June 23, 2015

Marketing Beyond Marketing

Jamie Brighton, Strategic Marketing EMEA at Adobe Marketing Cloud explains why customer experience is increasingly synonymous with your brand

“The nature of marketing has exploded from an ancillary communications function to the Grand Central Station of customer experience.” 
Scott Brinker, Chief Marketing Technologist.com

As customer expectations evolve, customer experience is becoming increasingly synonymous with your brand—the experience is the brand.

Modern organisations are placing marketing at the centre of the customer experience and understanding that there are synergies, savings and ultimately customer benefits from doing so. Product, services and pricing are no longer as important as customer experience as a key differentiator.

This transformation in the way we engage customers is driving a need for digital transformation, not only in terms of marketing technology, but also in the skills we need as marketers, and the processes that we must implement in order to succeed. And ultimately we need to answer the question: How do we use technology to deliver experiences that are both connected and consistent?

One answer to this is that marketing needs to move beyond marketing—marketing’s role is expanding as it moves closer to the core of the company. Increasingly, every department has a role in delivering brand-building experiences. With this new responsibility comes the need to connect previously siloed departments and technology investments and ensure that the whole organisation understands and believes in your shared goals.

If this seems daunting, it needn’t be. Many companies have started making great strides in the right direction and the goal of the ‘Marketing Beyond Marketing’ track at the Figaro Digital Marketing Conference is to explore the lessons they’ve already started to learn. 

We’ll hear from a number of national and international brands about their approach to putting the customer at the centre of their marketing and the impact this has had on their business. We’ll also learn about the opportunities that they’ve uncovered and the challenges they’ve had to overcome along the way, including getting internal buy-in to what can mean major changes to a company’s approach to dealing with their most important asset: customers.

Partnerships with external agencies and third parties are often an important enabler of digital transformation, where you may not have the skills or resources in-house to cover all of the disciplines necessary to succeed. The track will also include the thoughts and experience of some of the key agencies and integrators that are helping organisations move their marketing forward.

The sessions in the track will be a mixture of best practice and case studies and we’d like to encourage you to interact with the presenters and ask as many questions as possible—you’ll be able to do this via an app or at the end of each presentation directly to the presenters.

I look forward to hearing the great lineup of presenters that we have for you, hosting the track, and more importantly, meeting other digital marketers and hearing first hand their experiences on the day.