Customerland
Customerland is a podcast about …. Customers. How to get more of them. How to keep them. What makes them tick. We talk to the experts, the technologies and occasionally, actual people – you know, customers – to find out what they’re all about.So if you’re a CX pro, a loyalty marketer, a brand owner, an agency planner … if you’re a CRM & personalization geek, if you’re a customer service / CSAT / NPS nerd – you finally have a home.
Customerland
The $15 Billion Product Experience Challenge
Ever wondered why you abandon your shopping cart online? The answer might surprise you. According to Tarun Chandrasekhar, President and Chief Product Officer at Syndigo, "Customers don't abandon products, they abandon poor experiences." This simple yet profound insight cuts to the heart of today's commerce challenges.
The most jaw-dropping revelation from our conversation? Amazon generated more revenue from retail media and product sponsorships last year than from their entire AWS business. Let that sink in—a company whose cloud services dominate the market is making even more money from how products appear and are promoted on their platform. This seismic shift is reshaping the entire retail landscape, with Walmart and others racing to develop similar capabilities.
We dive deep into the $15 billion Product Experience Management (PXM) industry that connects the dots between multiple information layers in commerce. From supply chain to ERP systems to product data to customer experience, these previously siloed systems are now being integrated by digitally mature organizations seeking competitive advantage. For brands, success hinges on speed-to-market across multiple channels. For retailers, data accuracy prevents costly recalls and builds customer trust.
The COVID era dramatically changed the game—companies that once employed 15-20 people to manage product information now operate with teams of just four, while simultaneously juggling expanded responsibilities like managing media influencers and social platform syndication. This new reality demands smarter, more efficient systems.
As shopping behavior evolves from traditional search to AI-guided discovery, brands and retailers must adapt. The holy grail? Connecting rich product content with customer intelligence to create personalized experiences. It's a transformative time for commerce—exciting yet nerve-wracking, as Tarun describes it: "a 3D jigsaw puzzle we're building as we're free-falling from the sky."
Ready to rethink how your business approaches product data? Listen now to understand why product information has become your brand's first handshake with customers, and how getting it right might be the most important investment you make this year.
One of the best, best tidbits I heard about 2024 was Amazon made more money last year selling retail media and product sponsorship than their entire AWS business Right. Right, let that sink in for a minute, it's unbelievable and AWS is still bigger than Azure and Google Cloud and every other cloud.
Speaker 2:Today on Customer Land, I'm speaking with Tarun Chandrasekhar, who is CPO at Syndigo, and we've already been talking a little bit about what Syndigo is all about, why it exists, but maybe just to set context for the conversation, first of all, let me welcome Tarun, because I've been looking forward to this conversation for a while and love to hear more about what Syndigo is about, how and why it exists and your role there.
Speaker 1:Sure. Thanks for having me, mike. I am really excited to be on the podcast. This is a topic close to my heart, right. So I'm Tarun Chandrasekhar, president and Chief Product Officer at Syndigo. I lead the product and commercial strategy for our PXM business, our product experience management business.
Speaker 1:Syndigo started in the 70s as Gladstone, a leader in creating product content like nutrition labels, images, shelf tags for retailers, and since then we've expanded from content creation to content enrichment, syndication, product data management, enabling brands to deliver accurate product information across all shelves physical shelves, digital shelves, marketplaces, all channels right.
Speaker 1:With the acquisition of RiverSand, which is where I came from, we added enterprise-grade MDM solutions, multi-domain. So product masters, customer masters, which combine structured data with enriched content to deliver true, consistent, trusted experiences. For me personally, a lot of my role focuses on evaluating technology, looking for opportunities to partner or acquire companies and that can help us deliver better experiences across the commerce ecosystem on evaluating technology, looking for opportunities to partner or acquire companies and that can help us deliver better experiences across the commerce ecosystem. I spend a lot of time right now exploring innovations with CDPs and personalization engines and anything that sits at that nexus of PXM and what I call CXM customer experience management, and it's a space that truly excites me because I think, where product intelligence meets customer intelligence, that's where we get the true insights on how do we accelerate the journey of providing that answer to a customer who's at every retailer's shelf, who's buying from a brand on. Why should I come back here again?
