Key Takeaways: Adobe Summit 2019
Having recently spent a week over in Las Vegas, I thought it might be nice to share some key-takeaways from the Adobe Summit, which is billed as the world’s largest customer experience conference.
According to Adobe, creativity and experience is at the core of delivering the best customer experience. In smaller markets like Australia & New Zealand, where competition for a finite customer base is ever paramount, the importance of this experience is exaggerated even more-so than comparable larger markets overseas.
“Business that have creativity at the core are more responsive and agile to business needs”
Creativity at the core is not just a nice to have, but is an essential requirement in this day and age to the bottom line. According to McKinsey, creative leaders outperform their peers on key financial metrics such as above average organic revenue growth, above average total return to shareholders, and above average net enterprise value.
“The line between epic and epic failure is experience.”
Experience has changed everything, and in an age of digital disintermediation, marketing has now become the experience. According to Adobe, by the year 2020 customer experience will over take price and product as the key brand differentiator.
People already now generally buy experiences not products. However, there’s a big difference from an experience that transcends discussions around cost or value versus one that is a failure (a bad experience). To deliver an “epic” experience you will need to utilise robust insights and customer data.
“Always maintain a test and learn mindset”
It’s crucial to build an always on framework for testing and learning. To do this, brands would benefit from looking at Adobe’s own marketing activity. Adobe.com today has 9.2bn web visits a year. Adobe started with 1 test per week, now they do 50 per week. It has created a recipe for success for Adobe’s growth and has largely contributed to the meteoric growth of its website which now delivers much of its business outcomes.
“The convergence of ad-tech and mar-tech”
The main theme from the summit was one of convergence. Specifically, the convergence of marketing technology and advertising technology in delivering a better experience for the customer, and the convergence of sales and marketing to further accentuate that experience.
In an effort to do this Adobe announced their open data initiative - which includes a data sharing partnership between Microsoft, Adobe and SAP. This new partnership heralds some great growth opportunities for brands in leveraging and merging data from within platforms such as Adobe owned Marketo (Marketing Automation), Microsoft owned Dynamics (CRM) and Microsoft owned Linkedin (ad-tech) and SAP (enterprise tech). By converging these worlds the long-term vision will be to get closer to building a true omni-channel single customer view, giving a fuller story around how our customers are experiencing our touchpoints as brands, giving us more insight into how we can hack, grow and optimise the experience to make it better.
Satya Nadella (CEO of Microsoft) shared the following insights on how he transformed Microsoft's culture into one of growth and innovation, ultimately enabling it to become the most valuable company in the world (as of April, 2019)
If you want to succeed you need to be in a learning mindset
Move from being 'know it alls' to 'learn it alls'
Infuse your company's culture with constant intellectual curiosity
Take great ideas and breakthroughs through to instant execution (start with something - worry about the rest later)
Take friction out of the process - allow people to collaborate
Originally posted on Linkedin