Henry Ford advocated his “one size fits all” strategy on Model T production when he said, “Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black.”*

Eighty-nine years later, companies are embracing the idea that each customer is unique and deserves relevant, personalized experiences and product options. What’s driving this? We are living in what Forrester Research calls the Age of the Customer, where consumers are empowered with technology to obsess over their desires, and the successful companies obsess over those too. In this recent webinar, Forrester pairs up with Adobe customer – leading U.K. automobile manufacturer – Renault to discuss embracing customer obsession with customization and vivid digital experiences.  Renault even shares successful tactics of its own using Adobe Scene7.

Product customization can be a powerful differentiator and represents an opportunity to deliver greater value, build loyalty and develop one-to-one customer relationships.

“Roll over, Henry Ford. Today, you can have any color you want, as long as it’s the one you want.” — James Gilmore and B. Joseph Pine II, 2000

*Source: Henry Ford and Samuel Crowther, My Life and Work, Garden City Publishing, 1922

According to the National Retail Federation (NRF), the average shopper plans to do 36% of his or her holiday shopping online this year – up 33% from last year! What are you doing to ensure that these purchase-minded shoppers are going to have the most relevant and efficient experience possible on your website and complete their business with you rather than your competitor? We’re now well into our second decade of selling and buying products online, it’s time that digital shopping experiences delivered more – both for the shopper and the retailer. It’s time for informed, intelligent targeted merchandizing.

Merchandising is a well-established, even fundamental aspect of retail marketing. It comprises the many activities surrounding the efforts to accelerate a potential buyer through the purchase funnel to the point where money is exchanged. In a recent white paper written by Sue Aldrich of the Patricia Seybold Group entitled “Success with Best Practices for Targeted Merchandising”, Sue sums it up by saying, “Merchandising is the practice of maximizing sales by leveraging product design, packaging, pricing, display, and most importantly, selection.” Corporations spend tremendous amounts of money and time working to put the right products, information or incentives in the right place at the right time to inspire a purchase – whether it be a large-ticket item or a spontaneous addition to a buyer’s shopping cart.

Although a fair amount of science has emerged from the collective experience of merchandisers, in the offline world, there is always an unavoidable element of inefficiency involved when merchandising strategies are deployed. Because few specifics are known about a customer, a merchandiser needs to cast a pretty wide net in hopes of attracting potential buyers who are prepared or interested in the products or offers presented them.

Targeted merchandising is a form of personalization – the creation of a unique sequence of relevant digital experiences, targeted to an individual or like-minded group of people to inspire them to progress towards a purchase or some similar success event. But whereas we think of personalization as being of primary benefit to the visitor or shopper, turn the tables and think of targeted merchandising as delivering personalized experiences in a way that not only satisfies customer goals, but optimizes the experience for the merchant as well.

In the digital world, the details and data available to a merchandiser open up several opportunities to remove or minimize the inefficiencies of merchandising to a largely generic audience. The data that an online retailer has access to from a digital analytics product such as Adobe SiteCatalyst or a multi-channel analytics product like Adobe Insight, can infuse online merchandising efforts with loads of intelligence regarding online customers’ and prospects’ interests and intentions.

Combining this intelligence with products like Adobe Test&Target, Adobe Recommendations, Adobe Scene7 and Adobe Search&Promote, merchandisers are now capable of delivering targeted content, messaging, cross-sells and offers to the anonymous, yet highly predictive profiles that analytics data provides. Targeted merchandising is all about leveraging these universal profiles – that signal implied and expressed interests and intentions – to present customers with timely and relevant content and offers. For example, with the latest release of Adobe Recommendations, merchandisers can arrange that a shopper who is viewing a specific brand of shoes will see targeted product recommendations for only shoes from that same brand. The product will even help you determine where on the page those recommendations perform the best.

So as shoppers start hitting your site in these crucial weeks to come, think “targeted merchandizing” and remember these three simple things:

• Don’t assume that what works for one shopper works for all
• Let your metrics guide the relevance (and flexibility) of your merchandising
• And, most importantly…pay attention to shopper intent and deliver personalized digital experiences that meet your merchandising objectives.

For an excellent overview of targeted merchandizing best practices, click here to download a copy of Sue Aldrich’s paper, “Success with Best Practices for Targeted Merchandising”.

I’m writing this post 37,000’ above Iowa, heading back to San Francisco for the final MAX prep work. Yep, MAX 2011 is less than a week away and if you’re joining us in Los Angeles next week, you’re in for all the fun and excitement you’ve come to expect, and more. And if you’re not attending, well, fortunately there are ways for you to join in the fun.

Of course, our MAX announcements are highly guarded secrets. And usually we hold back on announcing our celebrity guests until they get on stage but with musical guest Weezer (!) at the MAX Bash and…Rainn Wilson (!) as emcee of the MAX Awards and Sneaks – we just couldn’t hold back!

