Chelsea F.C. markets beyond borders; Adobe scales to meet customer needs

At our annu­al Adobe Sum­mit it is always a thrill to hear from the lumi­nar­ies, the celebri­ties, the inno­va­tors and the dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing prac­ti­tion­ers; but what excites me the most is hear­ing from our cus­tomers and how they are scal­ing to use Adobe Mar­ket­ing Cloud to move their busi­ness­es for­ward. The diver­si­ty of brands now using Adobe Mar­ket­ing Cloud and the ways in which our tech­nol­o­gy is help­ing them trans­form cus­tomer expe­ri­ences con­tin­ues to fas­ci­nate me.

Here in Europe, we are see­ing some very strong momen­tum, with a num­ber of icon­ic brands choos­ing Adobe Mar­ket­ing Cloud. From The Tele­graph Media Group to the Roy­al Bank of Scot­land (RBS) and Monarch Air­lines through to Argos and even Chelsea Foot­ball Club, each are work­ing hard to become orga­ni­za­tions that have cus­tomers at the very heart of their busi­ness­es. We’ve also expand­ed our own infra­struc­ture to con­tin­ue to sup­port our cus­tomers, includ­ing data cen­ters and co-loca­tion facil­i­ties in Lon­don, Dublin, Ams­ter­dam, Frank­furt and Paris to store and process Euro­pean cus­tomer data, and we’re con­tin­u­ing to invest in active R&D cen­ters across Roma­nia, Ger­many, France, Switzer­land and the UK, among others.

For me, what Chelsea Foot­ball Club is doing with Adobe Mar­ket­ing Cloud is incred­i­ble. With Stam­ford Bridge as its only “bricks and mor­tar” shop in the world, it has rec­og­nized the direct need to mar­ket beyond its own geo­graph­i­cal bor­ders. As the first Eng­lish Pre­mier League to adopt an enter­prise-wide dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing plat­form, Chelsea is now able to not just com­mu­ni­cate with a poten­tial fan base of 40 mil­lion peo­ple in the UK—but it can also now mar­ket to a poten­tial fan base of 500 mil­lion peo­ple around the world! This quite lit­er­al­ly opens up new rev­enue streams, new mar­ket­ing chan­nels, and gets them one step clos­er to becom­ing one of the most rec­og­nized sports brands in the world.

As Jer­ry New­man, head of dig­i­tal and CRM, Chelsea Foot­ball Club told us recent­ly: “It’s extreme­ly impor­tant that we have a rela­tion­ship with our audi­ences beyond the turn­stiles so that a fan in Bangkok feels as close to the foot­ball club as a fan in Putney.”

Chelsea uses Adobe Ana­lyt­ics to track vis­i­tor behav­ior insights both social­ly and offline, Adobe Social to cre­ate rel­e­vant and engag­ing expe­ri­ences with its one mil­lion Face­book fans, Adobe Tar­get to per­son­al­ize offers, Adobe Expe­ri­ence Man­ag­er to quick­ly pub­lish con­tent in mul­ti­ple lan­guages and over mul­ti­ple chan­nels, and final­ly Adobe Cam­paign to auto­mate and exe­cute mar­ket­ing cam­paigns across all platforms.

Grant­ed, while foot­ball fans may be some of the most com­mit­ted ‘cus­tomers’ in the world, the major­i­ty of brands know that they need to con­tin­u­al­ly work to earn trust and likeability—this is some­thing that RBS is well aware of. Through a major dig­i­ti­za­tion project, the 300-year-old bank aims to pro­vide its cus­tomers with imme­di­ate access to the infor­ma­tion they need when­ev­er they want, wher­ev­er they are and how­ev­er they choose to access it. Insights across the cus­tomer jour­ney using Adobe Ana­lyt­ics allows ‘per­son­al bankers’ to go back to being tru­ly per­son­al – and the data allows them to con­nect direct­ly with their local branch cus­tomers and offer tai­lored services.

A large part of my job is meet­ing and work­ing with cus­tomers to help them solve some of the big issues they are fac­ing today, name­ly the non-stop pace of dig­i­tal devel­op­ment and the cor­re­spond­ing con­sumer demands that put enor­mous and unre­lent­ing pres­sure on busi­ness­es. But with this pres­sure is also great opportunity—whether that’s con­nect­ing with hun­dreds of mil­lions of poten­tial new fans or deliv­er­ing a per­fect expe­ri­ence for bank­ing cus­tomers. And it’s great to see how Adobe—along with our partners—are help­ing these com­pa­nies across Europe.

Click here to see Chelsea FC putting Adobe Mar­ket­ing Cloud to action.

For more news on Adobe Sum­mit, or to lis­ten to keynotes from the event, vis­it Sum­mit Live.