It seems everyone wants to be in the experience business these days, whether you’re selling bottles of sugared water, body lotion, education or sports. At the Adobe Symposium, held in Singapore this week, they call themselves experience makers.
As I listened to speaker after speaker talk about how they are creating experiences around their products and services, I couldn’t help but reflect that at least, in this regard, travel is ahead of the game. Travel has been creating experiences since time immemorial, just that perhaps we didn’t always call it that but now that we have Airbnb Experiences and TripAdvisor adding the word to its tours & activities business, it too has become the IT word in travel.
The difference is, this is about experiences that are delivered by technology – mobility, big data and cloud – so that the real and virtual world become one which is already happening as far as we, customers are concerned.
Taj Hotels and Singapore Airlines were cited as two travel brands that had used technology successfully to create seamless customer journeys – but clearly there’s a long way to go even for both companies because the travel journey is so fragmented. But at the same time, there are lessons traditional travel brands can take from other industries as they too transform to survive.
On a panel, Johnson & Johnson’s Richa Goswami, whose job title has changed from chief digital officer to total brand experience officer for APAC, said that if you look at the world’s top three most valuable brands – Apple, Amazon and Alphabet – “two of them do not have products, it’s all about experiences and survival.”
Opening the symposium, attended by about 1,200 marketers and designers eager to learn what’s new in the Adobe world, EVP & GM of Digital Experience, Brad Rencher, said, “People buy experiences, not products. Make experiences your business.”
Citing a new study it commissioned (see below to download the study), he said companies that invested in customer experience see 36% faster revenue growth rates and 16x customer lifetime value – however only 29% of brands in APAC are doing so.
Customer experience is everyone’s business, and does not sit in any one department, and there needs to be an alignment between marketing and IT, he said. Above all, talent needs a mindset change – from being experience thinkers to experience makers.
Coca-Cola: Maybe we can change the real thing
Mariano Bosaz: “How can we use technology to connect romantic reality with the reality?”
Mariano Bosaz, global senior digital director, Coca-Cola, now based in Shanghai after joining the conglomerate 12 years ago, said the biggest task ahead of the company that sells 1.9 billion beverages a day in more than 200 markets and reaches 1.5b consumers every week is “scale and being personal”.
“How do we use technology to bring the two together – the romantic reality and the reality? Customers cannot tell the difference between real and virtual and the Internet is becoming like electricity.”
From its early goal of being “within arm’s reach of desire”, Bosaz said Coca-Cola is now operating in a digital world that’s unknown. “How do we connect to customers in a different and personal way beyond the 3-second video? People give their data in exchange for personalization, after all.”
He listed four areas in which Coca-Cola is working on.
- Experiences – “how do we change the experience when customers touch our product?”
- Operational – “how do we change operations to change speed to market?”
- Business – “how do we disrupt ourselves before others do it?”
- Culture – “This is one of the hardest things to do for any company. We are asking our teams who are experts in touching hearts to think about behavior in a different way, to go beyond story telling and 3 second videos.”
From its 1915 creative brief which called for “a bottle that could be recognised when broken on the ground or by touch in the dark”, Coca-Cola is personalising cans and using its labels to transmit real-time consumer messages or to place songs.
During the Trump-Kim Peace Summit in Singapore, it designed a new logo, blending the word “Coca” with the word “Cola” in Korean, and called for “peace, hope and understanding”. 
From one of its most popular slogans, “It’s The Real Thing”, Bosaz said, “Maybe we can beat the real thing.” For example, it’s using Augmented Reality on its cans.
And because it receives over 20,000 pieces of content everyday, it decided to invite its customers to reimagine the experience of the Special Olympics Tokyo in 2020 and received millions of submissions.
ONE Championship: Chasing numbers is a big trap, telling stories was the magic bullet
Chatri: “In digital marketing, qualitative drives quantitative. You can get so caught up analyzing numbers that you forget what drives people.”
Entrepreneur and martial artist, Chatri Sityodtong, who’s built up ONE Championship into Asia’s largest sports media property with a global broadcast of over 1b homes in more than 118 countries, said the turning point in his business came in 2014, three years after founding, when he switched from selling attributes and chasing numbers to telling stories of its martial artists champions.
Filipino mixed martial artist Eduard Folayang (pictured), for example, who came from a poverty-stricken family in Baguio, Philippines, and fought his way to the top of wushu championships. “Stories like his are inspiring,” said the half-Thai, half-Japanese “third most powerful sports person in Asia” (FOX Sports).
“For the first three years, we only cared about numbers, chasing numbers – that’s a big trap. In digital marketing, qualitative drives quantitative. You can get so caught up analyzing numbers that you forget what drives people.”
The three pillars of ONE Championship, which is backed by Sequoia Capital and Temasek Holdings with US$100 million in total capital as of 2017, are “values, heroes, stories”.
“Values unite, heroes inspire, stories are unforgettable,” he said.
Founder and Chairman of Evolve MMA, a chain of martial arts academies in Asia, Chatri said he started ONE Championship because “Asia’s sports media ecosystem lags behind the US and Europe”, yet martial arts’ home is in Asia and the market opportunity is immense.
Download the Adobe study here: The Business Impact of Investing in Customer Experience – A Spotlight On Asia Pacific