Entering the era of customer obsession— key takeaways from Adobe Summit Las Vegas

Diana Daia

Published in

Accutics Industry Insights

4 min readApr 5, 2019

Nearly 20.000 attendees met in Las Vegas for this year’s Adobe Summit to stay in tune with an evolving marketplace and make meaningful connections. Even for Vegas, that’s a lot of people. One prevailing question joined us all: how do we unlock the power of technology to create more value and build stronger relationships with customers? Here’s what I found out at the conference.

From customer-driven to customer-obsessed

For a while now, we’ve witnessed a growing commitment from brands big and small to shifting from a marketing-obsessed strategy to a customer-obsessed culture where the ultimate goal is to drive purpose and value through long-lasting relationships with customers. This became apparent at Adobe Summit.

Adobe’s CEO — Shantanu Narayen kicked off the first official day of the Summit with the statement:

“Retention is the new growth” — Shantanu Narayen, CEO Adobe

For a company like Adobe — that relies heavily on its growing community and renewal rates, especially with the recent acquisition of Marketo and Magento, customer retention is indeed key. Nevertheless, this statement brought a reality into focus: the importance of truly understanding the customer journey(s) to own the digital experience and provide value at the right time.

But how do brands do that? Here are 3 key insights from Adobe Summit speakers:

1. Leverage technology with customers in mind

It’s not about simultaneously embracing AI, AR, VR and all the trendy acronyms that are currently populating the martech space. It’s about embracing technology that makes sense to your customers and your brand. Figuring that out becomes easier by taking a step back and carefully looking at the customer journey.

Personalization was a key theme at the summit that is making impressive strides for companies worldwide. Pairing it with compelling creative ensures that brands are always in front of the right people with the right content while capitalizing on their retention.

“We used to blast one email to everyone, we now send 40 million versions of that” Hubert Joly, CEO Best Buy

2. Build a strong data foundation

While employing the latest digital technology is key to getting ahead of the curve and blazing the trail for a customer-obsessed culture, its power is limited without a strong data foundation. Having access to accurate insights at the right time is key to convert, retain, and take action.

Companies like Chegg and analysts like James McCormick from Forrester made it clear that building an insights-driven organization has become an imperative for customer obsession.

“If we make a mistake and we don’t fix it, our renewal rates go down within one hour. Our target groups don’t have the patience nor time to wait! — Dan Rosensweig, CEO Chegg.com

Working for a company that helps brands become empowered by their marketing data and become truly data-driven, I know how important it is to our customers to create a solid ecosystem where they can rely on actionable insights, in real time.

3. Exceed your customers’ expectations

In a constantly evolving marketplace, meeting the current needs of customers is no longer enough. Exceeding customer expectations is needed to challenge, push borders and continue to think new. A common thread at the summit was creating content and products with users in mind — a bottom-up approach where engaging and helping users is essential.

“Nobody wants to be sold to, as human beings, we all want to be engaged with” — Steve Lucas, Digital Experience, Adobe (former CEO at Marketo, an Adobe Company)

In practice, this means that brands have become dedicated to creating dynamic and personalized customer experiences in the right place, at the right time. This also means that we’re drifting away from creating content that is about our brand or about delighting the customer to content that actually addresses and predicts real pains that our audiences are facing. As Adobe’s mission is, with the recent release of Adobe Experience, the current direction is to “activate content to deliver real-time personalized experiences”