Visitor, member, customer, cookie. Call you what they will, as you appear on a website, loyalty programme or a store, identifying you as one and the same person and letting you know about offers and deals that may suit your needs as soon as you’re in shopping mode, is the marketer’s challenge. This task of creating a unified profile for a holistic and sensible customer experience – are you still seeing marketing messages for stuff you bought last week – is top priority.

At the opening of the Adobe Summit held in Las Vegas last week, President and CEO Shantanu Narayen said that today, experience made all the difference. While only some details remain, the overall experience stays with the customer. The Holy Grail of marketing today is hyperpersonalisation. Achieving that, with the help of Adobe’s products such as its Experience Cloud and Sensei, which make it easy to synthesise data, analytics, content and insights into a piece of marketing in no time, was the focus at the convention.

The challenges ahead

“Many brands cannot modernise fast enough to match customer expectations,” said Brad Rencher, Executive Vice-President, Digital Experience Business, Adobe, adding that modernising technology to become experience-centric is a major challenge. Technology has to be able to refresh data in milliseconds in real time, pair it with content, some of it created in real time, generate insights, and serve up a pertinent piece of marketing, consistently. Some of the difficulties that would involve: enormous amount of data and content, high velocity processing, multiple ads across multiple devices, image recognition – and discernment.

For instance, “how many can recognise inbound data from Germany and treat it differently?” he said. (The General Data Protection Regulation will come into force in the European Union from May.) At a media session later, he said that from now on, enterprises will legally not be able to use data like they have done so far, as privacy concerns never go away and only get magnified. Another challenge is “amplifying talent”, equipping people to use technology.

Given that l’affaire Cambridge Analytica-Facebook blew up and hogged headlines around the world the previous week, Adobe executives had to face many questions about privacy, personalisation and the desirability of it all.

Opt in or opt out?

You might find value in your airline letting you know your bag has been loaded on to the aircraft, but do you want the TV in your hotel room welcoming you by name when you switch it on? The control has to be with the customer, Narayen said. An obligation will emerge that marketers will tell you what they collect and share of your data. Adobe, its executives said, worked privacy into the design of its product and “makes standards like GDPR better”.

Putting customers at the centre of the experience means that experience makers should don the role of agitators and rabble-rousers on behalf of the customer, said John Mellor, Vice-President of Strategy, Alliances, and Marketing. Speaking to cat.a.lyst  later, he acknowledged that as marketers, one got a little overwhelmed by the demands of processing data, content and insight. “One of the challenges we face is organisational inertia, getting people to buy in. I tell marketers to start with something manageable. So even a small segment of the customer base, product or channel needs to be successful” for people to be convinced, he said.

A study by Adobe and Forrester on the business impact of experience-led marketing found that it results in brand awareness growing by 1.6 times, revenue by 36 per cent, greater employee happiness, brings a larger number of new visitors to the website and there is a rise in the number of orders too.

The consensus among speakers at the summit is that digital transformation is happening so fast that businesses don’t have the luxury of time any more, unlike in the case of automating systems and processes that took a couple of decades. “We are speaking to the transformation going on inside enterprises, not just to buy technology but to learn how to use it,” explains Mellor, to a question on how this Summit is different from those of previous years. It marks the shift from “experience thinker” to “experience maker”, the people who are involved in effecting the transformation in teams, processes and the use of technology, with the goal of transforming their organisations into experience-led businesses.

(The writer attended the Adobe Summit at the invitation of Adobe.)

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