The MAX keynotes are always inspiring, exciting, and entertaining. And if you think the last few years were cool, wait until you see what we have planned this year. The stage is 180’ wide and hosts an absolutely gigantic screen, the venue boasts 11,000 amps of power and 548,500 watts of lighting; the side screens themselves are almost 500 square feet each! You won’t believe what all that is capable of, and so we are going to … oops, sorry, I got carried away there. Look, I’ve been part of the keynote team for 13 consecutive years now, so you can trust me when I say that you won’t want to arrive late for the opening keynote. Really. Once again, Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch hosts, and we’ll be broadcasting it all live, so not being present in person is no excuse for not taking part. The Day One keynote is on Monday Oct 3 at 9.30am PT and the Day Two keynote (which I’ll be a part of) is Tuesday Oct 4 beginning at 10am PT.

Oh and speaking of “taking part,” make sure you vote in the 2011 MAX Awards. The nominees this year showcase the best uses of Adobe software in ads and branding, digital publishing, entertainment and the enterprise. The winners are chosen by you, so vote online at the MAX Awards Finalist Gallery starting Tuesday, September 27 through Tuesday, October 4.

After the MAX Awards we’ll host one of the most popular MAX events, The Sneaks. This is where 10 members of Adobe engineering teams will get to show off some of the most amazing ideas they are cooking up. Hey, you know that Content-Aware Fill feature we added to Photoshop CS5? That was first seen by MAX attendees as a sneak long before it was in Photoshop. Yep, MAX attendees get to see potential future features (and register their approval or disapproval) long before the rest of the planet. With Rainn Wilson hosting, both programs promise to be highly entertaining.

And then it’s the MAX Bash featuring the aforementioned Weezer. And yes, I’ve seen all the plans, and this party is shaping up to be one of the best ever (perhaps topping Mardi Gras World in New Orleans, the theme parks in Orlando, and the Olympic Oval in Salt Lake City).

So, if you’ll be in L.A., come by and say “hi”. (Actually doing so will be worth something this year, 50 points to be exact when you scan my QR code for the “MAXme game” to win cool prizes. Stay tuned for more on that…). And for those of you unable to join us, don’t make the same mistake next year!

And with that, I really do need to get back to finalizing my demos …

The countdown has begun for the November 9 unveiling of  the newest exhibition in the Adobe Museum of Digital Media – Journey to Seven Light Bay, a commissioned work by well-known artist Mariko Mori, curated by Tom Eccles, executive director of the Bard College Center for Curatorial Studies, Annandale in Hudson, NY.    Mori has a longtime interest in harmonizing nature, spiritualism and technology.  Through Journey to Seven Light Bay, we get a look at her artistic process and experience a digital recreation of her physical project, Primal Rhythm, now being built on Miyako Island off the coast of Okinawa in Japan. A unique feature of the exhibition is a white glowing orb, the Tida Dome,  that greets visitors as they enter the AMDM atrium. Inspired by prehistoric caves of Okinawa, the Tida Dome illuminates in the same way the caves do when sunlight strikes them from a specific angle.

Check out the trailer below to get a sense of Mori’s work, and visit the exhibition when it launches at the AMDM.

If you were anywhere close to downtown San Jose on Saturday night, you’ll have to excuse us if we had the music turned up a little too loud.  But there was good reason to celebrate as we wrapped up a fantastic week with the Adobe Youth Voices Live! party at the California Theater.

The mission of Adobe Youth Voices is to provide youth in underserved communities the opportunity to create media that express their emotions and concerns about issues that are affecting them and our world.  To date, The Adobe Youth Voices program has impacted 150,000 youth and 4,000 educators in more than 40 countries.  The celebration on Saturday was the grand finale of our second international Adobe Youth Voices Summit, a four-day conference which brought together more than 90 AYV students and educators from 16 countries around the world.  Their stories are amazing and so are they.

The week’s highlights included a moving keynote from journalist Laura Ling, who you might recall was held captive in North Korea for nearly five months while on an assignment covering refugee movement between the China/North Korea border.  On Saturday, the Adobe Foundation joined forces with the Black Eyed Peas Peapod Foundation to open the newest Peapod Adobe Youth Voices Academy at Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana (MACLA) in San Jose.  MACLA joins the growing network of academies in New York, Los Angeles, Oakland and Redwood City, California.

But Saturday night was all about celebration with performances by AYV students and a special appearance from Fergie, apl.de.ap, and Taboo of the Grammy Award-winning Black Eyed Peas.  Photos from the AYV Summit can be seen here.

