The Cumulus Solution for Supporting E-Commerce
on the Web
by Geoffrey E. Bock, Principal
Bock & Company 2006
A Force
in the Consumer Electronics Industry
From audio/video cables to home entertainment Monster Cable Products is a force
in the consumer electronics industry. Founded in 1978 and headquartered
in Brisbane, California, Monster produces many of the top brands
of high-perf-or mance cables that are used to connect audio/video
components for home, car, and professional use, as well as computers
and computer games. Proud of its reputation as a Bay Area success
story, Monster bought the naming rights to the San Francisco
49ers' stadium in 2004, and renamed it Monster Park.
Over the years, Monster has expanded its product portfolio beyond
cables and connectors. It also manufactures premium power supplies,
amplifiers, and speakers, as well as accessories for Apple iPods,
MP3 players, and SIRIUS Satellite Radio receivers. Continually
seeking to develop new products for new markets, Monster is
now introducing a range of home theater furnishings and sound
systems, designed to seamlessly integrate the ultimate music,
movie, and gaming experiences into the home.
Monster invests heavily in visual communications to capture
the essence of the Monster brand. It relies on Cumulus from
Canto to manage all of product photographs used to merchandise
its products.
Focusing on bricks and clicks In the ever-changing audio/video
marketplace, Monster remains at the forefront of product innovation
and brand awareness. The company adds 400 to 600 new products
annually to its catalog of more than 4,000 items.
A company of more than 800 employees, Monster counts on both
bricks and clicks to merchandise its products. It sells to thousands
of retailers and distributors worldwide. Monster also has direct
relationships with more than fifty (50) authorized e-commerce
vendors on the Web, ranging from consumer giants Amazon, BestBuy,
and RadioShack to sites such as Crutchfield.com, OneCall.com,
Vanns.com, and BHPhotoVideo.com.
A key touch point Monster's customers—audiophiles,
videophiles, car audio enthusiasts, professional musicians,
and recording studio engineers—have a growing need for ever-better
product information. Whether they are pulling products from
shelves in retail stores or buying online, customers are doing
more and more of their research over the Web.
Photos for selling Customers want to see what they
are buying, such as the form factor of cable connectors, the
weave of cables, the design of speakers, and the displays of
amplifiers and power supplies. Monster maintains a staff of
professional photographers and several in-house studios. It
produces all of its own product photos, which it then publishes
in its own product catalogs and Web site (www. monstercable.com),
and also syndicates to its growing network of e-commerce vendors.
Yet customers are becoming more demanding. "We've had to step
up our level of photography to meet our customers' desires and
to reflect our own need for asset access within the company,"
Klar reports. "We used to produce one picture per product.
Now we need five or six shots, reflecting different backgrounds,
angles, and perspectives. Our customers want to see more photos
of what they are planning to buy." When they cannot touch and
poke the products, customers need to view the product details
online.
Managing
the Visual Experience
Adopting Cumulus as part of the e-commerce
initiative Fortunately, Monster has developed
its e-commerce initiative around the capabilities of a digital
asset management system. Monster adopted Cumulus in 1999. Monster
has steadily enhanced its digital asset management capabilities
with each successive version of Cumulus.
Monster now uses Cumulus Workgroup Edition to manage all
of its product photographs, digital videos, and other digital
assets for both electronic and hard-copy distribution. Monster
relies on Cumulus when developing collateral for its own needs
as well as when syndicating photos to its distributors and retailers.
A central repository Using Cumulus, Monster employees
can easily find product photos when designing Web pages, promotional
materials, package designs, and product data sheets. All of
the product photos are stored in an online repository and catalogued
with a predefined set of product-related terms.
No longer do graphic designers and marketers have to search
through one set of directories for product thumbnails, another
for low-resolution screen shots, and a third place for high-resolution
photos, suitable for print publications. No longer are product
photos simply stored in a folder hierarchy on a file server.
Rather, Cumulus ensures that company employees can manage and
maintain all photos in a consistent manner, organized by product
categories and other relevant, descriptive categories.
