This is the Future of Design

Adobe Symposium 2017 and the key takeaways for business owners as well as design and marketing professionals.

AAdobe Symposium is one of the most elite digital conferences of Adobe for design and digital marketing professionals across the globe. It was held at Grand Hyatt on 4th May this year. The main agenda of the conference was to help businesses leverage data and context to continuously provide more relevant and delightful experiences for the users.

Key takeaways from the conference are:

Make Experience your Business

We are in the business of experience. Every top brand is leveraging the usage and contextual data to provide personal experiences to users.

Idea Telecom uses your usage patterns to offer you relevant internet packs when you are about to finish it or when you are roaming.

Hospitality brands use that data to show you relevant offers based on your likings and previous preferences.

Make sure you collect relevant data about your users and use that to talk to them one to one rather than one to many. Strike a conversation with your customer. Realise where they are in their user journey and accordingly offer them experiences that make most sense to them. A user searching for a place to stay while planning a large family holiday would avoid hotels with only Romantic Couple images. These small things do make or break your conversion rates and customer loyalty.

Artificial Intelligence is not the future. It’s present.

With technologies like Adobe Sensei, one can change use rich customer profiling to deliver experiences that would seem like something from the school of wizardry. This is the example where using a beacon and webcam, the website UI changed according to the person that came near it. Truly a one-to-one experience. AI is taking over the manual tasks of segmenting and offering experiences. In the below example it just took the pics from Adobe Stock photos and used it’s legacy data to change not just the images but also the structure and colours of the website.

You can leverage AI like Alexa and Siri to offer more personalised experiences

Adobe’s marketing cloud could also be made to work along side the third party AIs like Amazon’s Alexa. Demo in the conference showed how a person in the hotel could just ask Alexa about his loyalty points and new offers in the hotel.

Living profile would make your website your best salesman

Using customer segmentation and profiling you will be able to talk to users just as your best salesman would talk to them. Talking to them in their language, remembering their name if they return, helping them with everything they need. This makes users feel more protected and hence has better chance to buy or come back again and again.

True personalisation is not knowing “what” choices a customer make, but “why” they make them

By understanding the motivation behind the choice, brands can uncover customer’s needs, wants, beliefs and preferences.

Content is still the king

No matter how intelligent our technologies get and how automated your processes are, content will still be the king. Knowing what your customer wants when they want it and delivering it to them helps you build a long-term relationship with them.

Here are few facts (from above image):

• 70–90% of user’s journey is complete before even engaging with a vendor.
• Consumer engages with 11.4 pieces of content prior to making a purchase.
• The consumer is 5x more dependent on content than they were 5 years ago.

Here are few glimpse from the conference:

Hope you find value in these takeaways. Share it with someone you think would benefit from it.