Consumer electronics has, like many other sectors, experienced some exaggerated highs and lows in recent times. While the pandemic caused a spike in demand within certain verticals (home entertainment and home working driving particularly strong performance), supply chain issues were exaggerated by a strong reliance on manufacturing in a largely locked-down Asia.
Despite these challenges, in the first half of 2021, the global consumer electronics market grew by 18%, amassing $42.8 billion in revenue. In this article, we’ll explore a few of the common product related challenges that this booming industry is still facing – and present a few smart solutions to help sidestep the roadblocks going forward.
1. Inefficient Product Onboarding
The Problem: Consumer electronics sector is a fast-paced sector. The demand for new and improved products is constant. As a result, manufacturers are constantly refining more advanced iterations to bring to market, and new products launch with a high degree of frequency.
While this can make the sector an exhilarating space to work, it can also present some challenges when it comes to the onboarding of new products. Keeping up with a high frequency of releases means adhering to tight turnarounds. Launches are time sensitive (there’s a need to keep up with other retailers and maintain a reputation for offering the most current products) but at the same time, a high degree of accuracy and product information is required.
Why It Matters: Efficient product onboarding does more than keep you competitive – it also impacts consumer experience. Your existing customers expect to have access to products as they are released and available elsewhere – their loyalty will be tested if products are already on sale through other competitors. Additionally, consumers need to be able to make fully informed purchase decisions – consumer electronics in particular have a lot of attributes, functionality, and features that they will want to ensure a complete understanding of before they part with their money. Stress-free product onboarding is also essential for team cohesion and internal morale. When you’re onboarding products regularly, a disjointed process will quickly impact ongoing performance and job satisfaction.
The Solution: The key to success for any process repeated at scale is efficiency. This comes in the form of automated onboarding workflows, which free your team and reduce the margin for error when it comes to uploading important product information. ECP’s leading digital content experience platform offers the ability to create optimized automated onboarding workflows, saving time, driving value, and enhancing consumer and employee experience.
2. Difficulty Keeping Close Brand Control
The Problem: Within consumer electronics, the brand is critically important. The reputation and loyalty that an electronics brand command is every bit as important as the features and functionality of its latest product release. As a result, brands need to maintain their market position and presentation consistently across a wide range of retailers. If they fail to protect this asset, they run the risk of their brand being diluted and losing impact. However, keeping close brand control throughout a wide range of retailers and channel partnerships can be a real challenge.
Why It Matters: The success of consumer electronic brands is dependent on the trust of their customers. Typically offering higher price items, purchased with less frequency, the need to offer a dependable, consistent, and safe experience is essential. For this reason, the consumer electronics industry, relies heavily on the presentation of a consistent brand – and this is especially true within online retail, where goods rely solely on digital assets to convey safety, quality, and functionality. If a channel partner is failing to promote products with an adequate degree of detail (for example. failing to include instructional videos, 3D renderings or lifestyle imagery) the correct impression cannot be made consistently, and this will have ongoing implications that only compound for consumers over time.
The Solution: To avoid these issues, brands and channel partners alike need to have a dependable shared source of product information and digital assets. By working with a digital content experience platform such as the Effectus Content Platform, dual syndication means that assets can be pulled directly from the brand’s catalog, offering instant and complete access to all assets and information – fully approved by the brand. The multiple user access for DAM offered by the Effectus Content Platform also enables better ongoing collaboration when it comes to the leverage of digital assets.
3. Maintaining High Quality Product Content
The Problem: As we’ve already touched upon, when it comes to consumer electronics, consumers need to feel a good degree of faith in the products they purchase online. Functionality, quality, and safety must all be clearly conveyed through the range of digital assets and information that product pages display. Consumer expectations are rising – the demand for information at the point of purchase is sky high, and if competitors are offering a more complete picture or experience of the products in question, buyers will simply go elsewhere.
Why It Matters: Purchases made within consumer electronics do not tend to be impulsive. Careful consideration is usually applied before a sale is made, with customers comparing several models or brands for the perfect specification before making their decision and converting to a sale. A lack of product information can create hesitancy (and even lack of trust) in customers, and this loss of momentum can have a big impact on conversion, causing many unnecessarily missed opportunities.
The Solution: When you’re managing hundreds of products across multiple sales channels (and onboarding new ones every day!) it can be a real challenge to root out products that are underperforming due to a lack of information or digital assets. Our digital content experience platform means that AI-powered product content scoring can be applied – giving your team instant visibility of the gaps that exist and recommending the “next best action” for them to take in terms of optimized efficiency.
A Bright Future for Consumer Electronics
With so much future opportunity within the consumer electronics sector, it’s essential to optimize product-related workflows, keeping them efficient and scalable. Without these procedural safeguards in place, growth will always prove challenging, and the full benefits of a scaling sector cannot be fully accessed.
From automated onboarding to data-driven recommendations and instant syndication of brand assets, Effectus Content Platform offers a dependable, practical solution to help you scale with confidence and ease.
