AP-016
Every client’s catalogue is different.
One client may sell technical products with detailed specifications and compatibility requirements. Another may rely heavily on variants, categories and filters. Another may have relatively simple products but years of inconsistent information spread across the catalogue.
Those differences matter.
The agency cannot assume that what is appropriate for one client should simply be copied to another.
The required product information, classification and questions shoppers need answered can all vary.
The agency therefore needs to adapt its catalogue approach to the client.
But adaptation can spread further than the differences actually require.
One client gets its own spreadsheet. Another develops a different review sequence. A third has a different way of recording findings. A fourth depends on conventions understood mainly by the person who has worked on the account longest.
Over time, the agency can end up with a different catalogue process for every client.
Some of those differences may be necessary.
The question is whether all of them are.
Consider two clients selling very different products.
For one, compatibility may be essential. Shoppers need to know which components work together before they can make a confident choice.
For another, compatibility may not matter at all. Shoppers may care more about dimensions, materials or which variation is appropriate for a particular use.
The agency should not apply the same information requirements to both catalogues.
The same is true of structure.
One catalogue may need several levels of classification because shoppers narrow products through technical characteristics. Another may have a much simpler range where that degree of classification would add little value.
A useful catalogue process therefore has to accommodate genuine differences.
If every client were forced into the same product structure, information requirements and catalogue rules, the process would become consistent by ignoring the catalogue in front of it.
That would solve the wrong problem.
The important question is not whether clients should be treated differently.
They should, where the catalogue requires it.
The question is what actually needs to become different.
Two clients can require different catalogue decisions while the agency still uses the same underlying method to reach them.
For one client, the agency may conclude that compatibility information is essential.
For another, it may conclude that it is unnecessary.
Those are different answers.
But reaching them can involve comparable questions.
What does the shopper need to understand before choosing?
What information does the catalogue currently provide?
Where does the catalogue leave an important question unresolved?
What should the correct treatment be for this client’s products?
Those questions recur because, however different the products, structures and information requirements may be, shoppers are still using the catalogue to find relevant products, understand them, compare alternatives and decide what to do next.
The answers can therefore vary considerably while the professional questions used to establish them remain recognisable.
The agency is not looking for the same answer across both catalogues.
It is applying a dependable way of reaching the appropriate answer for each one.
Catalogue requirements can vary in both information and structure because shoppers face different buying decisions.
That does not automatically mean the agency needs to reinvent the way it identifies those requirements every time.
A different catalogue decision is not necessarily evidence that the professional process used to reach it should also be different.
Client-specific processes rarely appear all at once.
They usually develop through reasonable individual decisions.
A new client arrives with an unusual catalogue, so the team creates a separate worksheet to handle it.
A reviewer prefers findings to be recorded in another format, so that becomes the convention for the account.
A particular sequence of checks proves useful during the first project and continues being used during maintenance.
None of those decisions necessarily creates a problem.
The difficulty appears when the agency stops distinguishing between what is specific to the catalogue and what has simply become specific to the account.
After several clients, similar professional decisions may be reached through different spreadsheets, different terminology and different review sequences.
Someone moving from one account to another has to learn not only the new catalogue but also another operating method.
The agency is now maintaining process differences that the catalogue itself did not require.
That does not mean every difference should be removed.
A client’s approval requirements may genuinely demand another review step. A platform may constrain how a particular change can be made. A regulated product category may require checks that do not belong elsewhere.
Those are reasons for the process to differ.
The fact that the client is different, by itself, is not.
The agency does not need to remove client variation; it needs to decide where that variation belongs.
A repeatable catalogue process does not require the agency to reach the same conclusions for every client.
It requires a dependable way of reaching conclusions appropriate to each client.
The agency may consistently begin by establishing which buying decisions shoppers need the catalogue to support.
It may examine what the catalogue currently provides, identify where that differs from the intended approach, determine the appropriate change and review whether it has brought that part of the catalogue into line with the intended approach.
The details can vary considerably inside those steps.
The required attributes, catalogue rules, terminology and priorities can all change, so the resulting recommendations can be completely different.
What remains dependable is the method used to establish how the catalogue should support those decisions.
This is the difference between process consistency and catalogue uniformity.
Uniformity asks different catalogues to produce the same answers.
A repeatable process allows different answers to emerge through a method the agency already understands.
That allows the agency to move between clients without treating each account as a separate operating model.
The team still needs to understand the products, the catalogue and the shoppers’ buying needs; the repeatable process provides a dependable method for applying that judgement.
Client-specific requirements are not exceptions to a repeatable process.
They are inputs to it.
A product range may require particular information. Its category structure may reflect how shoppers narrow their options. Its commercial priorities may make some improvements more important than others.
The process should accommodate those requirements without becoming a new process every time they change.
Some engagements will still require additional steps.
If a client needs an additional approval stage, a specialised regulatory check or another required control, the agency can add it because the engagement genuinely calls for it.
The objective is not to eliminate variation.
It is to know where the variation belongs.
When the agency can make that distinction, a new client does not automatically mean another operating method.
It means another catalogue to understand and another set of appropriate decisions to reach.
When something about a new client is different, the agency should determine where that difference belongs.
It may belong in the catalogue requirements or in the decisions made within the existing process. In some cases, it may genuinely require the process itself to change because of an approval requirement, platform constraint or specialised check.
A different client should not, by itself, trigger another operating method.
When every account develops its own spreadsheets, review sequence, terminology and conventions, the team can end up learning another operating method each time it moves between clients.
Some of that variation may be justified.
Some may simply have accumulated because the agency never separated the catalogue-specific requirements and decisions from the process used to handle them.
The agency should separate the repeatable core of its catalogue process from the client-specific requirements and decisions applied within it, changing the process itself only where the catalogue or engagement genuinely requires different treatment.
The process does not need to make every catalogue the same.
It needs to provide a dependable way of establishing how each catalogue should support its shoppers’ buying decisions.