Adobe Summit has come and gone and if there was one big messaging push it was "marketing beyond marketing". How can marketing be beyond itself you say? Well that's a good question. What Adobe had to say was marketing is your product. So if marketing is your product, then as marketers we have to think beyond what we have traditionally thought of as marketing.
I love going to conferences with great speakers and company examples of excellence because it really gets your mind flowing. Of course Adobe is a company that wants to sell you their products in the end, but I truly believe they want marketing to advance regardless if they are your solution choice. They want to be thought leaders in the space, which in turns sells you more products. Which oh by the way, is an example of Adobe marketing beyond marketing.
Now as hokey as these tailgates can be, I believe Adobe is out in front of what lies ahead for digital marketing tools. They want to enable that lifecycle approach to marketing that has only been a tagline. To manage the customer experience from beginning to end and change the behavior of your customer by being relevant in the content that is provided takes marketing to a whole new level.
But marketing has to go beyond marketing in organizations. Up until now the brand marketer has been able to infiltrate the C-suite, but it is the age of the digital marketer and Brand is just one piece of the marketing puzzle. Brand focused CMO's tend to be advertising first and lack execution around them. They also tend to defend the brand in strategic meetings instead of evolving the brand around the latest trends, whether they be digital trends or customer related trends.
Digital marketers have found the C-suite title, with the Chief Customer Officer, but I believe this is just a knee-jerk reaction to an identified problem. The C-suite doesn't necessarily need to get larger, the role of the CMO must transform. The CMO must be more of a generalist, someone that understands brand value and developing brands, but they must also be tech savvy and have an extreme customer focus. CMO's can no longer be the spend first and advertising will fix everything type of leaders from the past, CMO's need to be savvy marketers with an eye on tailoring their marketing spend to better reach the customers when they want to be reached with an experience that matters. An ad being fed that promotes awareness does not cut it anymore.
When your message is omnipresent in multiple channels when your customer wants it to be there, marketing has truly gone beyond marketing. We are a long way from that reality, but the framework is being laid which will allow marketers to deliver meaningful content when it matters most. It's cheesy, yet high concept at the same time, which is why I don't think many people in the audience understood what Adobe was trying to say. I had a leader who taught me you have to say something seven times in seven different ways for people to understand what you were really saying, well this is one time in one way, so I can't wait to hear or see the next articulation of this concept.