Adobe Summit 2019 Super Session - Retail

Now I want to talk a little bit about where we started. We started where IT ran the website, but we had old tools and older processes that didn’t match and help us to keep up. So we had long lead times for our projects, for minor enhancements. We needed a developer to do content changes, things like that. Sound familiar a little bit? We have multiple brands within our organization, multiple regions as well. They all have their own agencies. We had multiple processes for even website changes.

Our abilities to get in line, the funding to do it, it varied by brand. And then the other thing, we outsourced a lot of our knowledge in digital. We didn’t have that core competency internal so that we could be directive. We could make the decisions with our brands. Now what did we change? Okay, we collect data from all of our consumers. We had it sitting in various places and we needed to pull that in. We needed to know what we had. We needed to understand our consumers, and we needed to be able to rely on that data as a single source of truth. Collecting data is great, but if you’re not going to use it why spend the money collecting it. We wanted this to be able to be used in a very interactive way. We were able to create visually appealing dashboards that our brand teams could use that actually gave us insights and told us what was going on so we could make real-time decisions in our marketing efforts. The other is people. Okay, tools will only get you so far. Processes will only get you so far. You’ve got to complete that with people and expertise, and so we started to embed that expertise within our brand teams. So each brand had a digital marketing manager. They were the point person for digital. Now we started that very centralized within the DCOE, and then we dispersed it back out into the brands. Because we didn’t want to take over and just have another IT organization to execute and do those things. We wanted to raise the digital maturity of each of our brands and raise the organizational IQ in digital up. Our marketing programs used to go, I’ve got this great idea. I’m going to execute this. I’m going to do creative, and then I’m going to figure out a way to measure it so that I can say it was a success later.

We decided to flip that on its head. So now we’re looking at data before all of that starts in the initial. And we’re going it with our agencies, with our IT organization, with the DCOE and brand all together. So that we can see what customer do we need to hit? What are our goals? What are we trying to achieve, or what problem are we trying to solve? And then, we already know how we’re going to measure or what we’re going to measure because we have already figured that out.

Okay, within the first year that we started to make impact on the site we cut that time from months to days or hours. We employed the tools that Adobe had, brought them in and we enabled our brand marketers to make these changes on the information that they were accountable for in the first place, okay? So it’s all about enablement. Now we have a better relationship with our IT department then we’ve ever had, and that continues to grow. We’re all focusing on the consumer, and what is the impact to the consumer. That helps the conversation to be less about control and more about what problem do we need to solve and what does our end consumer need. Now we had, over the last year, we’ve had multiple agencies including the digital strategy group from Adobe come in and help us with our organization. We talked about different operational models. For us the DCOE and having a kind of a centralized governance model around our digital strategy and employing some similarities across the organization was the most beneficial for us, okay. It helps us to have a view into all the data and all the processes that we employ in partnership with our brands and our IT department.

Now this model kind of shows the path that we started on and where we want it to end up. And our goal is to have embedded digital natives within the organization. Not just in the DCOE, but in our IT departments and in our brand for them to have that expertise and building up those little communities of practice that I’ll show you in just a minute to really raise the entire organizations digital maturity.

These communities of practice we’ve created in these certain areas, and we’re really trying to expand and build these out. So that we can have people with deep expertise helping those that are just getting their feet wet so to speak. And helping to get that depth of digital IQ. And these are the areas where we’ve decided to start. These are areas where we have some of that expertise in house and we’re driving in these spaces. So what do you do? First, I mentioned this before, start with what you have. If you don’t evaluate where you are, what data do you have available, what decisions can you make you’ll never get started. Don’t wait til it’s perfect. Your perfect plan is going to evolve. It’s going to be different four or five months from now, and you have to understand that that is a continuous evolution it’s not a one and done experience. Own your data. Know what you have, have it be reliable. If you can’t see it and you can’t measure it how are you supposed to know if you’re winning or losing. We can’t fix what we don’t know.

And lastly, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Talk to people who have done it. Network. Identify. We’re lucky, we had awesome agencies that are helping us. Okay, we have partners like Adobe that is helping us.

Listen to them, they have a lot of clients. Their benefit is that repeat business, just like your consumers that are purchasing things from you, you want that repeat business, so do they. -