Online product data is a critical element for the future of manufacturing brands

Online experience was never as important for manufacturing companies as today. With growing amount of e-commerce, the ability of online retailer to leverage structured data and online identification is absolutely critical. GTIN (Global Trade Item Number) also known in US as UPC are taking guessing game out of comparing two products online to determine if they are the same item eliminating the problem with entity resolution and big data.

Remember some of my previous blogs about Global Part Numbers, unique product identification and part number intelligence? For me, it goes back to the topic of future product data intelligence and online information about manufacturing products.

If you look at the intersection between e-commerce, online advertising and product data, you better watch Google trying to acquire and organization information about manufacturing products sold online. I shared some of my thoughts about it last year – Why manual product data modeling should be a thing in the past. PLM vendors should learn about Google Knowledge Graph and related Google projects.

The idea of interconnection between product modeling activities, building online data standards such as schema.org and collecting of data about manufacturing product sold online is very powerful. The combination of product data curation with deep learning can be applied to build classification of product information used online.

Manufacturing brands operating online are learning how to leverage online data and what is mostly important how to put the right data in front of customers and search engines. My attention was caught yesterday by the Google Inside AdWords article – Google Manufacturer Center helps brands find and convert new customers. It speaks about Google Manufacturing Center. Here is the passage that explains its role.

Google provides consumers around the world with the answers they need to find, review, and buy the products they’re looking for. Last year, we announced Google Manufacturer Center, a free tool to help brand manufacturers accurately represent their products to shoppers on Google.com and other Google services. By uploading complete and accurate product data into Manufacturer Center, brands increase their chances of standing out in a crowded marketplace — and ultimately get more of their products in the hands of consumers. Today, we’ll shine a light on three manufacturers who have boosted results with Manufacturer Center, and highlight new partners that can help manufacturers maximize the tool.

The article brings few very interesting examples from vendors such as Bosch, Speakman, JanSport  using Manufacturer Center to help their shoppers make more informed buying decisions. It also introduces new Google partners that can help manufacturing companies to upload data to Manufacturing center:

Manufacturers can choose to either upload their product data directly to Manufacturer Center or work with an approved Google Shopping Partner that integrates with Manufacturer Center. In addition to our existing partners, we’re announcing 4 new partners: WebCollage, Channel Advisor, Informatica, and GFK Etilize. These partners are industry leaders in organizing and distributing product data.

What is my conclusion? Remember the days online content providers and website owners discovered SEO? It was the time the change came to publishing industry. Since that time, publishing industry changed forever. The days of old manufacturing companies distributing data about products manually to sell it efficiently and numbered. To provide right information about product to online space such as Manufacturing Center will be as important as sending colorful prospect to dealers 10 years ago. The more interesting things will be coming after – how manufacturing companies will discover what customers want and injecting this information into product development process? This is a future of combined customer and manufacturing experience. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg