The Challenges of Images at Digital Shelf and The Solution That Drives Shopper Growth

The pandemic accelerated the adoption of digital retail out of necessity. The habits that were formed by consumers navigating online retail will endure, even as the restrictions imposed by the pandemic recede. Retail is now decidedly digital.

This leads to a more hidden challenge on the digital shelf, which packs a bigger punch on brands professionals who deal with marketing, trade relations, category management, and e-commerce sales. Namely: managing online product content detail!

When we look at the product detail page (PDP) on e-commerce platforms (Amazon, Target, Walmart, and Tesco most certainly, but actually every digital retailer), we see an unprecedentedly complex environment to manage. Much more so than in brick-and-mortar trade relations, brand teams must monitor and manage product information necessary to place the brand’s product online, literally on a daily basis. The PDP must comply with the parameters imposed uniquely by each retailer, down to the individual SKU level, with few ways to stand out, create differentiation for their products and drive sales. Brand teams responsible for products on the digital shelf face a logarithmically difficult task of managing data at agonizingly minute detail. Teams are often dealing with more than 600 “fixes” per day of PDP information that is non-compliant with individual retailer rules, deficient and ineffective content, and data that is just plain wrong.

Behaviorally’s unique leadership in the world of shopper marketing has always been grounded in the behavioral principle that shoppers buy what they see. Consumers tend to make instinctive, snap decisions, choosing what they put in their carts, versus making deliberate, cognitive choices based on truly considered comparisons between products. We know that 80% of shoppers choose a product based on images rather than text; this is even more true in digital shopping environments.

The digital PDP provides opportunities to communicate and optimize the benefits of the product in text, but there has been a gap in the market in terms of tools that address product images and their ability to convey benefits and minimize barriers to drive choice. With so much to manage and such a void in the tools for optimizing images, it is easy to imagine a recipe for brand e-commerce teams to make mistakes, fail to influence the purchase decision, and incur unnecessarily lost revenue.

 

This all makes e-commerce devilishly challenging for brand teams when making sure digital shoppers see their products in the best light.

Knowing how critical this challenge is to our clients’ digital retail success, Behaviorally has developed a new solution to what we determined is an unmet need. We apply AI visual recognition technology to our extensive (and growing) category and retailer level image database and shopper marketing metrics, and our deep category expertise and unique behavioral framework, to create the definitive solution that addresses the most critical variable to conversion on the digital shelf: image optimization. The result is Behaviorally’s Flash.PDP™: an always-on, subscription-based digital shelf image monitoring system that alerts brand side teams, in real-time, to deficient images at the SKU level, identifying the things that can be fixed and prioritizing action that will optimally drive sales.

We are excited to share with you the details of how Flash.PDP can fit seamlessly into your workstreams allowing you to optimize the images that most potentially influence shopper behavior.  It is the latest innovation in the Behaviorally suite of digital services that defines and diagnoses elements that drive shopper growth.