Major US retailers Sephora and REI joined Audi and crowd-funding site Kickstarter to talk digital disruption at a wide-ranging two-and-a-half hour keynote presentation to kick off Adobe’s Digital Marketing Summit in Salt Lake City on Tuesday.
REI senior vice president of digital retail Brad Brown, Sephora chief marketing officer Julie Bornstein and Audi general manager of digital technology, solutions and strategy Jeff Titus talked about how digital was changing their business.
Titus said Audi had recognised that digital integration with the entire customer experience of the brand was key. “It’s not just about technology or the vehicle, it’s about relating to customers on their own terms,” he said. “We’re trying to innovate on the back end with key innovations that provide us with a quick time to market.”
Brown said there were a multitude of ways to draw in and engage with customers that weren’t even conceivable a few years ago, but it was “really, really hard and that’s why they call it work”. “As you get to know people you get to know little bits of them a little bit at a time so you can have relevant, personal conversations. It’s harder to do digitally,” he said.
Bornstein, a marketer with experience at upscale fashion retailer Nordstrom, Urban Outfitters and Starbucks, said the biggest changes in the past 15 years were the growing role of ecommerce, the rise of the social web and instantaneous customer feedback. Bornstein said the big shift within organisations was the rise of tech.
“Traditionally retailers would try to spend as little as possible [on tech] and outsource, but we’ve begun to realise what a critical asset tech is, because it’s all moved to the consumer and is now front-facing. We now have a tech team in-house, and the investment in that team is the biggest organisational change. The CIO is my best friend.”
Adobe senior vice president and general manager of digital marketing Brad Rencher summed up the theme of the presentation, ‘The Reinvention of Marketing’, pointing to the just-announced partnership with German multinational software giant SAP.
The reseller deal will integrate SAP’s enterprise resource planning suite with Adobe’s digital marketing software to “bring together the office of the CMO with the CIO” and develop a holistic view of the customer through online and offline data.
“What is required and expected is reinvention,” Rencher said. “Our challenge as humans is once we learn something, it’s hard to unlearn it. How do we break down the organisational muscle memory, unlearn marketing as we know it?
“Imagine a world where marketing was invented just now. Imagine erasing all those titles on your business cards, no managers, no specialist directors. Our jobs have evolved to inherit the less-than-ideal technology environment.
“This ad hoc approach to building a technology stack will never keep up. Every new stack creates a whole new set of job titles, labouring under some historical baggage and the need to be backwards-compatible.”
Rencher said the result of so many legacy silos was that “the whole of our efforts ends up being less than it could or should be … it takes all our effort to get this patchwork of technology working together”.
The solution being touted, of course, is the Adobe Marketing Cloud. Hence the big jamboree in Salt Lake City. The company has announced major upgrades to its Core Services to coincide with the Summit, including, crucially, a single unified customer profile across the entire Marketing Cloud ecosystem. Adobe is also previewing its Marketing Mix Planning tool, which will provide attribution modelling for CMOs to evaluate past campaigns and run simulations of future spend.
Adobe president and chief executive Shantanu Narayen talked about the need for customer experience to remain the central focus for every business. “We all recognise a bad customer experience when we see it. Our tolerance for bad experiences right now is extremely low and our expectations as consumers are extremely high,” he said.
“To succeed in the digital era and deliver on expectations, we are all being challenged to transform our organisations into real-time enterprises in a multi-screen, multi-channel, personalised, dynamic, optimised world. That means redefining the central nervous system that runs our business, every system needs to be interconnected.”
That transformation was being led by marketers, Narayen said. “The digital era is not the end of creative. In fact it’s creativity and customer focus that are the true engine of this real-time enterprise, and that puts marketers at the front end.”
The author travelled to Salt Lake City as a guest of Adobe.
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