Month: September 2022

Spectrum’s portfolio of leading consumer brands, provides a unique perspective into ecommerce and personalization trends, showing engagement trends between a brand’s top products and its most dedicated fanbase. Insights gleaned demonstrate why product customization successfully drives ROI.

But beyond its financial impact, product customization provides substantial benefits that can multiply a brand’s investment: 

• More dynamic marketing opportunities that speak directly to your top brand fanatics
• Additional inventory control and optimization opportunities
• Opportunity to align your brand with culture in an extremely unique and engaging way

Previous posts demonstrated how and why customized products will be increasingly featured in marketing, and how they can provide unique inventory control opportunities. This post will focus on how product customization allows brands to tap into culture like never before. 

Many consumer brands spend significant amounts of their marketing budget tapping into cultural events and trends relevant to their audiences. However, very few of these achieve brand alignment in a way that feels genuine. At best, they are a temporary lift should it capture the audience’s attention. At worst, they can be perceived as disingenuous by their most loyal audiences. Brands that find strategic ways to connect their products to culture can create more impactful and relevant relationships with consumers.

CULTURAL IMPACT

• Forward-thinking companies can align their brands and products to support important cultural topics that are meaningful to their audiences, further strengthening the relationship with their enthusiasts.
• Unique cross-promotions can help brands offer unique and limited product collaborations to spur incremental sales and generate buzz among two brand audiences.

EMBRACING FOMO

• Whether capitalizing on blue-chip spokespersons or aligning with niche influencers, the flexibility of product customization gives brands additional chances to nimbly adapt their product lines by providing influencer-designed assets for co-creation opportunities. 
• Strategically capitalizing on seasonal promotional opportunities can be a struggle for many brands. Product customization allows brands to pair time-sensitive art/photos/designs to stock SKUs.

With built-in flexibility, product customizers offer brands an excellent and effective way to tap into culture in unique ways. Nimbleness in adding unique designs, patterns or partnerships can provide brands with great opportunities to culturally align their products and audiences in completely new and unique ways.

Spectrum’s portfolio of leading consumer brands, provides a unique perspective into ecommerce and personalization trends, showing engagement trends between a brand’s top products and its most dedicated fanbase. The insights we’re able to derive demonstrate why product customization can successfully drive ROI.

But beyond its financial impact, product customization provides substantial benefits that can multiply a brand’s investment: 

• More dynamic marketing opportunities that speak directly to your top brand fanatics
• Additional inventory control and optimization opportunities
• Opportunity to align your brand with culture in an extremely unique and engaging way

The previous post demonstrated how and why customized products will be increasingly featured in marketing initiatives outside of ecommerce. This post will give examples of unique inventory control opportunities that customized products provide. The final post in our series will provide examples of how brands that provide product customization can tap into culture like never before. 

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Of course, adding product customization brings additional revenue streams to an organization as well as the potential to reach new audiences, globally. But product customization platforms also afford unique opportunities to scale and manage inventories in ways you may have never considered:

MANAGING INVENTORY

• As supply chain disruption becomes more of a norm and products are limited, brands can increase their margin by offering stock SKUs within a custom program where MSRP is never discounted and consumers pay a premium for the embellishment 
• Sales of slower-selling SKUs can be encouraged by adding unique customization options, such as color ways and designs updated to address temporary inventory challenges.

CROSS-SELLING OPPORTUNITIES

• Products with similar customization options can provide unique bundling options, encouraging additional product purchases and trial, while also increasing overall cart AOV.
• Brands should consider cross-selling opportunities that include exclusive benefits for the most loyal fans.

Customization offers unique opportunities to bundle products together, upselling to your fans and further strengthening brand loyalty.

SCALING UP INTERNATIONALLY

• If you’re an international brand, your loyalists are not limited to the continental United States. Brands offering product customization should consider opportunities to scale internationally where distribution and production will allow. Spectrum’s customization platform is built to scale quickly with 135 global CDNs in over 60 countries and over 45 factory partners, helping brands capture international revenue.
• If you’re not yet global but seeking to increase reach into new markets, Spectrum can work with your team to set up additional countries, providing custom products to new audiences and exponentially increasing your brand’s reach.

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Spectrum can provide a wide variety of international production partners to help scale your customization business.

Product customizers are generally regarded as a net new revenue stream, fairly autonomous from the rest of a normal inventory management strategy. However, through the use of a product customization platform, brands have the opportunity to manage inventory levels in unique and real-time ways, spurring incremental sales with loyal fans and scaling up to their international presence.