Adobe Summit 2019 Recap: Customer Obsession is a Sure Bet

If there’s ever a place that teaches you how decision-making requires careful planning and data, it might as well be Vegas—no one wants to press their luck with a blind bet. This week, marketers and leadership from brands both big and small descended upon the city for Adobe Summit 2019, a three-day conference dedicated to providing best-in-class customer experiences by leveraging consumer data.

The summit kicked off with a slew of new features announced for the Adobe Experience Cloud that allow brands to better understand their customers and make decisions backed by user data. In Adobe Analytics Cloud, for example, organizations will now receive real-time customer data—both known and anonymous—to activate profiles across channels throughout the customer journey (including offline). Unveiling the integration of its Magento and Marketo acquisitions, another major theme touted at the conference was a focus on “business to everyone” (B2E) marketing, a trend in which personalization and customer experience will be critical to success.

Ask anyone at the conference what the prevailing, over-arching theme of the sessions has been and they’ll likely say that it’s customer obsession. The focus on customer experience has been so strong as of late that Adobe’s Senior & Strategic Editor for Enterprise Thought Leadership calls it “Digital Transformation 2.0,” and key leadership from Fortune 500 shared how they use data to cultivate strong relationships with their customers (find out what some of them had to say below). The message is clear: with front-end customer experience as a key differentiator, organizations of all sizes must use data smartly and responsibly to maintain relevancy with consumers.

Brands Must Rethink How They Engage with Customers

The brands that lead in customer experience set their sights beyond just product; instead, they seek to provide services that enhance users’ relationships with the brand or its products. When Best Buy faced intense competition with Amazon, for example, the electronics retailer shifted its focus. “We are not in the business of selling products or doing transactions with you,” Best Buy CEO Hubert Joly told the conference audience. “Our purpose is to enrich lives with the help of technology.”

Best Buy now offers several services to help customers along the user journey both in and out of brick-and-mortar stores, but perhaps most interesting is its Tech Advisors service, which provides free, in-home consultations to prospective customers. In a visit, Best Buy’s tech experts hear out customers’ needs and provide advice, whether it be product recommendations or even entire home media setup plans. There’s no commitment to purchase, providing real value to customers without pressure to buy.

This focus doesn’t just help build a relationship with customers; it also anticipates how emerging tech will further prompt brands to seek out new opportunities informed by data. Internet of Things devices, for example, are growing in popularity—and may rapidly proliferate after mass adoption of 5G connections. As the digital ecosystems in consumers’ homes become more complex, so will customers’ questions about them. Such a service will certainly prove useful for helping homeowners get connected and understand how the technology available can improve their lives; likewise, brands should continually seek out the potential of emerging tech to provide new, personalized experiences that build equity and help connect to consumer need.

Provide Value by Using Data Responsibly

Providing this level of personalized service digitally requires a sophisticated understanding of user preferences on an individual level—and that requires smart use of data. Unfortunately, a big challenge that brands face in producing insights-driven content is that their data is often siloed, or there’s simply too much of it to organize or draw conclusions from. “Overcoming organizational and data silos is key to putting customers at the center of your digital business and delivering a leading experience,” said Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen at the summit. By breaking down internal barriers and pulling together stakeholders across an organization, a more holistic view of customers’ engagement with a brand across the customer journey emerges.

Another key takeaway from the conference is that the use of data must come from a place of empathy and transparency. While explaining his vision for innovation, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella posed an important question for brand leaders: “What is the real source of inspiration, the necessary conditions to get your strategy and products? One is a sense of purpose and the other is culture.”

Taking those words to heart, businesses seeking to retain and unlock user data must do so with a sense of purpose and a desire to improve lives. “People want to be heard, not overheard,” said MediaMonks co-founder Wesley ter Haar. There’s a lot of consumer unease around collection of data, “which stems from approaching data without empathy,” says ter Haar. “If organizations implemented solutions informed by the empathetic use of data, they’d be far more successful and not creep people out.”

The sky’s the limit with insights-driven content.

Here’s what that level of transparency looks like: when we worked with creative agency GSD&M to redesign the US Air Force website, the platform simply asked readers their gender, education/professional level and goals. The page informs users that their experience with the site is be custom-built from this information, explaining the up-front use and value of the data. The website is powered by Adobe Creative Cloud and dynamically surfaces up content based on readers’ activity, helping them envision what to expect from a military career and how it can help them achieve their professional goals. The result is a website that provides a highly personalized experience populated with relevant content—without asking readers to blindly hand over sensitive or personal data.

It all boils down to trust: “While personalization cannot happen without data and intelligence,” Narayen told his audience, “it should not happen without trust and transparency.” As brands seek to build deeper relationships with their consumers, brands must not only leverage data smarter, but also more responsibly. Used in this way, organizations have the tools in place they need to connect with consumers through value-based, personalized and insight-driven content.