Speaker 2:The materials that your team and I tossed back and forth in advance of this conversation had me it from an operational standpoint, but somewhere either on top of the layer you're working in or below the layer you're working in. It is all about the experience, and I was particularly intrigued by the idea that and this shows my own personal ignorance that there's now a category called pxm makes complete sense there. There would have to be. I had just never seen that before, but I'm very intrigued by by how you view that category, why it exists and and did it really need to be named that way? And um, I have my own answers to that question, but yours is the ones that matter.
Speaker 1:So I'll share this with you, just what you just said. Right, I have been surprised with the same thing, but I think there are like six or seven layers of information that is shared across this value. Think of the commerce value. You have manufacturers and suppliers that come to brands, to distributors, to retailers, to the customer, and that end-to-end journey, right at the base layer of it, is the actual product shipping the product, making sure that the product makes it to the shelf. It's a supply chain layer. There's the ERP layer, which is make sure that the inventory is managed.
Speaker 1:The shelf, so supply chain layer. There's the ERP layer, which is make sure that the inventory is managed. We're making the right money on it. There is what we are in, which is the product information layer saying all the attribution about the product correctly makes it across, and I'll come back to why I think that's important. There's a damn digital assets layer, which is like make sure all the images are right when they go through. Then there is the ratings and reviews, there is purchase order, so like six, seven layers of them. And then there's the entire customer space, which is personalizing the content product such that I can retain my customer, I can build a brand loyalty bar none, and all of these six, seven bands have kind of been in silos.
Speaker 1:They've just had different players solving the problem in a different manner. And most enterprises, whether they're a brand or a distributor or retailer, have seven or eight different buying centers to go buy these things. And it takes years of digital maturity for a company to understand there is correlation here and that if I was getting insights from this layer into this layer, I can actually make smarter decisions faster. And that aha moment probably got accelerated post-COVID because I think we all had a lot more time in COVID to really be introspective about what are we doing and how do we survive this. And it's truly.
Speaker 1:You know, we have a saying in the company. We say customers don't abandon products, they abandon poor experiences. Don't abandon products. They abandon poor experiences. Because if I get to a website because mostly now that's where we start our shopping journey even if I'm going to go to the store, if I'm not getting the right content in the first time, if the images are missing, let me put it this way right Just basic image. If it's just a product with just that little, no image, I'm moving on.
Speaker 2:I'm not going, I'm moving on. I'm not going, I'm gone.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it's that first impression, it's product data, is your brand's first handshake. That's how we believe in it. So enhancing that, improving that. And then the other big thing that we will also get back to is improving that without increasing the workload on the brand or the retailer to go do more. This is the COVID impact Pre-COVID. In my space, in PXM space, we would have product marketers. We have product management teams, product marketers, channel managers. We have 15, 20 people who are doing that for a 500, $600 million company. We're down to four now. Right, and it's not that they don't think it's important, but there is just so much more to do. Now. I've got to worry about managing media influencers. I've got to worry about managing how do I syndicate my data to Instagram or TikTok? That scope has improved so much that now they're expecting this journey to be a lot more faster or intuitive.
Speaker 2:I want to go back to something you mentioned a moment ago. I think you used the phrase years of digital maturity, no-transcript. Kind of reach that point, but but what are the commonality, what are those common factors that would cause a company, company leadership, if you will that kind of go? Okay, we really have to think differently about our digital transformation.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So that's a really important question because the segments are different and I'll maybe segment it to two. There are companies that have been in this space for 50, 100 years right, and then there are companies that started in the last 20 years. I'm just segmenting it these two ways. The folks who started in the last 20 years have almost a digital-first mindset, because their primary channel is e-commerce right, if they're lucky, they're going to go sell in Walmart and CVS and everything else, but primarily their channel is e-commerce. But the people who've been here for a long time and this is not just large companies, it could still be mid-market and small companies, but they've been in business for 80, 100 years. They were one location, maybe they ended up multiple. That's where the key drivers for why I need to do this Then. So if I just take that segment of size of the company, then you segment it by vertical Food, CPG, retail, low profitability business, large red ocean right, lots of competition. That's where they're feeling the pressure, especially as the globalized marketplace opened up.
