The Future of Merchandising is Adaptive — Johan Boström // inRiver

Quotes

• “Merchandising is a wide term and can be interpreted in many different ways. The way we interpret merchandising is actually making it easier for a buyer to buy a product.” - Johan “What we have seen in the last few years has been a rapid increase and the need for syndicating the content to Home Depot or to Walmart.  When you look at that, merchandising becomes a lot harder.”  - Johan “The way that merchandising needs to work is that you need to build a full content on pages like Amazon or Home Depot. There’s an overlap between content that you can produce and present on their site and that of yours.” - Johan “The customers that we cater to today, they syndicate a lot of this content to these different third-party endpoints and they need to take into consideration what is the best way of merchandising on those endpoints too, with the limitations that they have.” - Johan “The way that the market is heading is that our customers need to syndicate more advanced content to these channels and to really be able to quickly adapt when those channels change.” - Johan “The adaptive part when you are looking at an old channel is that when you own the channel,  you can actually adapt to the customers’ search navigation and buying behavior and thus adapt the content to them which you cannot do on a third-party marketplace. What you need to do is to constantly monitor how you are performing.” - Johan “Being able to get more data about what’s happening in the third-party marketplaces is a big thing today and it’s only going to get bigger because if you don’t know, you can’t adapt.” - Johan “You need to have a content creation factory set up so that you have the ability to react to whatever findings you get when you start analyzing the data.” - Johan “Our customers have now realized how extremely important it is to produce high-quality content than ever before. The buying behavior is constantly changing, competitors are changing and you need to keep track of this and that can only be done by tracking data.” - Johan “Brand is, and I do believe will still be very important but we can’t clearly see that the brand value is diminishing and that buyers and consumers alike are searching for product properties when they are looking for a solution. What they do is that they’re not searching for brand anymore and thus when they see your product, it needs to stand on its own two feet.” - Johan “I think the role of the brand is going to be increasingly important and one of the things that you can do to build your brand is merchandise effectively.” - Ben