Neil Morgan, senior director of digital marketing, Adobe

Neil Morgan, senior director of digital marketing at Adobe, is helping the brand align its key business units and communicate this significant shift to a saturated marketplace. Victoria Clarke reports

There are some lucky people out there who always knew what they wanted to do. Neil Morgan, senior director of digital marketing at Adobe, is one of those people. Things did start off a bit unexpectedly, however.

In his high school years, Morgan began to pursue a career in electronics (influenced by his father’s belief it would be the ‘next big thing’), but by his own admission he was pretty poor at maths and physics, and soon came to realise electronics wasn’t for him. By chance, however, he stumbled across economics, which led him on to a business studies degree at university, and through that – into the world of marketing.

“I love marketing,” Morgan confesses. “An economist would say that economics makes the world go round, but I think marketing makes the world go round. It’s creating something from nothing.”

New direction

It’s clear Morgan’s got the marketing bug – he’s been marketing tech software for over 20 years. In his role at web analytics provider Omniture, he helped grow the brand across EMEA to become a 200-person organisation accounting for 25 per cent of global revenue. No wonder then that it became attractive to Adobe who acquired it in 2009 for an impressive $1.8 billion.

“The acquisition of Omniture was the first step on the road to doing something other than what people know the Adobe brand for,” Morgan reveals. He goes on to explain that the acquisition was part of a series of takeovers Adobe has made in recent years in order to take its business in a new direction. It is this activity that has fuelled a major overhaul of the brand’s key proposition. While up until last year the software giant was comprised of multiple business units in what was a highly fragmented market place, its latest restructure will see it streamlined into two symbiotic areas: digital media and digital marketing. Digital media encompasses the likes of Photoshop, Acrobat and Dreamweaver – products its customers, and the world at large, associate easily with the Adobe brand. Its digital marketing offering, on the other hand, is an exciting new direction – not just for Adobe, but potentially for the wider marketing landscape.

Morgan says, “In most mature software markets, you get all your software from one provider (e.g. Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc, from Microsoft Office). But it’s not happening in marketing yet. Marketing is the last bastion of software consolidation.”

He elaborates by explaining how most B2B marketers will currently be using a plethora of systems and solutions but none of which necessarily tie in to one another – a database management system, a campaign management system, a lead nurturing system and Salesforce, and that’s just marketing. Digital marketing, he says, is even worse, with the likes of content management, web analytics and search marketing optimisation to also contend with.

“Adobe’s focus is to become a hub to tie all these things together,” Morgan explains. “The idea behind the new vision is we’re known for digital media but we want to be the leader in digital marketing. We want to make Adobe synonymous with digital marketing – in a way that no one has done before.”

Morgan acknowledges the likes of IBM and Google will no doubt also try to accomplish this challenge, but he says Adobe’s unique edge is that the brand has been focused on marketers for 30 years.

“IBM has always been focused on IT. Google is focused on digital marketing, but you can’t easily create content with it. Plus, Google is trying to convince marketers to spend their ad budgets with it. If it shows brands data about what’s working, it’ll probably be just search stuff. Adobe, on the other hand, is agnostic; we’ll give marketers an independent view of what’s working where.”

Great expectations

Adobe’s ambitious plans to become a “new animal” as Morgan puts it, are comprised of four pillars – brand awareness, community development, thought leadership and demand generation. In terms of raising brand awareness, the latest ‘Adobe &…’ campaign aims to address this issue. Morgan says it’s the first brand campaign in the UK “in as long as anyone can remember”, and explains it will run across online, print, mobile and tablet, social media and PR. The idea behind the ‘ampersand’ campaign is to highlight how Adobe and innovation or a customer testimonial builds on the brand’s global marketing proposition. The UK execution of the campaign launched with ‘Adobe & Social’ in March and tapped into the topical issue of demonstrating the business impact of social media.

The other three pillars behind the brand alignment are being addressed through social media activity, live ‘tweet-ups’ and other face-to-face events, as well as a series of industry-focused thought leadership reports to generate discussion among Adobe’s key audience.

Interesting that Morgan’s vision of the future of Adobe is animal-like. While the brand has never been known for an aggressive approach to marketing, it is certainly hungry for a bigger bite of the digital marketing pie. And if animal instincts are anything to go by, the brand’s sniffed out a smart move in aligning its business units.

Morgan’s top tips on successful brand alignment

1. Have a vision. Brands are identified by more than just a logo. Having a clear vision for your business and your brand is fundamental; both to differentiate it from competitors and to make sure the true values of the company are reflected.

2. Get support from the top. It’s important that leaders of the business embrace the brand identity, not only in marketing, but across all functions and empower employees to be brand advocates.

3. Ensure 360-degree communications. It’s essential the company lives and breathes the brand values and vision. It needs to be communicated across all touchpoints and channels of the company, from sales and marketing to channel and customer support.

4. Measure your success. Monitoring how the brand is perceived and aligned to the vision allows you to understand how successful you are and what needs to be done.

 

 



 

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