Speaker 1:So go back to 20, 40 years ago. 50 years ago, we put manufacturing in China, right, but then we had the eBay, the Alibaba, the Amazon model, then the Walmart and Dollar Tree model. Both of those still said my product can come from there, I'm going to bring it in. But Alibaba and eBay were the first one where people didn't mind waiting for six, seven, eight weeks to get the product out. That competition has then brought people in to say I can't afford the inefficiencies in my workflow.
Speaker 1:And the primary driver for a brand which is slightly different from a retailer is how quickly can my product hit the shelf, and as many shelves as I can. That's the only way I'm going to start making money right For the retailer it is, yes, how quickly can I onboard all my supplier's data onto my shelf, digital or physical. But how do I do it where the data quality is good? Because the retailer is worried about you know what? Look at what happened with Costco 80,000 pounds of butter that missed the allergy information that said contains lactose or contains milk, and they had to do the whole recall because nobody wants to get sued there.
Speaker 1:And how much do they then go charge the brand? We don't even know that, but the direct impact to them. So they're extra careful saying I want that product data quality to be accurate. One part of it is, of course, lawsuits and returns are number one. Hey, you said this was a small. What I got was or the PDP now says 40% of the reviews say that this runs small. Right, the way that you do that. You're like yeah, I want to find something where I know it's going to be true to size, because I'm not going to try to guess whether should I get a medium or a small.
Speaker 2:Right right.
Speaker 1:So that trust is built on data quality for the retailer, but it is built on a speed to market for a brand, For the brand. Their primary driver for that digitalization, for connecting those dots in that vertical stack, is how quickly is my product moving to multiple shelves and multiple changing shelves? Right, Because everybody's God, we have customers who are like, hey, we're going to expand it to Brazil and Mexico and we need to understand what that means to us. And just even building a strategy and the more further away we move from North America, Western Europe, right, Even Australia and New Zealand you start getting into a more disconnected ecosystem of brands and retailers or really small networks of play that you kind of have to be. It's an entirely different go-to-market model for those brands. And how are we going to go do this?
Speaker 2:Just because of cultural distinctions.
Speaker 1:It's cultural distinctions, it is the way these commerce systems are deployed there, right, and a lot of them are these handshake information. Do I have a way to send data digitally across and am I going to get the analytics back? Now, very interesting in this are there are pockets, especially in Southeast Asia, in South America, where you see a flipped mindset, where they are looking at it, because again, these were areas that were like, okay, we need to get into e-commerce faster, and so they kind of leapfrogged the legacy problems that everyone else was suffering from and they went for the better digital mindset. If they had more software resources available locally, they would actually start leapfrogging some of that, and China has seen some of that, india has seen some of that, and all of those markets still are very cost competitive in terms of the profitability margins. The currency is different, the money they make is different, so they're not going to go invest the same amount of money a Western European company is going to do. So that drives that need for connecting those dots faster.
Speaker 2:I'm intrigued. If you don't mind, I want to kind of just press on this just a little bit, but you're building and selling a technology that I think for a retailer and a brand. When they get it, when their light bulb goes off, this is a natural purchase. We have to figure out how to integrate this idea into our systems. It's a natural, having been in enterprise sales and talked to an awful lot of people who do this for a living. Getting that light bulb to go off can be a difficult thing, especially if you're talking about a product category that's not really top of mind, that's not, yeah, a category that's not really top of mind, that's not yeah. So in in your world, in your processes and clearly, you figured out how to, how to create that, those light bulb moments. What does it take? I mean, what do you, do you have to to like model out an roi on this, or is it kind of more conceptual than that?
Speaker 1:no, no. So it's both in a a way, because the sales cycles on anything which is transformative, the way I look at this, this is almost as big as trying to implement an ERP or a CRM system. If you think of end-to-end right, because it touches so many of your little departments, all departments inside the company, that it's going to be very disruptive to go do inside the company, that it's going to be very disruptive to go do. And so the conceptual is almost that little image that you see, that cartoon that we have of a whole bunch of wheels in a cart that's being pushed along the square wheels right and like. I don't have time to replace it. And you have to define that if you continue doing the same thing you're doing, you're not going to expect different results. You're going to have to completely left shift and do something else. And so that journey is of discoveries, of thought leadership. We have a lot of health here. I'll be honest with you the space is. For those who don't know, the space is surprisingly large. It is still a $12 to $15 billion TAM in this market. A lot of systems integrators and consultants are very active in this space, right, accenture, deloitte, the TCSs of the world. Then you have very niche partners like Pivotries and Object Edges of the world. In Europe we have focused people who have built an industry of trying to get us.
