Adobe EMEA Symposium: Driving brand loyalty in the experience era

Cus­tomers don’t buy prod­ucts. They buy expe­ri­ences. To show brands how to rein­vent their approach to cus­tomer loy­al­ty and make expe­ri­ence their busi­ness, Adobe is host­ing an exclu­sive EMEA Sym­po­sium, focus­ing on the impact of chang­ing cus­tomer behav­iour on brand loyalty.

Being an “expe­ri­ence busi­ness” means putting cus­tomers first. In a recent Adobe sur­vey, eight out of 10 par­tic­i­pants said they’re loy­al to brands that offer delight­ful expe­ri­ences, and near­ly two-thirds to brands that tai­lor expe­ri­ences to their pref­er­ences and needs. But what hap­pens to brand loy­al­ty when your cus­tomers’ needs and desires are con­stant­ly changing?

To answer that ques­tion, Adobe col­lab­o­rat­ed with Dr. Chris Brauer at Gold­smiths Uni­ver­si­ty and research con­sul­tan­cy Smooth­me­dia to inves­ti­gate how con­sumer behav­iour is chang­ing, and how mar­keters are react­ing to those shifts.

The study’s first seg­ment exam­ined chang­ing con­sumer behav­iour and its impact on brand loy­al­ty. The researchers found that the pro­lif­er­a­tion of dig­i­tal tech­nol­o­gy has changed the land­scape sig­nif­i­cant­ly, giv­ing con­sumers more choic­es than ever before. Dig­i­tal tech­nol­o­gy has also her­ald­ed a new era of ulti­mate con­ve­nience, in which time-poor con­sumers can obtain the prod­ucts and ser­vices they want, when­ev­er and wher­ev­er they want them. In addi­tion, com­pa­nies of every size can now com­pete for loy­al­ty and mar­ket share, mean­ing even more dis­rup­tion for brands.

This week marked the launch of the study’s sec­ond phase, which looks more close­ly at how mar­keters are react­ing to the chang­ing con­sumer, and sets out a new frame­work against which brands can mea­sure cus­tomer loy­al­ty. Adobe and Gold­smiths’ research team dis­cov­ered a new loy­al­ty mod­el, at the heart of which is a con­sumer empow­ered through dig­i­tal tech­nol­o­gy. These con­sumers are more self-aware and vocal than ever before, and their behav­iour is increas­ing­ly moti­vat­ed by inter­nal beliefs rather than exter­nal attempts at loy­al­ty brand­ing. At the same time, how­ev­er, more than two-thirds of con­sumers report­ed that they’re excit­ed by brands that use the lat­est tech­nolo­gies to cre­ate delight­ful experiences.

In short, the new key to cus­tomer loy­al­ty isn’t just cre­at­ing pow­er­ful brand­ing, it’s plac­ing cus­tomer expe­ri­ence at the cen­tre of your busi­ness. To win share of atten­tion (and share of wal­let), mar­keters have to start putting con­sumers’ per­son­al con­text above all else.

Adobe Expe­ri­ence Cloud is designed to pro­vide exact­ly this sort of per­son­al­i­sa­tion, by ensur­ing that data from dis­parate sources is inte­grat­ed to devel­op a 360-degree view of each cus­tomer. Pow­ered by Adobe Sen­sei machine learn­ing and arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, Expe­ri­ence Cloud lets brands per­son­alise at scale, fos­ter­ing the one-to-one rela­tion­ships that are so cru­cial to loy­al­ty by help­ing con­sumers fil­ter their options and stream­lin­ing the process of deliv­er­ing what they want, when they want it.