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Merchandizing Content: How Endeca
Applies eCommerce Lessons to Enterprise Content |
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12 July 2004 |
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Contextualizing catalog content has been a key factor for
success in online stores, a capability that
Endeca has refined to
a "T" and now uses to focus on getting the most out of
enterprise content. Instead of perusing toys or wine
bottles the enterprise user finds Endeca's Guided
Navigation a very valuable tool that allows content
browsing from multiple facets - and finding lots of useful
contextual content in the process. Content providers of all
kinds need to think carefully about how merchandizing
concepts that have been so valuable in ecommerce can pump
up content usage by users who value ecommerce methods in
their daily lives. |
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While
shopping is generally not my thing on a personal level, I can
get over my miserly ways often enough to be quite fascinated by
the efforts that stores and product brands put in to
merchandizing their wares. A box of
Godiva
chocolates that looks kind of puny sitting in the case of one
of their own richly decorated stores next to a huge and richly
decorated one next to it looks pretty nice at the department
store down a few storefronts and just about right in the "big
box" bookstore not far away. Same product, same packaging, but
different contexts that allow multiple exposures of the same
merchandise in notably different circumstances, any one of
which might be the trigger to get a wallet to open. That's
merchandizing in a nutshell, a trade that is becoming ever more
sophisticated as it expands its influence into how items are
purchased online.
The efforts to build a better online
merchandizing mousetrap that have sprung out of
Endeca
Technologies Inc.'s "Guided Navigation" are of
particular interest to us because they are being used not only
to sell merchandise online in numerous leading retail portals
but increasingly behind the firewalls of major institutions
that are trying to organize content from internal and external
sources. In an ecommerce setting Endeca's Guided Navigation
allows a shopper to define a general category for browsing an
online catalog - say, Australian wines for starters - and then
get a listing of not only items within that category but a
categorized navigation listing tailored for those specific
results - say, by price range or specific vineyards. Each one
of these displays is not simply a search results listing but a
unique "storefront", with promotions, content and branded
navigation most suitable to the merchandise at that level of
browsing. If I had started with wine prices instead of country
of origin in my browsing, the whole "store" could take on a
different and nearly infinite number of specialized and
specially framed categorizations of results with complementary
marketing materials and content to suit.
Place these same kinds of capabilities in
an institutional setting with content sources from internal and
external sources and the results can be similarly powerful -
especially when existing content taxonomies are integrated into
this Guided Navigation framework. This is just what Endeca has
undertaken, oftentimes with remarkably effective results. The
main difference in an institutional content setting is that the
value being extracted is not in direct merchandise sales but in
locating the most appropriate content to make a decision that
will result in revenues - or lives saved, if you think of how
this technology is applied to national security work. No wonder
that IBM, one of Endeca's larger ecommerce clients, is looking
over the top of its glasses at Endeca as it develops its own "Masala"
enterprise search initiative.
Endeca may not have the complete answer
to institutional content needs, but here are a few things to
consider about the Guided Navigation capability when
approaching your own content sets:
- Using merchandizing concepts to get
content in its most valuable content is key to enterprise
content success. Even when an item comes out on top on a
search results page it's important to place it in the
framework of other related content that's going to give it a
rich framework for interpretation and use. Reference data,
premium content, directories and other kinds of related
content can help one to make more informed decisions right on
the spot without having to go into further searches. The
Endeca approach provides some unique ways in which to manage
this context enrichment process, but any tool's search
results context has the potential to provide a wide range of
highly focused and "merchandized" content services. Without
this kind of enrichment, many content sources will be as good
as unavailable in the minds of hasty searchers.
- Merchandizing concepts are key to
the success of premium content in today's enterprise search
environment. Oftentimes people don't want to be sold
content in their professional environment. However, the
broadening success of online premium content services on the
open Web and the increasing sophistication of outlets such as
Amazon in positioning premium content effectively in a
merchandizing environment should remind premium content
providers that today's content users are increasingly
comfortable with effective electronic content merchandizing.
Being able to have premium content not simply listed but
displayed in a way that makes it both attractive and useful
before ever venturing a click into more details can take
premium content search presentation away from its dreary card
catalog listing roots and into a realm that will allow its
distributors to think more effectively about how each and
every item of content may be positioned for contextual use.
- Taxonomies are great, but adaptive
taxonomies are greater. The great taxonomy debates roll
on and on, but at the end of the day the only "right"
taxonomy is the one that gets used to find useful results. By
concentrating on how people navigate taxonomies rather than
one specific "right" taxonomy development method, Endeca
points the way towards being able to concentrate on how
people actually look for things in a way that has produced
bottom-line results. The only path to effective, contextual
content is the one that a user wants to take at the moment -
preferably not hampered by arcane "advanced" interfaces. Just
push the "merchandize" out there in numerous contexts until
it sticks in their minds.
There are many interesting and engaging
solutions to providing better content contextualization for
enterprise content, but in our minds Endeca's approach offers
much to think about because it has proven itself in many
commercial online environments in which today's content users
feel very effective in making decisions about what's right for
them. Not every content solution will benefit from this
approach, but probably far more than we'd like to admit. As
enterprises become more adept at "merchandizing" their internal
content assets, they'll discover that there's a lot more to
learn from how a box of chocolates gets sold than they may have
ever imagined. Make mine milk chocolate, please.
-
John Blossom
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