Romain Fouache, CEO at Akeneo
For years, the return on investment conversation around Product Information Management (PIM) has been quite narrow. Time to market, data completeness, error reduction, revenue uplift, these are all important and all measurable but fundamentally downstream.
What we rarely talk about is what happens before those metrics move, before data quality improves, governance sticks and speed increases. The problem is, if the people responsible for managing product data don’t trust the system they are asked to use, none of those outcomes are sustainable.
That is why it is time to treat emotional response not as a soft, secondary signal, but as a leading indicator of PIM performance. In other words, Net Emotional Footprint should be recognised as a core KPI for PIM ROI.
Trust doesn’t start with customers; it starts with users. Retailers and brands invest in PIM to build trust with customers: accurate product descriptions, consistent attributes across channels, fewer returns, better discovery and stronger brand credibility. But product data doesn’t magically become trustworthy at the point of syndication; it is shaped, governed and maintained by people.
When those people feel confident, in control and supported by their tools, governance becomes a habit,processes stick, and collaboration improves. When they don’t, the opposite happens: workarounds reappear, spreadsheets resurface, and shadow systems creep back in. Data fragmentation quietly returns, even while the PIM technically remains live. In short, emotional response can be an early warning system.
Net Emotional Footprint aggregates verified end-user sentiment across five critical dimensions: trustworthiness, transparency, reliability, fairness and innovation. Together, these dimensions capture how users feel about both the product and the vendor relationship across the full lifecycle, not just at implementation, but in day to day use.
Crucially, this sentiment is predictive; organisations with high emotional footprint scores consistently show stronger adoption, better data discipline and faster time to value than those where users feel constrained or unsupported.
Emotional confidence drives operational outcomes. Consider what happens inside organisations where emotional confidence is high: teams are more willing to rely on a single source of truth, role-based access is trusted rather than bypassed, workflow and approvals are followed rather than skipped, and data enrichment becomes proactive instead of reactive.
This is why usability, intuitiveness and ease of administration matter so much. These areas directly influence whether governance feels enabling or obstructive.
The same applies to AI; generative AI in PIM only delivers value if users trust the outputs and understand how they are generated. High emotional confidence accelerates AI adoption while low confidence stalls it. Emotional footprint becomes the difference between AI as an amplifier and AI as an experiment.
From emotional signal to commercial impact
Sceptics may still ask how sentiment translates into revenue. The answer lies in speed and consistency. When teams trust their tools, they move faster, product launches accelerate, channel activation becomes smoother, errors decline before they reach customers and returns fall because information improves at source.
This is why emotional footprint is a leading indicator. Financial metrics capture the outcome after behaviour has already changed. Emotional response captures whether that change is likely to happen or down.
It is no coincidence that platforms with strong emotional footprints also show a high likelihood to recommend. A high recommendation score reflects not just satisfaction, but advocacy born from confidence. People recommend tools that make them look good internally, not just ones that tick boxes.
A new lens for PIM ROI
As PIM becomes sort of a foundation to AI-driven commerce, the cost of poor adoption grows, fragmented data undermines personalisation, inconsistent attributes break generative experiences, and slow governance constrains speed at precisely the moment markets demand agility.
In this context, measuring ROI solely through output metrics is no longer sufficient. Leaders need to understand whether their PIM investment is building internal trust at scale. Net Emotional Footprint provides that lens.
It tells you whether your data strategy is resilient or fragile, whether governance will hold under pressure, whether AI will scale or stall, and ultimately, whether trust with customers is being built on solid internal foundations.
The next generation of PIM leaders will still care deeply about revenue, speed and accuracy. But they will start by asking a more fundamental question; do our people trust the system they are being asked to trust with our brand?
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