This week at the Adobe Digital Marketing Summit  in Salt Lake City, Adobe and SAP announced a partnership  in which SAP will resell the Adobe Marketing Cloud with SAP HANA and the hybris Commerce Suite to support omni-channel marketing and eCommerce. Plenty has been written about each of these products, so we won’t go into detail here. The partnership announcement represents another step towards what Aberdeen calls Just-in-Time marketing. Just-in-Time marketing, a play on the notion of Just-in-Time or Lead manufacturing, is the notion that marketing must become responsive to the needs – and behavior – of buyers (rather than create an “inventory” of batch and blast responses). This announcement represents a combination of an analytical foundation with marketing execution across channels. In Aberdeen’s September 2013 report “Building the Analytical Infrastructure for Just-in-Time Marketing” (Aberdeen’s research is available free of charge; registration required)  outlines the three key elements of just-in-time marketing:
  • Analytical buyer model — An analytical or predictive buyer model is the  foundation of just-in-time marketing. It provides the instruction manual from which the campaign is assembled.
  • Signal analysis — Aberdeen’s April 2013 report Towards Segments of One: Predictive Analytics for Marketing Delivers the Future of Offer Management, Today indicates that top-performing firms are more likely to incorporate real-time behavioral signals across customer touch points into marketing analytics models. Additionally, new programmatic marketing and audience targeting offerings allow firms to precisely target “look alike” prospects in the process of making buying decisions on the web.
  • Dynamic content assembly — Dynamic campaigns require dynamic content. Firms need to have the right digital asset management infrastructure in place that allows for responsive content placement independent of channel (e.g., images and copy are optimized for email versus mobile delivery).

But just like technology partnerships, success often (always?) comes back to execution. The vision of just-in-time marketing is an extension of a one-to-one marketing concept being discussed for over a decade. The report mentioned above goes on to discuss the capabilities top-performing companies are using to execute on this vision, from data integration and preparation to model development and self-service deployment.