Fergie of the Black Eyed Peas, center, dances with members of the Peapod Adobe Youth Voices Academy during the Adobe Youth Voices Live! celebration

Video pros have been active and in the news recently and today Adobe announced a “switcher” program to help Apple Final Cut Pro and Avid Media Composer customers migrate to Premiere Pro CS5.5 or Creative Suite CS5.5 Production Premium.   You can get 50% off Adobe’s professional video tools, an incredible deal. Check out all the details over on our product page.

If you haven’t looked at Premiere Pro in a while, now’s a great time – it’s been getting great feedback from innovative customers and our friends in the media.   Interesting times are afoot in the world of pro video, broadcasting and filmmaking.

Check out this outstanding example of what can be achieved with our just-launched Photoshop Touch SDK, from our friends over at DI Magazine.   What a fantastic idea — using a digital magazine on iPad to drive a Photoshop tutorial on your Mac (or PC). They also developed their digital magazine using Adobe Digital Publishing Suite, in a perfect storm of Adobe digital technology customer ingenuity.

For those of us who have trouble telling their Gaussian Blur from their Clone Stamp, this is revolutionary stuff that will bring the amazing creative power of Photoshop into many more hands.  Woof!

To celebrate a year of digital publishing innovation between our friends at Conde Nast and Adobe, we’re sponsoring the latest edition of WIRED on iPad.  Yup, you can download the May edition of WIRED free of charge for next 30 days, thanks to the marketing boffins here at Adobe towers.   Pop on over to Ye Olde Apple App Store and download this bad-boy.   Like all of Conde’s work, it really is a beautiful example of what’s possible with a digital magazine.

19.05 WIRED Andy Samberg Cover

When we launched the Adobe Museum of Digital Media (AMDM) last October, we aspired to create the world’s premiere showcase for digital art and media. The unique dynamic between digital and traditional creativity serves as the focal point of the newest AMDM exhibit which we’re excited to unveil this week.

John Maeda: Atoms + Bits = the neue Craft (ABC) is the AMDM’s second featured exhibit. It’s an interactive lecture led by world-renowned designer and Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) president John Maeda. In the exhibition, Maeda discusses how today’s designers are connecting the worlds of digital creativity and analog (or handcrafted) creativity. The digitally-rich exhibit also features scenes from RISD design studios – including its textile, glass blowing and print press workshops. According to Maeda, the creative experiences that take place these environments – and the traditional tools designers use to create them – have a direct influence on the tools used and experiences enabled by the digital artists and designers of today.

This relationship between experience and design and the lessons the traditional art world offer the digital design world are something we’re keenly aware of at Adobe. And it’s one of the many reasons we’re tremendously proud to welcome this new exhibit to the museum.

John Maeda: Atoms + Bits = the neue Craft (ABC) will be showing through the end of 2011. It’s accessible online, anytime, and around the world at www.adobemuseum.com. Please stop by, enjoy the new exhibit and let us know what you think.

RISD President John Maeda leads his virtual lecture in the AMDM.

This week we released the newest version of Adobe Search&Promote. This release promises to give our customers even more opportunity to give their site visitors relevant search-driven experiences. And today at Omniture Summit 2011 online sheet music retailer Musicnotes.com helped us tell attendees all about these new capabilities.

So what’s new? In the true spirit of online marketing optimization, we’ve taken additional steps to make site marketers and merchandisers more effective in their jobs. Specifically, we’ve deeply integrated Adobe Test&Target functionality with Search&Promote.

First, marketers or merchandisers can now test a variety of business rules before pushing them live to all their site visitors or specific segments. The great thing about business rules in Search&Promote is that it allows the marketer to influence search outcomes based on what he or she thinks (or what the metrics indicate) is the best direction to take the visitor who, through search or navigation, expresses interest in a particular item. Now, marketers can test their hypotheses — rather than wondering what would have happened if they’d used an alternate business rule. Additionally, you can take advantage of the cool new simulator we introduced in December. This means that you can see the results of these alternate rules-generated experiences the way they would look live on your site. You don’t even have to leave the Search&Promote marketer interface to do this as long as you are a current Test&Target user.

Second, beyond testing, Search&Promote’s integration with Test&Target allows businesses to utilize targeted business rules to make search experiences even more relevant and personalized. For example, Musicnotes’ Bill Aicher today in our Search&Promote Summit 2011 breakout described new strategies for presenting relevant results — and eliminating noise — by using a targeted “guitarist” business rule. He also demonstrated how using geo-targeting will help create more relevant site search experiences based on delivering results according to popularity of certain kinds of music around the world. Very cool. If you weren’t able to attend this session, the recording will soon be available to Summit attendees on Omniture.com.

If you want to learn more about the new release, I encourage you to check out this video of my colleague, product manager Mark Tuyay, demonstrating the new capabilities now available in Adobe Search&Promote.