Live from Adobe Summit 2015: Three strategic imperatives for digital transformation

Mov­ing from print to dig­i­tal is hard­er than it sounds, but if there is a good exam­ple of how it’s done, it’s BNP Paribas Wealth Man­age­ment. With a glob­al pro­duc­tion of 150,000 pages of infor­ma­tion each year, it was no small task to effec­tive­ly shift their deliv­ery mech­a­nisms to dig­i­tal, but thanks to con­tent-cen­tric apps pow­ered by Adobe DPS and under the guid­ance of Chief Dig­i­tal Offi­cer Thier­ry Derungs, that’s pre­cise­ly what they did.

This achieve­ment was based on a pow­er­ful guid­ing prin­ci­ple: high net worth indi­vid­u­als’ ser­vice expec­ta­tions are being rede­fined by the con­ve­nience and rel­e­vance of online and mobile expe­ri­ences, there­fore these cus­tomers are look­ing to their pri­vate bank­ing providers to deliv­er a pleas­ant and sim­i­lar­ly seam­less expe­ri­ence across channels.

This shift in strat­e­gy effec­tive­ly changed BNP Paribas’ busi­ness, but how did they do it? And what are the main take­aways for any­one who wants to push the dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion efforts with­in his/her own organ­i­sa­tion? Accord­ing to Thier­ry Derungs, there are three strate­gic imper­a­tives you need to consider.

1. Delight your cus­tomers: digi­tise cus­tomer experience

Good con­tent, accord­ing to BNP Paribas’ Chief Dig­i­tal Offi­cer, is the result of a coher­ent process that effec­tive­ly lever­ages pro­duc­tion (new mate­ri­als or data that are tai­lored to a spe­cif­ic client), edit­ing (by fol­low­ing clear graph­ic and edi­to­r­i­al guide­lines), imple­men­ta­tion (tech­ni­cal inte­gra­tion of con­tent through a robust CMS), re-usabil­i­ty (focus on pro­duc­ing ever­green con­tent), dis­tri­b­u­tion (know which are the most effec­tive chan­nels) and analy­sis (mea­sure your audience’s buy-in of that con­tent in order to know what to improve).

In short, any cus­tomer expe­ri­ence needs to abide to some extent to this process, and com­pa­nies that are dig­i­tal­ly trans­formed thrive by deliv­er­ing sim­ple, share­able, client-cen­tric con­tent that is pur­pose-built for dig­i­tal but lives beyond it as well. A clear exam­ple of this is Apple: their cus­tomer engage­ment is processed through an ecosys­tem mod­el, where the App Store or iTunes ensure a con­sis­tent lev­el of ser­vice from begin­ning to end.

2. Re-ori­ent your busi­ness: dis­rupt sub-markets

What busi­ness are Face­book and Google in? Some might say that, respec­tive­ly, they are a social net­work and a search engine, but a deep­er look tells a more com­plex sto­ry. Face­book is the own­er of a pow­er­ful social media plat­form, but what makes them spe­cial is how they were able to pio­neer the mon­eti­sa­tion of behav­iours through hyper-tar­get­ed adver­tis­ing, while tran­si­tion­ing those prac­tices to lead on mobile in lit­tle more than two years. Sim­i­lar­ly, Google may have start­ed as a search engine, but what they’ve done on top of that is build a proac­tive inter­ac­tion and advi­so­ry ser­vice that focus­es on search adver­tis­ing, big data man­age­ment and ana­lyt­ics mon­eti­sa­tion, among oth­er ventures.

The sec­ond strate­gic imper­a­tive is this abil­i­ty to re-ori­ent your busi­ness in a way that dis­rupts exist­ing cat­e­gories and reshuf­fles the rules of the game. It’s com­mon­ly said that there are three types of busi­ness­es: the rule mak­ers, the rule fol­low­ers and the rule break­ers. We need to ques­tion and break more rules when aim­ing for dig­i­tal transformation.

3. Flex your plat­form: digi­tise operations

Dig­i­tal is not a depart­ment; it’s a trans­for­ma­tion­al lay­er of every sin­gle busi­ness prac­tice. Com­pa­nies like Ama­zon thrive not only because they pro­vide a wide range of ser­vices, but more impor­tant­ly because they deliv­er per­son­alised expe­ri­ences with excel­lent cus­tomer care, build­ing on an open platform.

This capac­i­ty to deliv­er excel­lence to cus­tomers is great­ly enhanced by dig­i­tal tools, mak­ing it an indis­pens­able piece of the puz­zle when it comes to trans­form­ing your com­pa­ny to thrive in a dig­i­tal-only age. That is what Adobe Sum­mit is all about and where the future lies for for­ward-think­ing marketers.

What oth­er guid­ing prin­ci­ples would you con­sid­er to cham­pi­on dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion? Let us know on Twit­ter @AdobeDigitalPub and join the con­ver­sa­tion at #Adobe­Sum­mit.