 who believes and ensures that customer experience is a core business ideology at the heart of the brand. Please welcome Mr. Nicholas Contraplus of Marketing Adobe DX Commercial, who's speaking on the topic brand utility, the core of brand purpose to deliver exceptional customer experience. Joining us live from Singapore is Mr. Nicholas. Hi Nicholas, over to you. Good evening. Good evening and thank you for that welcome. I love your energy and passion there. So very good job. Let me just get my screen shared for you and you let me know once my deck, well, we're having a slight technical issue here. Just give me one second. Okay, bear with me. Sorry about this, everyone. I'm having to let's see if this works now. Are you able to see my desktop? Yes, I can see. Are you also seeing the slides or are you seeing the notes as well? I'm seeing the slides only right now. Only the slides. So you're not seeing my speaker notes as well. Okay, great. Awesome. Excellent. Just let me know if there's any issues with the slides as I get going. Sorry about that. The joys of virtual presentations. So off we go. I'm here to talk about a topic I'm deeply passionate about. It's going to be a quick fire talk. I'm going to try to make up some of the time we just lost, but as I said, this is going to be a topic I'm very passionate about. We're going to talk about brand purpose and brand utility. I've always been passionate about customer experience as a marketer, but I'm also passionate about other things. Of course, my family is one of the things I have a deep passion for because they are really ultimately what my life revolves around outside of work. But it wasn't always that way. I also was someone who traveled extensively from a young age. I left, actually, Australia when I was in my 20s and took off and backpacked around the world and saw all of the things that had to offer. But then at some point, I met my beautiful wife and then we decided to get married and then I became a husband and a father, which has given me a great satisfaction. And now I really know what my purpose is. That really is ultimately to try to be the best dad and husband I can be to my kids and to my wife. For me, to be happy ultimately and to achieve something in this world, everyone must cultivate a great sense of satisfaction. I deeply believe that. And ultimately, we've got to be passionate about what we do and ultimately you can't do that without really having a clear purpose in my opinion. And that's going to be the cut and thrust of my talk today. This really ultimately gives us grounding and direction and satisfaction. And ultimately, purpose is practical and doable. For me, my purpose ultimately is, as I said, to serve my family. But in order to do that, I also need to understand them. I need to see them as individuals. These are my two boys, Yilan on the left, Sush on the right. Both are very different. Yilan loves throwing himself off high places. Parkour, he's a crazy kid. He's very physical. My eldest is more of a computer guy. He likes reading, et cetera. So they're very different. My approach to them is very different. I don't use a one size fits all approach when it comes to my kids. And ultimately, this is a key message I want to deliver when we think about that in terms of our businesses. We need to think about our customers as being obviously uniquely different. And really, some people might think this idea or this notion of purpose is a luxury. But it really isn't. It's quite a foundational pillar for your businesses. And ultimately, purpose, though, it really shouldn't be seen as about saving the world. And I've seen this become quite a prevalent approach to a lot of brands when they embrace this idea of purpose. They start anchoring it against maybe some social issues out there. Ultimately, it really shouldn't be about promoting your brand. The consumers and customers can see through inauthenticity. This is a great example where Pipsy had embraced a topic and then ultimately got a lot of backlash on that. So again, we've got to be mindful and careful about how we embrace this idea of purpose and incorporate it into our businesses. And we've got to see it. It really is about being who you are and the reason for your being. Ultimately, it really is why we get out of bed every morning. This is where when we think about purpose, we've got to really think deeply and widely about it. And ultimately, Simon Sinek was a great influence on me when it came to this topic. He wrote a fantastic book, which is pretty well known. But for those that haven't come across it, they should buy it. Know your why. And he talks about people don't buy what you do. They buy why you do it. And this is really at the heart of the talk today about purpose and the importance of that. We now live in a post-pandemic world where we're seeing unprecedented change in terms of how customers are engaging. We've seen, obviously, churn is up, but also new businesses increasing for a lot of brands. We've got a lot of new customers coming. But also their expectations are increasing exponentially. But we really need to think about how we capture our customers, both heart, mind, body, and spirit. We need to really do this. We really need to understand the different journeys and pathways that they're taking that constantly evolve and adapt. We need to look at how we remove that unnecessary friction and touch points. And we ultimately need to anticipate what they feel and what they need. This is really important because customers don't care how hard it is for us to organize ourselves around them. They really don't. They've got so many options available to them. So really defining your purpose and really building a purpose that connects to your customers, as I said earlier, isn't a luxury. Brand purpose really is the beacon that can really light the way forward for your business. It's something that you can rally not just your customers, but your employees, your partners around. And without a clarity of purpose, brands really run the risk of fragmenting and ultimately having a disconnected business model. Really what we're looking at here is trying to create and use purpose as a way of helping ultimately create order out of chaos. Because if chaos, we know what happens there. If we pick that path that ultimately leads to poor customer experience and ultimately also poor employee experience, which feeds that customer experience and ultimately also is a significant impact on the business. So brand purpose is not a mission to save the world. So when you think about that, when people talk to about brand purpose, don't see it as a way to save the world. Brand purpose really is about your why and the meaning behind your brand's existence and its potential and its possibilities. Brand, you know, and really in order to deliver and create brand purpose, we need to understand also the importance of the brand promise is really the commitment to fulfill your purpose and the realization of the brand to the world. This is really important. You know, brand utility is is another idea that I want to introduce to you here because really brand utility is how we ultimately apply our purpose. It's it's how you walk your talk. And it's ultimately the practical counterpart to your purpose and your promise. It's it's how you how you ultimately will, you know, deliver the value that you're aspiring to deliver and ultimately enable you to serve your customers in new and exciting ways. And for this, you know, again, if for those that are really passionate about customer experience and ultimately, you know, looking at, you know, design thinking type skill tool sets in helping, you know, architect optimal customer experiences will know that empathy is a really important part of, you know, delivering great customer experiences. We need to really invest in empathizing with our customers and ultimately