It’s not enough to be great at one thing. You have to be diverse as well. That’s where you scale.
It’s a tough balance. Be experts, but don’t have all your eggs in one basket. That goal makes sense in the world of marketing and ecommerce because everything is connected. And it sells, too, because companies would rather not work with eight different vendors to run their ecommerce effectively.
This is what we’re striving for at Kasama. More focused than a jack of all trades but also not a one-trick pony. So when we recently decided to partner with product experience company Akeneo, we were looking for a partner in that same realm. Akeneo has long been known and respected as one of the leading product information management (PIM) solutions. But it was the breadth that Akeneo showed that proved what was really possible with the two of us.
Providing a Single Source of Truth
Let’s start with what Akeneo is known for best. It’s really difficult for companies (especially CPGs) to juggle hundreds or thousands of SKUs across retailers, distributors, and DTC channels.
Akeneo’s PIM serves as a central hub of product information, ensuring product data completeness, legal compliance, and a consistent brand experience across all existing and emerging sales channels. The value is in making teams more productive and efficient. You can automate mundane tasks and identify missing information more easily to improve your time to launch. For CPG brands, this is huge.
The Complete Product Experience
One of the areas where Akeneo has excelled is in its positioning and framing as not just another PIM. Most legacy PIM tools are glorified databases. They store product data, but don't help you do much with it. But Akeneo has expanded to address business outcomes as well as data management outcomes.
Akeneo Product Cloud is built to both activate and optimize data, in addition to just centralizing and enriching it. This is a big distinction. Companies using Akeneo can activate product experiences across all channels, creating an improved customer journey from discovery to purchase. That activation and optimization results in increased sales, reduced returns, faster time-to-market, and increased team productivity.
The AI component of Product Cloud is also an area that deserves a deeper look. Akeneo is identifying ways to purposefully help its customers’ teams work more efficiently and effectively. Just a couple of the areas include:
AI product enrichment that instantly extracts structured data from images and PDFs, accelerating SKU creation and reducing manual entry.
An Akeneo Data Architect Agent (DAA) that builds and evolves product data models automatically, and then optimizes them continuously based on real-world shopping signals.
AI that automates the mapping of product catalogs to retail and marketplace channels, reducing manual effort and accelerating go-live time.
And then there’s agentic shopping, which is changing the way brands operate their ecommerce. Akeneo is helping companies understand how AI platforms interpret and surface their products versus competitors, which product attributes influence ranking, and where data may be missing, unclear, or inconsistent.
Akeneo + Kasama
Data is the connective tissue of ecommerce experiences, and Akeneo is becoming a connective tissue for the ecommerce tech stack. Meanwhile, our focus at Kasama is to help brands integrate and get the most out of the platform to create better experiences. We can help brands leverage Akeneo to both provide a single source of truth and then activate it.
Reach out to learn more about our process and how we can tailor Akeneo to your needs.
