Next-Gen Digital Transformation ‘About Goose Bumps And Smiles’
Great customer experiences focus on people, though brands also must be vigilant about their ability to react to a changing market as quickly as emerging competitors, speakers in Sydney said.
Goose bumps and smiles were among some of the ideal customer outcomes shared in the opening keynote at Adobe Symposium 2016, in Sydney on July 26.
“Digital marketing is not about you or me. It’s not even really about customers,” said Brad Rencher, Adobe’s executive vice president and general manager, digital marketing. “It’s really about people.”
According to Rencher, the current wave of digital disruption is a significant break from its predecessors because it is forcing organisations to shift their focus away from internal operations.
“This wave of digital transformation isn’t about us or what we sell,” Rencher told the audience of more than 2,000 digital marketing professionals at the largest digital marketing conference in the Asia Pacific region. “This wave is about goose bumps and smiles and bringing people closer together.”
In a similar vein, Adobe president Shantanu Narayen said the focus needs to shift away from technology and towards the experiences and opportunities created through digital transformation.
“Digital experience has the power to transform the way we live our lives,” Narayen said. “Whether it’s a working parent who can easily book a holiday for their family or an anti-hero like Deadpool who wins the box office, some of these experiences should blow our minds, and others should seamlessly integrate into our lives.”
Narayen challenged the audience to examine their credentials as real experience businesses–asking whether they were using technology to put customer experience at the core of everything they do.
“We think great experiences should start with great content,” Narayen said. “But great content needs to be delivered to the right people at the right time, and that takes great data.”
However, it was Adobe Asia Pacific’s managing director, Paul Robson (top photo), who highlighted the very real business challenge brought above by the current wave of technology disruption.
“In this region we’re seeing billions of dollars available to startup companies and hundreds of new companies being registered every year,” Robson said. “This means that existing brands need to ask themselves where their competitors might come from and whether or not they can respond to market changes as quickly as these emerging competitors.”