Beyond Marketing: Know Your Customer

Last week, Adobe unexpectedly ended support for one of their core Creative Cloud apps. Naturally, this resulted in a fierce backlash from users of the affected product, and a partial climbdown. Instead, the app will be placed in maintenance mode, meaning support will continue even if no new features are to be added. Now, I’ve never used Adobe Animate, the app in question. It’s unlikely I ever will. However, the app is an integral part of the production workflows at several leading 2D animation studios. Given the importance of professional creators to Adobe’s business, it’s surprising that they deprecated Animate at all. From an outsider’s perspective, the entire saga looks like an entirely avoidable mistake. However, it does highlight a critical weakness in Adobe’s corporate strategy, with lessons for marketers everywhere.

Divided Focus

At the heart of the problem is Adobe’s sprawling product portfolio. Professional creators are Adobe’s core market. However, Creative Cloud is a mature product and an industry standard. From a strategic perspective, there is very little revenue growth to be obtained from improving the likes of Animate or InDesign. Adobe's consumer marketing focuses on Document Cloud instead, but Acrobat is also a legacy product that few people like using. For that reason, Adobe’s corporate focus has been on developing Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) and the broader portfolio of marketing applications. Big money acquisitions, such as their 2018 purchases of Marketo and Magento, have tended to be within the martech space.

In the last 3 years, AI has become another focus. Much of the narrative around Generative AI has focused on the technology’s impact on the creative professions. That directly affects Adobe’s core market. Adobe’s share price has slumped as a result. The threat is real, albeit overhyped. Some game studios are using the technology to reduce costs, while image generators such as MidJourney and Google Nano Banana are being used by consumers and marketers for ad hoc image creation. To combat this threat, the Creative Cloud team have shifted their resouces to the Firefly image generator and a suite of AI asset management tools.

The focus on marketing technology has definitely paid off. AEM has become highly popular among enterprise marketing teams and is widely used. The rest of the Adobe Experience stack has benefited as a result. The likes of Adobe Analytics are seeing growing market share among large enterprises as well, despite being substantially more expensive than competing products. However, Adobe’s core creative customers have been neglected. As a consequence, many of the lesser used applications in Creative Cloud have seen minimal updates, ultimately resulting in last week’s deprecation announcement for Animate - presumably so that developer resources could be shifted to building out AI products within Creative Cloud.

Know Your Customer

Yet the decision to cancel Animate rested on false assumptions, without considering the ultimate customer impact. Adobe made the decision based on usage data and product positioning. They didn’t look at the list of companies actively using the product, potentially because key decision makers didn’t have access to that information. Adobe Animate is a 2015 rebrand of the old Adobe Flash platform. Flash was primarily intended for multimedia web applications, and was primarily associated with hobbyists and small scale developers. The widespread usage within animation studios was an unexpected byproduct of its prominence during the early days of the web.

Failing to understand exactly who uses Animate is dangerous for Adobe. Creators use Adobe because their products are ubiquitous and fully featured. The company is a reliable partner to professional studios, whose products have a long history and a vast user base. As a result, it is easy to find talented creative professionals with the right skills for any type of production. Sure, open source alternatives do exist in many creative sectors, and are used for award winning releases. But these alternatives mostly lack the enterprise support and commercial backing expected from Adobe products. Such intangibles do matter.

The Importance of Trust

No one enjoys dealing with Adobe, the company, especially after the original controversial switch to a subscription model. However, they are the type of solid and reliable enterprise software company that studios are willing to build their business around. Arbitrary and unexpected product deprecations are a very quick and easy way to shed that reputation. Studios plan in multi-year cycles. They need to be able to finish a production using the same tools that they began it with. Long term product support is critical to the Adobe user base. Any hint of backsliding on support timelines will lead to studios re-evaluating their production pipelines.

Customer trust is king in any business. At enterprise scale, it’s especially important. Businesses want partners invested in mutual success, not self-interested suppliers. That requires a first-class customer experience and a solid brand reputation. Yet building a brand takes time. Destroying a brand can happen in an instant. That’s why sales and marketing are essential to current and future success. As the voice of the customer, they are responsible for communicating customer needs to the boardroom. Engineers often resent marketing involvement in product development, yet without marketing, they can lose sight of who their customers actually are. Without marketing, there are no customers at all.

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