Consumers continue to demand personalized experiences that deliver on their needs and preferences. Driven by key industry changes, this mandate is more important than ever.

Cookies are crumbling

The rise of the “platform economy” is exponentially increasing the life time value of customers and a cookie-less world is going to make targeting more challenging. Consumer privacy regulations are also continuing to challenge the ability for brands to drive marketing ROI. We think the battle ground for consumer mindshare will accelerate its shift from personalizing media platforms, to personalizing a brand’s customer experience platforms.  

Investment priorities are shifting

There’s a persuasive case for CMOs to start rethinking how they deploy their working dollars to drive ROI. There is also plenty of evidence to demonstrate how investing in the improvement of holistic customer experience delivers better ROI than investing in low performing media or advertising outlets. Organizations that have elevated the customer experience transformation to a formal business priority report a 3x higher revenue growth.  

Synchronization is what matters 

Driving personalized customer experiences is not a strategic challenge, it’s an operational challenge that brands have struggled to address. It requires process, data and technology synchronization and integration across the entire value chain — marketing, sales, manufacturing, logistics, finance and more. Fundamentally, companies lack the proper operating model that cuts across, and integrates across, enterprise functions in order to deliver customer personalization at scale.     

Implementing enterprise-wide customer experience 

We believe CMO’s must rise to own the enterprise-wide customer experience and not just the omni channel communication engagement. Key enabling pillars must be implemented to enable a personalization operating model within companies. This includes:  

• Moving customer ownership out of the front office and into the back office where it is a business operations priority and focus for every employee
• Creating a unique and persistent customer ID across the enterprise including demand platforms, supply chain and finance 
• Embracing new ways of working including agile and cross-functional teams 
• Integrating technology across platforms and business units
• Maximizing the value of analytics to drive personalization, automate processes and uncover deeper customer insights visible to all  

Next steps

In this experience era, organizations must pivot from one-to-one messaging to one-to-one experiences. They must shift from media outlets, to experience platforms. And they must structure operations to move from a focus on customer acquisition, to a strategy around lifetime-value growth. In this new world, companies and CMOs will come to rely  not only advertising agencies, but on a new breed of strategic partners to help them navigate new personalization imperatives. Strategic partners that can support the synthesizing of design, analytics, data, complex technology integration and business-transformation capabilities to drive industry-transforming customer experiences. They will use their experience and capabilities to unite organizations behind this collective effort.

IBM combines experience design, data and analytics and platform-implementation capabilities with Adobe Experience Platform and Adobe Experience Cloud solutions.

Learn more about the IBM and Adobe strategic alliance