After the CRM Love Story, the marketing world is falling for PIM!
7 November 2025
2.3 billion online transactions in 2022 (FEVAD study): there’s no denying it, digital commerce is thriving. For the past 20 years, online sales have grown steadily – and so has the number of e-retailers. With competition raging, the customer experience has become the cornerstone of any sales strategy worth its salt. To achieve this, businesses capitalise on the insights gained from interactions with their customers: thus, CRM was born.
Whilst CRM enables the personalisation of interactions with customers, there can be no customer without a purchase. And before becoming a customer, there is the phase of discovering and gathering information about the products on offer. This very first encounter with the product forms the basis of the customer experience. So how can we improve this customer experience at the very moment when the customer is discovering what sets a product apart? Today, it is PIM (Product Information Manager) that makes this stage run seamlessly: it has become the new indispensable tool for marketing teams.
1. Expanding the range of products and customers
Just as the rise in customer numbers led to the invention of CRM to replace the Excel spreadsheets of yesteryear, the increase in the number of products on offer has, in turn, given rise to PIM. As the volume of products has grown, so too have the challenges of organising, grouping and storing information in product databases. A growing number of products to sell inevitably means an exponential increase in the amount of data to process.
- By bringing product data together in a single location, accessible to the entire marketing team at any time, PIM makes life easier for teams managing tens, hundreds or thousands of products.
Indeed, companies now need efficient, high-performance, operational and robust management tools – such as a PIM – to improve productivity in product data management.
2. Expanding the data collected and enriched
CRM has become essential for gathering as much information as possible about a customer and sending them the right message at the right time. Similarly, the amount of data available on a product is growing: media and text must appeal to the customer and reassure them to trigger a purchase. The richness, organisation and availability of this data are paramount. Indeed, certain data is now essential if a sale is to be concluded:
- ‘Allergen’ data in the food sector, which relates to a genuine health concern,
- ‘fabric’ data in the fashion sector, relating to allergies or ethical considerations that are important to shoppers,
- ‘children’s activities’ information in tourism, without which parents will not book their next holiday.
Incomplete or unavailable information would be tantamount to handing the sale to your competitor!
- By structuring product data and coordinating its enrichment by the marketing teams, the PIM ensures the transparency of comprehensive, cross-referenced information for the customer.
Better too much than too little: information and its comprehensiveness are crucial during the consideration phase for prospective customers. Product traceability, data transparency and standardisation across all sales channels will ensure that consumers choose your brand and your products.
3. Expanding channels and streamlining distribution
At a time when customer touchpoints are multiplying, CRM faces a major challenge in ensuring a seamless dialogue based on data from the various channels connecting the business and the customer. For its part, product data must be readily and instantly available across all distribution channels, whilst being adapted to the format of each one.
Whereas manual formatting was often a source of bottlenecks and wasted time, PIM now enables the automated distribution of data across each selected channel according to pre-defined rules. The time saved can be put to good use – perhaps to explore new markets… The same product content (descriptions, media, etc.) can thus be adapted to the needs of different sales and communication channels:
- Online: marketplaces, e-commerce platforms, online shops,
- For print: brochures, catalogues, PDFs,
- For international markets, thanks to the translation feature integrated into the PIM.
Conclusion
Born – like its big brother, CRM – out of an operational need arising from the front line, PIM has also become an indispensable tool for addressing the current challenges of e-commerce and marketing. Without a product, there are no customers: the product experience must be flawless and make life easier for shoppers who cannot tolerate any frustration… But it must also make life easier for staff, whose time must, now more than ever, be devoted to high-value-added tasks.