Digital Asset Management (DAM) across the customer journey, retailers and brands can give customers the confidence and appetite to purchase and to keep coming back.
Managing the plethora of rich media assets and all the associated digital rights and permissions is a complex task. Nuxeo DAM allows creatives to easily collaborate on, share, and access complete campaigns or component materials such as video and audio files across multiple devices.
Nuxeo breaks down information silos that keep the teams from doing their best work fast, delivering the right content to the right people, when they need it and on the most appropriate device. As a result, they can develop products faster, conquer trends and delight customers.
Our Digital Asset Management system works with any file type or format (image, video, 3D…), enabling scalable, flexible control over the information that matters at every stage in the product development process.
What is on the horizon for you as a company?
Nuxeo is focused on continuing to supply the most flexible, modern, content services platform on the market. The platform provides the foundation for our growing base of customers who have complex content issues in either Digital Asset Management or Enterprise Content Management (and occasionally both) that need solving.
Any final thoughts?
The changes we are seeing in the way we do business will continue to build reliance on digital experiences, and the need for the systems to support that while enabling business continuity and growth will fuel the ongoing acceleration of digital transformation projects.
By placing our rich media assets at the center of the digital supply chain, we can connect content, data, and assets across the organization and deliver exceptional customer experiences.
To find out more about how Nuxeo can help your retail operation, click here.
