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Content & Commerce: The Chocolate and Peanut Butter

There are certain things in this world that are just meant to be together.  Back in college, I had a professor named Wayne Jackson who summed up a Sony/Phillips platform merger as the “Reese’s Standard.” Both Sony and Philips had brilliant standalone products but the real magic happened when you put them together. He’d preach, “On the one hand, you had Sony; the chocolate. And then over here you had Phillips; the peanut butter. Now bring those two sides together and you have yourself a Reese’s.”

While it wasn’t necessarily Hemingway, the analogy made an impression on me and I can’t think of two better contenders than commerce and content management to earn the title. The whole purpose of this trip down memory lane, though, is to illustrate why the connection between these two separate disciplines is now more important than ever. 

According to CEB Global, a leading sales consulting company, 57% of the purchasing decision is complete before your customer even makes direct contact with your company. They go on to explain that 67% of the buyer’s journey is now done digitally. Let’s really think about that for a moment. That means more than 50% of your customer’s experience is driven by your brand's digital footprint and not by the people you staff. 

So, how can companies best use that digital footprint to drive sales? This is where the marriage of content and commerce comes in to play. In the past, it was standard to think and organize in terms silos. Static, brochure-based content was in one column while the shopping cart platform was across the way. The two sides worked perfectly well, but operated very independently of each other.

While this kept things organized and “departmental-ized” it was an incredibly inefficient sales model because the section where customers vetted the product/brand wasn't talking to the transactional piece. This is where the sales funnel concept and omni-channel marketing began to propel user experience and customers were driven like a herd of cattle down the chute and into pasture.

Consumers began to wise up to this process and backed off of the “interaction” accelerator in turn for personal research. In the digital realm, the phrase “content is king” is about as true as a mathematical law. Customers are now moving towards consuming a company’s content and making a sales decision based on their impression. 

At Function1, we're known for customizing Oracle’s WebCenter Sites platform; a highly flexible industry leader in content management. We've learned that WCS becomes the most powerful when we integrate the content management platform with Oracle Commerce.

Combining the two increases buying opportunities, while providing personalized content and a highly performant customer experience. In short, this translates to increased sales and minimized content creation and management expenditures. 

Stay tuned for my next article, where we'll explore some of the specific integrations in more detail. In the meantime, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me at eric@function1.com if you have questions or if you would like to discuss a customized solution that fits your company’s sales goals and web experience. At the end of the day, it’s about how business ingredients piece together to create a unified brand experience. And, while they can stand by themselves, I prefer a Reese’s.