Pickles, Profit, and a World Where Opportunity Can Be Manufactured
Can an organization manufacture opportunity? What would it take to be always at the ready?
Asking if an organization is ready to manufacture customers is not to ask if an organization is capable of cranking out campaigns and customer-ready content. Instead, this is to ask whether the organization could think about manufacturing opportunity the same way strategists think about manufacturing a jar of pickles. If the ask is to manufacture opportunity for the purpose of profitable growth, then yes, a supply chain dedicated to the creation and optimization of content that acts as the fuel for engagement can and should be established.
What is Supply Chain Management, and How Does it Apply to Pickles?
Let’s talk about pickles. To meet market demand, a business projects it must sell 100 jars each month. Each month, enough cucumbers and ingredients are ordered to fill 100 jars. The ordering process is like clockwork. But one month, the lid manufacturer can only supply 90 lids. Without visibility and automation in the supply chain, ingredients are still ordered and pickling and packing processes continue as usual to make 100 jars of pickles. Yet with a shortage of lids, 10 pickle-packed jars are wasted. Making matters worse, preorders had already been taken for all 100 jars, leaving 10 customers out of luck. No pickles for them.
A supply chain strategy is a plan to manage how goods and services are made and delivered. This encompasses everything from raw materials to final delivery, detailing the people, platforms, and processes that are required. Supply chain management (SCM) typically breaks down into coordination, planning, execution, delivery, and monitoring. These phases commonly involve key actions in sourcing, procurement, logistics management, quality assurance, and delivery, as SCM technologies and workflows aim to optimize efficiencies across the entire chain, measuring efficiency, productivity, and opportunity for continuous improvement.
Demand signals, past performance, and supplier availability of each component to the finished delivered product all play a part in getting the profit-driving 100 pickle jars into the hands of loyal customers. SCM intentionally predicts, orchestrates, and optimizes each stage of production, execution, and delivery to ensure that every element is right-sized and in lockstep with all other stages.
Now, imagine that instead of pickles, this discussion is about content. Instead of talking jars and lids, the discussion is about the opportunities across a customer’s journey. Content needs a supply chain of its own.
What Should a Content Supply Chain Really Address?
The purpose of a content supply chain is not to make more content faster. It is to generate the right content for the right audience or customer in the right moment. In the earlier example of the pickle business, the end goal of an optimally managed supply chain is not to make more pickles faster. Instead, it works to get the right jar of pickles into the right customer’s hands to meet an immediate craving and need in the right moment. Miss the prediction on materials, miss the mark in profit and margin; miss that window and risk missing that sale.
Through this same lens, working to create content must answer the question of why the content is being created to begin with. Content for content’s sake is a costly and unpredictable endeavor; instead, content should be produced to manufacture opportunity and growth through engagement.
Focusing on automating the process of content operations only creates more of the same content, perhaps incrementally faster. Add artificial intelligence (specifically generative AI) to the mix, and the process churns more versions of the same content, produced much faster. But when you focus on how content is used to manufacture opportunity, the processes, outcomes, and the technology being leveraged is set to a different purpose. Instead of churning assets quickly, the strategic focus turns to prediction, context, and the timing of content production and delivery orchestration.
This is not to say that there is not intense pressure on marketing teams to create more forms of content. This pressure has pushed the boundaries of the content development team to deputize functions and personas well outside the formal engagement center of marketing into this content development and deployment team.
These informal engagement hubs have often turned to rogue, self-selecting, easy tools that produce content or assets quickly, but fail to connect to centralized common brand assets or templates. These teams are asked to be part of the machine that is manufacturing opportunity, but they are not included in the tools or platforms that could allow for brand-secure creation.
The content supply chain requires specific shared services that include common data, common asset repositories, and visibility across what exists in the creative world of the possible. With guidelines and guardrails set across the organization, the supply chain allows for creative centralization that is built from collaborative briefs and a collective understanding of the brand and the customer.
An AI-powered agentic content supply chain should have the capacity to reason and take action. Predictability and scalability across the supply chain is not thanks to the speed of automating creativity, but rather thanks to the speed of identifying outliers and predicting needs to perfectly pace production, resources, and collaboration. The beauty of a supply chain strategy is that it should be structured to empower flexibility.
Just like with pickles, tastes for content will change. The content supply chain will allow for change. Spicy pickles could be all the rage today but fall out of favor tomorrow as sweet pickles take over. Similarly, image personalization might be table stakes in today’s engagement strategies, but just like that video could become the only game in town.
Which Organizations Are Ready to Manufacture Opportunity?
Organizations should start by mapping the stages and phases that leverage content to reach and engage with the customer. Work backward to identify where along that process content can and should be created, individualized, and contextualized to deliver a more personalized engagement with the customer. Take the time to also identify when personalization and over-contextualization will create friction or cross the dreaded “creepy” line of oversharing insight with the customer. Identify where signal, telemetry, and data can be curated to fuel predictive outcomes.
Then, do this exercise all over again, but bring in different entry points for the customer’s journey that extend across the organization. Sales, service, finance, commerce, in-store, and even events should be considered as part of this process to manufacture opportunity, and in turn should be accounted for across the content supply chain.
The content supply chain will continue to evolve as a strategy just like the technology stack will evolve as technologies evolve. While there won’t be a single “content supply chain stack,” there will be core tools and core platforms that will connect into a larger engagement and opportunity ecosystem. The content supply chain will integrate and connect far beyond marketing and creative teams. It will account for and deliver right-sized tools across the organization and connect everyone into this overarching supply chain that manufactures durable, profitable growth, even for a pickle manufacturer that only sells 100 jars a month.
Liz Miller is vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research, covering the broad landscape of customer experience strategy and technologies.