My Spring Break: Lessons from the Adobe Summit

Portions of this post originally appeared on intouchsol.com. Visit the full post to read more from the Adobe Summit 2016.

The Adobe Summit is an annual three-day conference in Las Vegas that brings together thousands of digital marketers who discuss industry trends and products and learn how to get the most out of Adobe tools. I had the opportunity to attend and summarized a few key takeaways below.

It’s About Experience

Brad Rencher, Adobe’s executive vice president and general manager of digital marketing, gave the keynote address, “Becoming an Experience Business.” As the title implies, his session focused on marketing’s move from selling products to selling experiences.

Today’s customers have voices, Rencher pointed out, and they’re unafraid to use them. Social media makes it easy for consumers to discuss brands in very visible and far-reaching ways. But people talk less about specific products and more about how a product makes them feel. This emotionally driven wave of marketing is about “goosebumps and smiles and bringing people together” — and about being unobtrusive as marketers. If we do our jobs right, our customers don’t notice we exist; we let them experience our brands, and we get out of the way.

Rencher offered four keys to successful experience marketing:

• Know and respect consumers
• Speak in one voice
• Make technology transparent
• Delight at every turn

Similarly, Chandra Surbhat, vice president at Wipro Technologies, offered four steps to building exceptional experiences:

• Create a central repository for all experience assets
• Manage with local flexibility but global scale
• Deliver designs to the Web and maintain content velocity (i.e., the speed at which we create and produce personalized content)
• Optimize and continue improving with rapid releases

 

It’s About Speed

Rencher riffed on Moore’s Law — the idea that, nearly every 18 months, computer processing capabilities double — with the thought that there’s a Moore’s Law for marketing, in that customer expectations double as quickly. What worked before, he noted, rapidly becomes outdated in terms of meeting the hopes of our audiences.

 

Check out more insights in What We Did on Spring Break: Lessons from the Adobe Summit.