Speaker 1:And let me get back to that. Who's the buying center for us? Who in a brand or a retailer is thinking about this or is worried about it? There are three different people. There's a CIO who's absolutely looking at how do I make sure that I'm running efficiently. There's the COO to make sure my operations are efficient. And then our primary ICP in ideal customer profile is the CMO. That's the person who's looking at how do I monetize my product and how do I make sure I can market it right, but that over the years, it's all three of them together who have to be convinced.
Speaker 1:It's not, you know, 20 years ago you can convince the CIO and they will go implement it, and then whether they get adopted not seven, eight years. That doesn't work that way. Every company is looking at their inefficiencies. They've looked at all. Three of these people have to sign off saying this is what I want. So the value proposition absolutely requires an ROI.
Speaker 1:And the ROI is also tricky because 15, 20 years ago the ROI was all about efficiency. It was about hey look, you have 30 people, you can do this in five. You can save money doing this. Look at your profitability comes up because your costs go down. That's not the ROI. The real ROI is how much more money can I make with this? It needs to be a revenue driver for me for it to hit the eyes of the CEO. I'm not going to name this company, but about a month ago I was in Phoenix area with a nice grocery store which is organic, healthy, and they just bought our software. I was talking to the CIO. We just went to meet and greet somebody else and he just walked me to the CEO's office and we spent an hour with the CEO Right, and he knew exactly what they were doing. He knew why they were doing it and my question to him was what I asked you say what made you come down this journey?
Speaker 1:Because usually what happens to me is we have to start by explaining why you need this before you go down this path, right, and they were like we've spent four years measuring why we're inefficient, right, and our plans are great. We have 300 stores. We want to get to 1,200 stores in two years. How are we going to scale that up? And we kind of every time we hit the problem of we have a data problem, we have an issue with what data is coming in.
Speaker 1:And so in my career I'm just sidebar conversation here I mostly spent my life in product, but 20 years I spent in oil and gas and oil and gas data management, and about six years of that I worked as a client at BP, mostly because I was frustrated with building product and nobody was using it the way I thought they should use it. So I was like I'm going to go to the other side and see it and it was eye-opening for me. And it was eye-opening because I hate to say this and I hope PP doesn't mind this but it took me six months to arrive at how many wells do we truly operate? Because I could give you 11 answers. Right, because we have 11 different systems of record, but we also have 11 different definitions of what is a well Is it operating, is it shut in, so just getting the company to align on one set of metrics.
Speaker 1:And that's the same problem I see today. It's not. We don't have data. We have an overabundance of data. We can't make sense of it in a timely manner and systems like ours allow you to do that. We kind of you offload that work to tech, to AI, to everything else, to say give me that answer faster so that I can get back to the business of being a brand or a retailer or a distributor and not try to do software.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you just kind of unloaded another couple hours worth of questions. I'm dying to ask, but won't for the sake of both of our schedules and our listeners. But, um, I'm curious. It, you know, just to kind of go back to one of our earlier statements is that, um, it feels like from the outside that pxm is, uh, becoming a category, that is, that is much more top of mind. I mean, I wasn't even aware that it was a category, I was just intrigued by the notion, but it makes an awful lot of sense there between yourselves, your competitors, your system integrators and everybody and the retailers and brands that you're working with, the retailers and brands that you're working with, and product and digital maturity aside, where do you think brands and retailers should be? What's the right word here? Considering and layering in PXM ideas and efficiencies over the next, say, 12 to 18 months? Where do you see this space going over the next 12 to 18 months?
