The terms business to business (B2B) and business to consumer (B2C) will eventually die out as marketers shift from focusing on the target audience, to the actual overall experience, according to software giant Adobe.
Suresh Vittal, VP of the firm’s experience cloud platform and products, told media at a briefing ahead of the Adobe Summit in Las Vegas that while there are different layers to B2B practices that B2C may not have, the “experience” of “everything” is the ultimate commonality that should prevail.
“We think this arbitrary line between thinking about B2B and B2C is gradually fading away,” Vittal says.
“We think the whole goal of experience delivery and personalisation is universal whether you are B2B or B2C and that is why we are thinking about this as a ‘business to everything’ (B2E).”
Adobe touts B2E as being business to everything, everyone and everywhere – with experience being the core.
From work flow, customer insights and campaign planning to studying of the customer journey, Vittal says there are benefits of bringing strategies used in B2B that would work well in B2C, and vice versa.
“It’s hard to differentiate constantly as more and more brands are marketing to both - they are talking to businesses and they are talking to consumers at the same time,” Vittal says.
“If you think about business buyers, the expectation of the experience they get is at the same level as they get from brands that sell to them as consumers.”
Suresh Vittal
From being able to research a product to making an informed buying decision through to having good customer support and aftercare, he says both sectors now need to be on par.
"Experience" has been a popular word in the martech vernacular with many latching onto this to help cut through the sea of tools and jargon which can confuse marketers.
The launch of "clouds" is also a popular terminology with Salesforce, Oracle, Adobe and the now Adobe-owned Marketo all promoting their various cloud offerings to marketers in the throes of updating their tech stacks.
Within Adobe’s Experience Cloud alone sits four other clouds; the Advertising Cloud (DSP, search, TV, creative), the Analytics Cloud, the Marketing Cloud (Marketo and Target etc) and a new cloud set to be announced at the conference.
On the question of whether marketers really understand it all, Vittal says “yes they do understand”, with the average customer using two clouds and the top 100 customers using three clouds.
In October last year Adobe entered into a definitive agreement to acquire B2B cloud-based marketing platform Marketo for $US4.75 billion. See the story here.
AdNews is attending the summit as a guest of Adobe.
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