Winning The Digital Race Means Finding The Relevance First

Digital is new and exciting, but make sure to consider what is relevant for your existing business and customers, says the latest Adobe report “The Path of Experience.”

Every client we meet with is clear that digital is now mission-critical to their business, as it is to every business in every sector, because we live in a digital world. It’s a world full of new experience possibilities for consumers and opportunities for marketers, both of which are addressed in “The Path of Experience,” the latest report from Adobe.

As a primer for CMOs looking to understand the extent of the possibilities that a digital approach might offer in terms of customer experience, it’s useful—a distillation of many of the components that can come together to offer the customer experience that helps businesses win in the digital age. But it isn’t a roadmap to be blindly followed without considering both your existing successful business and your own customers, because winning is, first, about finding the relevance, not the experience.

Digital can too often throw out the old, and a lot of the narrative around it can make those who operate in established businesses fear obsolescence. But we do not need to shock people into digital or to paint a picture of gloom for those who do not adopt. Instead, we need to excite people—this is an exciting time to be in business—digital gives us a toolkit for better products, better experiences, and, ultimately, growth.

For example, there is an underlying theme that “the product” has died, and been replaced by “the experience.” But I don’t think this is true. Dollar Shave Club sells razors, Uber sells journeys and food—they have different stock and distribution models, but they still sell products. The difference is that they are exploiting the tools and the opportunities the digital world has created to make the acquisition of the end-product (a car journey) easier and more relevant to me today.

Of course, they have changed the customer experience, but great businesses have always done that, using the tools available to them at the time. Jack Cohen, the visionary founder of Tesco, and Sam Walton ran the Amazons of their day, building them into the titans they are now by applying the best techniques available to them at the time to provide a better service to their customers.

Let’s not suggest that customer experience is a new phenomenon, because, in doing so, we position all existing businesses as doing it wrong. Phrases such as “uncharted territory” and “they don’t sell products” are not helpful, as they position the new digital tools available to businesses as something to be scared of, when they’re not.

The real challenge for marketing leaders looking to follow “The Path of Experience” is to establish how best to build on what they have, then how best to acquire and deploy latest tools to do it. In doing so, you must work out how your product and customer experience need to change in a digital world. Hilton’s adoption of mobile phones as keys and easyJet’s hugely successful move to mobile boarding passes are fantastic examples of established businesses doing this, every bit as good as examples from Uber or Airbnb.

It’s when you see examples like this, or when you see Amazon having to respond to the success of click-and-collect by buying locker space in traditional bricks-and-mortar retailers, that you see the old guard still has just as much relevance as the snappy disrupters—and just as much at stake in the digital landscape.

The key word I urge marketers to focus on is “relevance”—what is relevant to your business and your customers. Yes, personalisation can help you make a real one-to-one connection and, yes, big data can bring all approaches together and power them all. When it’s done right, it’s brilliant. But when it’s done without proper consideration, it can be a pointless waste of resources.

Brita, an example pulled out in the report, is rightly hailed for its utilisation of the Internet of Things: its new generation of digitally enabled water filtration devices can automatically order a replacement when the filter begins to lose its efficacy. It’s brilliant, I’d love to remember to check the water levels every time I open the fridge, but, clearly, I won’t, so now I get constant supply of freshly filtered water. Brita, a supplier of water filtration solutions, gets my constant custom—experience and relevance in action.

At the other end of the Internet of Things experience/relevance scale is the Johnnie Walker smart bottle, also referred to in the report, that sends a list of cocktail recipes to my smartphone when I open a bottle of whisky. Superficially, fine: Johnnie Walker is a whisky, the component of many a cocktail (relevance), and I do own a smartphone that can show me cocktail recipes (experience).

But just because those two things are true, do they really need juxtaposing? What if I haven’t got my phone with me? What if the cocktail recipes require ingredients I don’t have to hand? Why don’t I just ask Siri, the platform I’d turn to if I wanted cocktail recipes in any other situation at a time relevant to me? This is an example of deploying a branded digital solution to an experience problem that didn’t really exist, just for the sake of ticking off a hypothetical experience checklist.

To me, a smarter deployment of digital by a whisky company could be to use it to enhance my experience of enjoying its product by challenging my senses. The Glenlivet, for example, launched a companion tasting app to support its limited-edition Cipher range.

The “Path of Experience” is a route that all companies will have to follow in one way or another, but always remember that the destination must be relevant to you and what you do.