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a really good question. So let's talk about a few things and maybe we go back to the journey of how we shop, because that's probably what is the most important thing. When I'm shopping today, I'm not going to a brand first, right, or I'm not even window shopping anymore. Nobody goes into a mall and says I'm going to just go window shop and nobody goes to Amazon to just browse through and say, hey, what's new out there? There was a time period when people were doing it based on deals and deal sites that were coming out, but mostly the need starts from I have a need or a want, I want this thing. So the alignment that a lot of leaders have to start thinking about is that you have to understand that the journey starts with the person's product needs, because at the end of the day, they're trying to buy that product and the definition of that product is understanding what are the friction points in the journey for that customer to be able to get that right information quick. And then, how do you influence it? Like, I'm a big car nerd, okay, and in my world, I look at it, the best car manufacturer in the world is Porsche. Okay, that's hardcore 911 fan years together. But you look at BMW. Bmw has done a phenomenal job of marketing themselves as the ultimate driving machine and they sell a lot more cars than Porsche, because they have understood their customer and the product content is tailored to that and they really have closed that loop around getting that information. The holy grail for me is I use product experiences, and when I say product experience, I mean product content, images, the right, rich and enhanced content, media 3D images for a model. I want to use augmented reality to place this furniture in my house. You use that, but then you marry it with who's coming to my website and looking at it more right and I get within the realms of data privacy. There is still a lot of information that is tracked today to allow us to say that, okay, you know, 20 to 22-year-old males in the Boston area seem to be super interested in this, tying that into the right kind of attribution the ads. That loop is still not connected. It's getting better and I'll tell you how it's getting better.
Speaker 1:There are three things we talk about when we think of data. We think about people, places and things. So things are your product data management or product experience management, people is your customer experience management and places is your location. We've done a phenomenal job of connecting customer experiences with location. We've localized it. We can follow you on. You see the same ad in different platforms you go to. You visited a store. Suddenly you start seeing things about that thing. We've done a really good job there. We have not tied it to improved product experience so that, using that information, then tailor your experience to say, okay, given what I know about Mike right and the things he likes, because of the places he goes, because of the other things he's bought, what else would he be interested in?
Speaker 1:And closing that loop is the absolute hailing hologram and the biggest disruption in this and I'm going further ahead than probably your question here is for the last 20 years we have built that story based on people are going to go to a website, they're going to go to Google, they're going to do search, they're going to do SEO optimizations. I don't do that anymore. I had to change my Wi-Fi routers at home because I was having a problem with how far this was. I did a chat GPT deep research project. I was like, okay, here's my house, here's the distance, here's what I looked at, here's the interference I have, and literally I have pages of comparisons and everything else that got me to the product I wanted to buy. I deployed it and it was. My kids were like whoa, internet got faster. I think it's the same money I'm paying, but it's a huge difference.
Speaker 1:So what's happening is that entire search is now being offloaded to AI right, which means all of us are going to have to look at different metrics to track customer experience, product experience and location experience, if you will. What are we doing about that? Those are our biggest two variances. Tie all three together. Understand how shopper behavior is going to change and again, I say this from a customer-centric mindset. We can kind of go into so many sidebar conversations here. Look at a lot of retailers are moving away. One of the best, best tidbits I heard about 2024 was Amazon made more money last year selling retail media and product sponsorship than their entire AWS business Right.
Speaker 2:Right, right.
Speaker 1:Let that sink in for a minute Just unbelievable, and AWS is still bigger than Azure and Google Cloud and every other cloud provider.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:So for me it is a jaw drop moment and then it's a leading indicator into so then Walmart is getting into it. Right, amazon really drew first as their AI search, but Walmart just announced another one this May right now, saying, hey, they're going to do AI-based. I want to go, I want to find a unicorn toy for a 16-year-old, or I want to plan a unicorn theme birthday party, and it just lays out what you need to go buy. So your experience is changing. The goals for retailers is going beyond just selling products. I mean, somebody I spoke to mentioned in four years, is Amazon going to make more money selling products or selling ads about products we don't know? It's going to change their KPIs. They want to track and what happens to the brand at that point. Like, do they focus more on the ads? Do they focus on the product? It's an exciting time to be alive, but it is also extremely nerve-wracking because it's a 3D jigsaw puzzle we're building as we're free-falling from the sky.
Speaker 2:I completely completely agree, and I'm talking to the CMOs in my world, and there's a lot of excitement and a lot of intense hand-wringing at the same time yeah exactly when is this taking us off. So let me just say thank you for your time, for the insights, for the conversation. And this will be great fun when we pick it back up again.
Speaker 1:Sounds very good. Thank you so much for having me.