Integrating Cumulus with Monster's product
information management system Working with a systems integrator,
Modula4, Klar has integrated Cumulus with Monster's product
database. (Monster uses FileMaker to maintain the product categories
in a relational database.) Specifically, Monster manages its
products in a structured manner, first by product families,
then by product types, and finally by individual product names
and SKU numbers. Monster maintains all of its product-related
metadata within the product database.
Monster then relies on the scripting capabilities within Cumulus
to synchronize the metadata schema from the product database
with the categories for the digital asset management system.
Cumulus is able to automatically replicate the product categories
for digital assets from those defined by the product database,
and use them to tag product photographs. When adding or removing
products in its product database—a frequent occurrence in the
consumer electronics industry—Monster can immediately update
the categories for digital assets, and ensure that the terms
for indexing digital assets match the categories within the
product database. Staff photographers, who are responsible for
archiving the finished photographs at the end of a photo shoot,
launch the script to automatically tag new assets within Cumulus.
Consistent browsing and searching capabilities As a result, whether they are looking
for product information in the database or product photos in
Cumulus, graphic designers and content creators can browse or
search for content using a consistent set of indexing terms
and categories. Once they locate a set of photos based on product-related
metadata, they can browse through the group to view photos with
different background colors, photo styles, packaging, and cutaways.
For instance, Monster Cable, one of the company's product families,
produces different types of cables, including audio cables,
video cables, computer cables, and mounts, as shown in Illustration
1.
The photos themselves feature different backgrounds, packaging
formats, and cable presentations. Graphic designers, Web developers,
and others can thus find a range of photos from which to choose
when searching for pictures of a specific product.
Monster continues to refine the browsing and searching capabilities
of Cumulus. Monster employees can search by product name, product
description, model name, and inventory number. Monster also
includes the short product descriptions as entries in the keyword
field within Cumulus, enabling graphic designers and others
to find pictures based on their keywords. "With so many categories
and keywords available, it's easy for somebody at Monster to
find the product photos they need," Klar says
The
Impact of Cumulus within Monster
Reducing time and costs for developing
marketing materials More photos lead to more opportunities
for merchandising Monster products more effectively. With Cumulus
in place, Monster can centrally manage the more than 12,000
photos that capture its entire product line. Graphic designers
and content creators can readily access previously created photos
when developing new marketing collateral. They no longer have
to request new photos for products that are released and shipping.
Illustration 1. Product photos
for audio cables can feature white, light blue, or dark blue
backgrounds; glam packages or single wire shots; connectors
or wire spread ends.
Relying on Cumulus, Monster is
able to reduce the time and costs required to develop marketing
materials. Monster can produce the photos for a new product
as part of the product release cycle, index and store them within
Cumulus, and ensure that they are readily accessible to all
employees within the company. Graphic designers and marketers
can readily stay abreast of Monster's ever changing product
portfolio, and easily have the new product collateral available
for Web and print-based distribution when the new product is
launched.
Distributing training solutions In addition, Monster uses Cumulus
to catalog and distribute its training solutions.
Monster develops interactive training materials and other multimedia
experiences for its retailers, stores them within the shared
repository, and distributes them on demand over the Web.
For example, when Monster needs to train retailers' sales associates
about a new family of high-performance video cables, Monster
marketers develop interactive training modules using Flash and
video clips. They can easily find previous recorded interactive
media, stored and catalogued within Cumulus. As a result, they
can rapidly produce updated training modules, and enable sales
associates to learn about the new features of Monster's latest
products over the Web.
Building
Relationships with Distributors and Retailers
Making it easy to merchandise Monster
products As a manufacturer, Monster is only
successful when it moves its products through its distribution
channels. Monster needs to ensure that its network of distributors
and retailers can easily sell its products to the audiophiles,
videophiles, and gamers who value them. Monster needs to ensure
that distributors and retailers have easy access to Monster
product information, so that they can incorporate the photos
and product descriptions into their own e-commerce Web sites
and publish them as their own marketing collateral.
Monster's investment in Cumulus has an added business benefit.
Now that Monster maintains all of its product photos online,
it is able to syndicate them to the retailers and distributors
in its distribution channel.
As shown in Illustration 2, here's how the syndication process
works.
