For who don't have time to read, here is a fast-track summary of this Digital Trends 2022 study.
My analysis of the 2022 Adobe and Econsultancy digital trends study
There is evidence of a digital acceleration driven by the Covid crisis;
In the face of the urgent need to respond to this need for digitisation, not all companies are equal and only a third of them feel relatively comfortable with this change (“leaders”);
The main challenges revolve around data but also customer knowledge and organisational issues (and especially the ability to work and collaborate across the organisation);
All businesses grapple with the understanding of customer insights and motivations. There is a serious concern regarding the listening ability of companies;
There are still doubts as to whether sufficient budgets and effective skills development plans are in place;
To sum up, there are encouraging signs of business evolution but challenges that remain important on internal collaboration in a multi-channel and complex environment where organisational and IT silos represent a major obstacle.
Detailed analysis of the Adobe/E-consultancy 2022 digital trends study
Here is my detailed analysis, using the figures from the study.
Let’s start with some methodological notes. This is a truly impressive study as Adobe and Econsultancy surveyed around 10,000 people between November 2021 and January 2022, of which around 6,600 came from Adobe’s qualified databases with a supplement made of a panel of participants. Hence a total of 9,455 responses, 70% of which approximately are marketers.
This panel of respondents is divided between decision makers (28%) and practitioners (72%). The study described the various respondent companies as leaders, mainstream or laggards.
Mainstream businesses make up the overwhelming majority (60%) of these respondents. Leaders represent about a third of them. What we are measuring here is the impact of the crisis on innovation and digital transformation of organisations in terms of customer experience.
The MOPI index to measure the performance of marketing organizations
This ranking is made possible by an index calculation (MOPI or Marketing Organisation Performance Index) is calculated from a scale of 1 to 10 spread over 5 different measures:
Agility to respond to innovations and challenges
Innovativeness
Collaboration with IT
skills development and training
Diversity and inclusivity
Forty-three percent of the respondents to this survey are American, 39% European and 15% are from Asia Pacific. The survey was made available to respondents in several languages: English, French, German and Chinese.
The pandemic has sped up ongoing Changes
The Covid crisis has accelerated the speed of change and digitisation of businesses. Everyone had noticed this intuitively. The pandemic did not really initiate this change, as Ford’s Head of Customer Engagement, Claire Hepworth, says.
By confining consumers, and sellers, to their homes, and in part continuing to do so at the moment, Covid has contributed to the acceleration of the use of digital by consumers.
The impact on the CX is also quite significant. When the so-called practitioners (based on approximately 3,000 respondents) were asked if they had seen an influx of consumers on digital channels, 75% said yes for returning customers and 72% for new ones.
Moreover, something we had also noticed, intuitively, the change in customer journeys because of the impossibility of going to the local store. The pandemic therefore accelerated changes that were already underway.
With this in mind, what is preventing marketing or customer experience departments from responding more suitably to these organisational and marketing changes? Adobe and Econsultancy assigned the respondents to this study to three different buckets 1) Leaders 2) Mainstream and 3) Laggards.
To simplify the reading of the above graph, we have grouped the 3 most important scores for each category:
Leaders first: organisations that address new challenges properly are those that have managed to get the different organisational silos to work together. Mind you, we aren’t saying you can do away with silos, as a matter of fact, you can’t. We encourage ‘silo busters’ to get people to work in a collaborative manner, and that is a very different kettle of fish. In this category, Adobe witnessed some workflow issues (this makes sense, working cross-organisationally also means sharing responsibilities, putting workflows together that extend from one end of the organisation to the other and inevitably, this poses challenges for 30% or so of the leaders). And finally, integration between technological systems. It’s not just in organisations that we have silos. In information systems too.
For those in the middle of the pack (called “mainstream”), there is the same problem of integration between information systems, followed very closely by workflow issues and 3 criteria at the same level: lack of innovation, lack of customer knowledge and poor data quality. And it is clear that this is one of the most important sources of irritation. Poor data quality is correlated with poor customer knowledge, this is self-explanatory. When you work with huge numbers of customers, you can’t know them all personally, so you have to organise your data to overcome this issue.
As for the “laggards”, apart from the age-old problems of integration between systems, there is the thorny issue of digital skills (a major concern at the moment) and the lack of innovation.
Now that we have understood the challenges businesses are facing, let’s describe what makes leaders stand out from the crowd. Naturally, as stated earlier, being able to overcome internal silos and work across the organisation is one their main characteristics.
Then one finds “obtaining more reliable data” that provides more plausible customer insights. This is what does improve customer knowledge, which ensures that customers are conveniently acknowledged and get proper service across all channels.
