Amazon, Amazon, Amazon

It seems all we hear about today is how Amazon is doing everything in retail perfectly. We’re all trying to find ways to be more like Amazon.
But what is it that they’re doing so well?
The answer: They have created an exceptional customer experience. But it goes beyond Prime and free returns. Amazon is continually investing in new ways to enhance a customer’s interaction with their brand.
As reported in the New York Times, Amazon plans to “(…) pour money into photography to give internet shoppers a better representation of garments (…)”. They know that providing more photos will give people more buying information, improving the customer experience, and as a result increase purchases.
To this point, brands spend millions on strategies that are aimed at improving the experience one has with their brand. They test websites, optimize purchase paths and deliver personalized experiences across all channels, but rarely think about how to enhance the process that delivers them the valuable assets that empower these strategies: Photo and video content.
Think about this like a supply chain. E-comm teams are requesting more shots per SKU, social teams continually need new and fresh content and email teams require unique images for different customer segments. The demand for photos has never been greater, and creatives are running at capacity. They can incrementally increase production by focusing on people and processes, but without technology, they are at a disadvantage.
It has become critical for brands to invest in technology that makes production more efficient, allowing creative teams to deliver more assets while also accelerating the process. The ability to create more, faster, in a scalable and repeatable fashion is a competitive advantage that gets a brand to market more quickly. And with more retail brands going bankrupt, or worse out of business, it has become a business imperative to move faster and improve the customer experience.
Brands must invest in technology, for their creatives, to remove the obstacles that slow production down. There are unique roadblocks at each stage of the creative process (upload & ingest, review & approve, distribute & share, search & retrieve) so having a comprehensive work-in-progress solution is essential to making production more effective.
This technology automates manual, repetitive and time-consuming tasks that creatives are wasting time on when they could be creating. It provides visibility for all stakeholders into where projects are in the process. Collaboration and communication are optimized by consolidating interactions, notes, comments, and markups. Asset histories deliver valuable information into the who, when and why behind a photo. This level of efficiency keeps visual assets moving through the supply chain, getting them to the internal customer (marketing, e-comm, social, brand, store teams) faster. In turn, the external customer has an improved experience with the brand impacting purchases, loyalty, and LTV.
Leading brands, like Theory, Lucky Brand, and Smashbox Cosmetics have invested in such platforms, but not all solutions are created equally. To learn why globaledit is the clear choice to accelerate creative production read our blog, “Built for creatives, by creatives”.