Very few industries, if any at all, have been left untouched by the advent of the digital consumer. Business models are getting disrupted due to the emerging consumer demands as well as due to the increasing sophistication of digital technologies. In this session, we will look at the past, present and (possibly) the future of digital disruption.
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Good Afternoon – my name is Vijayanta Gupta – I look after Industry Strategy and Industry Marketing for Adobe’s Digital Marketing business across EMEA. I am usually London based, however if you ask my wife, she might tell you that I am based out of the Heathrow Airport.
Before we begin – I am from the founding batch of this school and I would like to add my welcome to all the welcome messages that you have been getting so far – on behalf of my School, thank you very much for the investment in time, effort, energy and money that you have made for this event.
In past, in this event, I have always started with a video – so why break that tradition….let’s roll the video…
Society evolves in waves and each new wave builds on and puts aside the previous societal wave.
Each wave formed from the one before it over many centuries, moving human civilization forward while transforming it at the same time.
Within this third wave, the world of digital engagement is experiencing a similar transformation, though instead of taking centuries to change how consumers act and what marketers do, this human-civilization transformation equivalent of marketing (and the entire enterprise) is happening at a very rapid pace. The magnitude of these changes mean bigger, better,” badder” waves to ride—and if you do so successfully, you not only can reap great benefits, but also your organization remains competitive in a sea of other surfers who are learning how to ride these waves of change.
So what do we do?
This wave of digital engagement was characterized by Web site-based digital interaction between consumers and brands. It led many enterprises and entrepreneurs to believe that if they built a killer Web site, revenue would follow; massive investment in Internet technologies was the result and everybody rushed to build their own website and ecommerce capabilities.
And then . . .
Wipeout—the dot-com bust happened.
But we saw . . .
[Chart source: Bloomberg, as stated by BBC in this article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8558257.stm]
. . . real winners starting to emerge, like eBay, Amazon, and Priceline. These companies had not only invested in building a business model around their Web presence, but also had invested in providing a differentiated online customer experience. Companies such as Google and others started to emerge too.
We learned a lot from that first wave. Especially, this wave also brought to fore the measurable effect of online advertising on online sales and, thereby, initiated the critical transformation in which marketers became accountable for actual, not influenced, sales.
This wave of digital engagement was characterized by channel-based digital interaction between customers and brands. As digital TV, email, social, mobile, location-based services, online video, and digitization of outlets/kiosks started to take hold, marketers became faced with an ever-growing number of digital touch points to manage.
In addition, marketers were faced with two very interesting trends:
1. Customer engagement in most of these digital touch points was a two-way communication between the brand and its target, either explicitly (such as social media) or implicitly (through back-end analytics and measurement).
2. Customers moved from one touch point to another as they engaged with a brand. Given the two-way communication happening at most at these touch points, this customer journey rendered the strategies implemented for the traditional purchasing funnel--one of the most beloved concepts of sales and marketing professionals--ineffective.
[Note: The social media icons in the above arrow are the Top 10 globally as of July 2014, beginning with Facebook as #1 and ending with MySpace as #10 (source: http://www.ebizmba.com/articles/social-networking-websites)]
Most marketers struggled with this multichannel, two-way engagement. Investments were prioritized to build engagement capability in each individual channel, mostly separately rather than as a part of a holistic customer experience strategy. It became increasingly more important for organizations to build attribution capability to ensure that the impact of each touch point was measured, agreed on, and understood as customers moved from one to the next during their decision-making process. Marketers started to realize that they were operating in an entirely digital world where every analog touch point had a digital footprint.
During this Second Wave, which crested with alarming speed, digital marketing came to the fore. Along with that came a plethora of point solutions that could address channel- and touch-point-specific marketing problems. Marketers wound up with a spaghetti bowl of point solutions to make sense of their customers’ digital footprint.
How do you measure across analog and digital footprints to create an increasingly clearer picture of a customer?
This is the latest and still-emerging wave, characterized by customer journey-centric digital engagement.
The goal is to measure across each touch point and channel.
As marketers started to make sense of their customers’ cross-channel journeys, they soon realized that their own channel-focused silos were getting in their way.
In addition, marketers realized that to truly provide world-class digital engagement across key customer journeys in an efficient and effective way, they would have to integrate and interact with other parts of their organizations, such as sales, finance, supply chain, production, HR, engineering, product design, etc. Everyone needs to surf together.
. . . but an enterprise transformation initiative.
Experience-driven commerce is the winning approach we see to help you differentiate and become more relevant to every customer across every channel.
These friction points are causing the Industry to transform – rapidly!