Then the final point is talent sourcing and skills development. The great resignation isn’t making things easy for those businesses that want to hire people with the skills that digitisation requires. As a result, putting your trust into your existing employees and offering them proper digital training isn’t an option.
For those who want to move into digital, there will be many opportunities, because the need for resources and skills in this area is formidable.
Let’s look at the budgets next. Here I must admit that I was a little surprised. Challenges due to the sheer acceleration of digitisation are enormous and companies must address such challenges, particularly in terms of training and skills.
All of this, without exaggeration, will require bigger budgets not only regarding technology, but also for the women and men who make such technology work.
The figures provided by the survey are rather surprising, however, since a significant proportion of respondents report stagnating or decreasing budgets.
I put this down to the crisis, but one will have to pay attention to this moving forward, because one will have to make up for the time that has been lost now in the next two to three years, be it in IT or with the acquisition or evolution of new digital skills, and that won’t be easy.
How do respondents rate their marketing organisations? The results are not very encouraging (77% are deemed negative or average).
Moving from human resource management to true talent development is a major challenge for organisations that have lost this habit through the many economic crises that have occurred since the first oil shock (my old boss even used to call HR “Human Remains” and I agree that this isn’t very flattering).
The respondents’ assessments of customer knowledge, on the other hand, is quite confusing. Real-time market researchThere are many methods for conducting market studies in B2B like quantitative and qualitative survey... technology is so pervasive and so easy to deploy (I even was one of the pioneers of CAWI over twenty years ago) that claiming not to understand your customers’ motivations for purchaseThe B2B purchasing process is the result of a long life cycle often linked to a contract as there ar... or what friction points there are in your customer journey sounds completely surreal to me.
Customer experience is on everybody’s lips. Yet, there is certainly a lot of work to be done to move from lip service to proper field implementation.
To succeed, and this is the final point of this study, with digitisation as well as overcome CX challenges in a multi-channel world, collaboration between IT and marketing is crucial. Here we notice that IT representatives are well aware of the importance of the role of marketing, and this is very good news.
We will also see that decision-makers know how crucial such collaboration is in order to overcome the many challenges of digitisation.
While there is still much to be done to improve the level of understanding and cooperation between these two populations, these results are largely encouraging.
Download the presentation that fuelled this analysis
(Source: Yann Gourvennec - CEO & Founder at Visionary Marketing - He is a speaker and author of 6 books. )
One of the difficulty to approach Vietnam customer is how to approach urban and rural area in Vietnam. The population of two biggest cities, HCM and Hanoi, only account for less than 20M, and the rest of 70 million lives in the other areas. We conducted the consumer survey in HCM and Kien Giang, as the representative of rural area, in order to understand the difference between urban and rural.
Firstly, when we compare the product ownership in urban and rural area, we see some differences. When it comes to home appliances, both cities have high penetrations of TV and refrigerator, while only 24% have washing machine and 17% owns air-con in rural area. (Half of TV ownership in rural are CRT TV, though). Same to IT devices, the penetration of smartphone in rural are more than 90%. On the other hand, only 23% owns notebook and 19% have desktop. Because of that, most internet connections in rural are from smartphone.
The activities with smartphone in rural area is quite concentrated. They mainly spend social, messaging, YouTube, and photo taking and nothing else. People in rural area spend hours in internet, mainly from WIFI, but what they do are always the same, like routine.
Social is one of the biggest item for their activity but there are one significant differences between urban and rural. In rural area, Zalo is more popular than Facebook. They prefer to communicate in smaller circle and messaging feature of Zalo suits their demand more. 68% in rural area prefers Zalo to Facebook Messenger. It is generally said that TV is more effective in rural area. It is worth noticing, though, that they spend as many hours in YouTube as TV. The youth spend more time in YouTube while those who are above in 30 years old spend more time in TV. 60% of the youth spend one hour and more on YouTube daily while 43% of the elderly spend 2 hours and more on TV. With regard to YouTube, we should pay attention to the fact that kids also spend 2.2 hours daily. 91% access internet from smartphone and 94% spend YouTube. YouTube is the king for the kids.
Where do they buy products? In Kien Giang, there is no convenience store and only 3 supermarkets. (HCM has nearly 1000 convenience store and 100 super market). Their shopping are mainly from wet market. 75% of HCM buys food & beverages at supermarket, whereas 88% of Kien Giang does that at wet market. So the selections of the products are quite limited compared with those in HCM.
However, online shopping usage is still limited. No more than 17% of them use online shopping while the number in HCM is 70%. The main popular category is fashion and the motivation is the product variety, not the pricing. There are increasing demand of those who sells/buys products over Zalo in rural area.
(Source: https://asiaplus.tumblr.com )
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