At periodic intervals, Monster uploads all of its new
product photos, together with the descriptive information
(or metadata tags) used to catalog them, to a third party
Web site. Monster is relying on Tentoe (www.tentoe.com)
to support syndication services over the Web.
The descriptive information is stored in a standardized
format as XML-tagged elements, using predefined tag sets.
When distributors and retailers need photos and descriptions
of Monster products, they connect to the third party site,
select the products they want, and download the product
information to their own electronic environment.
Illustration 2. Monster
distributes its product photos through a syndication service
on the Web. Thus Monster's customers—network-savvy retailers
and distributors—can easily access all of Monster's product
information and incorporate it into their e-commerce environments.
As a result, Monster is able to ensure that its distributors
and retailers quickly receive new product photos and the related
product information for their own product promotions, as well
as stay abreast of changes. Moreover, Monster only needs to
publish to a single destination on the Web. The syndication
service then redistributes the photos to others who want them.
For example, Radio Shack and Crutchfield can each find just
the Monster products they sell on their own Web sites and retail
outlets. When Monster produces new photos, Radio Shack and Crutchfield
can then incorporate changes into their e-commerce environments
on their own production schedules.
As a result, Monster not only produces the product photos for
its own internal use. Monster is also able to electronically
distribute them via various sales, training, and promotional
channels. Monster is able to ensure that these businesses can
easily and accurately merchandise Monster products.
Cumulus as a competitive distribution
mechanism
In the end, Monster relies on Cumulus for merchandising its
products in the digital age. "Cumulus is not just an internal
organization and archiving tool," Klar concludes. 'It's about
getting our intellectual property into the hands of the people
who need it. Now that we've carefully catalogued our product
photos, we're using Cumulus as a distribution mechanism."
In a continually changing industry where value-added content
and differentiation is the key to success, Monster and Cumulus
are a winning combination. By building its e-commerce initiative
on Cumulus, Monster is able to successfully merchandise its
product portfolio, gain market share, and stay ahead of its
competition.
Lessons Learned
Make digital photographs an integral aspect of your product
merchandising. Build your image repository as you develop your
product database and your e-commerce initiatives.
Ensure consistency. Maintain a standardized way to organize and browse a product
database.
Be prepared to
manage several different photos for each of your products.
Extend the metadata
for categorizing your digital assets. Beyond familiar product
categories, further tag and index your product photos by other
important and internally adopted field labels.
Be prepared to
syndicate your digital assets to your channel partners over
the Web. Make it easy for your partners to do business with
you. Support their marketing initiatives by ensuring that they
can easily access and incorporate your product photos, product
information, and other interactive media assets into their promotional
materials.
“Our online platform is now a key touch point for our
customers to do their research," says Jim Klar, Multimedia Marketing
Monster and manager for the company's e-commerce initiatives.
"The majority of our customers are looking to us to provide
them with descriptions and pictures of our products over the
Web. We want our products to look great online and represent
our brand appropriately."
Jim
Klar,
Multimedia Marketing
Monster
Technology platform
Hardware
Dell PowerEdge
2850 with 3.2GHz Intel Xeon processor
3GB RAM
6 136GB hard drives (2 RAID 1, 4 RAID 5)
Software
Cumulus Workgroup
Server
Apache Web Server 2.0
Windows Server 2003
About Canto
About Canto
Founded in 1990, Canto remains the leading supplier of Digital Asset Management
products and services, with more than 13,000 server systems sold worldwide,
and more than 1,000,000 user licenses. Canto products are built
upon the multi-platform Cumulus Core metadata management engine and software
framework, which enables customers to archive and manage the digital
assets used in workflows of any size, from office work groups, to multinational
enterprises.
About Bock & Company
About Bock & Company
Geoffrey Bock, Principal of Bock & Company, focuses on business strategies for content
management and collaboration. An analyst and author with over
twenty-five years industry experience, he tracks how organizations
create, organize, and manage business information to sustain
profitable relationships.
As a consultant and thought-leader, he advises software companies,
end-user organizations, and government agencies in areas of
business planning, technology innovation, and operational excellence.
Contact us:
Phone: US +1.415.495.6545 | EU +49 (0) 30 390 485-0 | Email: info@canto.com