being, you know, cognizant of the importance of how we keep those promises we make. Because ultimately those promises that we keep will lead to trust and trust is the bedrock of customer experience. So, you know, how to use brand utility to create an awesome customer experience is often a question that I get asked, you know. So for me, brand utility is really the central pillar of customer experience strategy, ultimately, brand utility is how you deliver that value and serve your customers. I said earlier, you know, every customer today is being bombarded by messages. We're getting inundated by messages through different channels. And, you know, it's getting quite stressful for a lot of us when it comes to making the right choice. And for me, you know, a great brand helps, you know, create a signal through all of this noise, this scramble of channels and platforms and touchpoints represent a very, very, you know, challenging time for a lot of customers. So what we really want to look at is how can we simplify that experience and ultimately creating brand utility for me is about helping make life simpler for the customer. It's really about taking the complexity out of that choice, helping me make, you know, a choice that I can feel confident is the right choice, is really the end goal and a core central sort of objective of creating great brand utility. And this digital shift that we've seen has been quite dramatic and all-consuming. You know, customers are really, as we know, become increasingly more powerful. And I've really driven this digital sort of transformation. We really, you know, customers have been fast-adopted, consumers have been fast adopters of new technology, much faster than the businesses that are trying to serve them. So we really need to appreciate that and understand that. And actual fact, if we look at the rate of adoption that we've seen in the last year, it's been unprecedented, actually. You know, we've seen five to 10 years of growth just in the last year in terms of acceleration, in terms of how people are adapting to utilizing technology in their decision-making processes. So really, you know, we want to, you know, help make that experience much more frictionless for our customers. We want to, you know, personalize the experience because we've got to recognize that our customers are really now being born or the experiences that we're delivering are ultimately being born in the digital realms now. So this is something we need to look at. How do we, you know, arrange our go-to-market strategies to embrace these new technologies and capabilities of connecting with our customers in a way that's uniform, that enables us to present the content in a beautiful, elegant way? You know, and ultimately, we are seeing customer behaviors changing significantly across the businesses, across segments and data. Data is such a critical component of our ability to adapt to these changing behaviors. We need to be able to harness that data in a way that enables us to really get those insights that can enable us to architect that customer experience in an optimal way and a one that meets that customer's desire, a way of engaging with your brands, you know? And the reality is a lot of businesses are still struggling in this area in terms of being able to meet these needs, these challenges that are being thrown up against us. So we really need to look at seeing the opportunity that exists there, you know, being able to embrace that opportunity and convert that on and ultimately into a way of engaging our customers in exciting and new ways in presenting information and content, as I said, in a way that creates utility. We need to win the hearts and minds of the customers. We need to look at recognizing that customer journeys have always been quite emotional. They're not necessarily always rational. Martin Lindstrom, I think, has estimated that 90% of our decision-making process is actually emotional. So we need to look at how we can guide our customers on that journey using the data they're sharing with us each and every day to help us engage them in a way that, you know, like I said, gives them a greater level of confidence and helps inform those decision-making processes, you know? And again, a great way to do this is, you know, looking at using the insights for collecting of our customers in a way that helps us demonstrate empathy when we engage with them. And ultimately enables us to provide, you know, a greater sense of comfort in those customers, those key decisions they're making. And this is where data for me is quite a critical component of this journey. How ability to harness data across all the different touch points that we're connecting with our customers on and aggregating that in a way that enables us to get that greater sense of what is making, what is the key, you know, driver for someone in terms of the decision-making process that they're using in terms of making a product selection, for example. You know, brands must look at how they can see their customers beyond just data sets and numbers. And really, and like I said, this gets back to this idea of empathy and really, you know, connecting with our customers in a way that is, you know, authentic and true and not really just about trying to get their dollars out of their pockets, you know? Using empathy is a, you know, customer-first approach. And ultimately using that brand purpose that I've spoken about earlier in a way that, you know, shows that we do genuinely care about them. You know, companies with brand purpose do outperform their competitors and we're seeing this. And this is actually also very important in terms of your employee experience. We see that employee experience and being able to anchor their roles to a clear purpose has a beneficial, you know, result for the businesses. So really look at this topic I'm talking about today as being something not just about your customer experience but also your employee experience. And a great brand that does this really well is Changi Airport. For those that have traveled through Changi will know what I'm talking about. This isn't just an airport experience. They deliver ultimately, you know, an experience that goes well beyond just being an airport. And they really do translate this right across the entire, you know, airport and into all of the different people that work there whether it's the employees or suppliers, they're all involved in delivering that experience is a clear purpose in what they're trying to deliver. Here at Adobe, our purpose is changing the world through digital experiences. That's a really important component for us. So what I really want to challenge you today with is going away and think about what is your purpose, your brand and how does that fit into your overall go to market strategy? Clearly last year and what we're seeing this year will not be a period of time that we'll miss. But one thing that has been proven out is those brands that are delivering great experiences are ultimately creating great value for their customers and their businesses. So let's look at how we can embrace this idea of brand purpose and brand utility to drive innovation in our organizations. You know, looking at how we can bring, you know, marketing and innovation together but ultimately see that customer experience is not just the marketing or customer service topic but it's an enterprise wide initiative that we need to bring the entire organization around together on that. So I encourage you to stay optimistic. A lot of the data points I quoted here are freely available. Feel free to go and download the report that underpins some of this. I will also share my PowerPoint deck with you all after this. My name is Nicholas Contopolis and it was a great privilege to share this content with you today and sorry about the technical glitch at the start there. So back to the team.