Let’s start with Adobe.
Adobe used to make software for artists. You know, folks with paint on their jeans and questionable posture. But now they make software for businesses. And not just any businesses. Big, all growed up, got me a data lake out back businesses.
They’re B2B now. Business-to-Business. Which is cute. Akin to calling a Rube Goldberg machine a “sandwich presser.”
But that’s not the whole picture, is it? Nope. No sir.
Because what Adobe is really doing, what we’re all really doing, is something far weirder. Something with too many iterations that a couple of overly-specific acronyms won’t properly define. Something I’ve decided to call B2X. I’m not saying I coined that, but I did come up with it organically and figured I’d write a few silly words about it.
So what the hell is B2X?
It’s the sound of a paranoid android sighing. It’s also the increasingly common reality of modern digital strategy.
Here’s the deal. You sell to a business. That business sells to someone else. Maybe another business. Maybe a human. Maybe a goat roper in Kansas who wants to a monthly subscription to those luxury shoelaces that don’t actually tie.
Doesn’t matter.
What matters is that it’s not a straight line anymore. It’s spaghetti. Wet spaghetti that sticks to the wall and never falls. And the only bowl designed to hold it all might just be Adobe Experience Platform (AEP).
You’ve got businesses selling to businesses who sell to customers who resell to partners who deliver to franchises who market to cute dogs with their own TikTok accounts. That’s not B2B. That’s not B2C. That’s not B2B2C or B2C2B.
That’s B2X.
Why B2X?
Because “X” marks the unknown. The ultimate variable. X is your customer. X is your partner’s partner’s vendor’s buyer’s mom. X is everyone and absolutely no one.
And Adobe, bless them, has built AEP as a machine solving for X. A warped factory where identities are stitched, journeys are mapped, experiences are personalized. A digital nervous system for a world that just can’t stop twitching.
Let’s just be honest. Most enterprises aren’t dealing with a neat little pipeline anymore. They’re dealing with:
- Dealers who change every quarter, every week.
- Distributors with conflicting catalogs and unique, specific needs.
- Customers who use ten identities on eleven devices with five aliases.
- Vertical markets that look like de Kooning’s early work.
And somehow, you still must know who’s buying what, when, where, and dog help you, why.
Adobe’s My Bet: X Is the New Normal
So Adobe goes hard into B2B, at least in their marketing, but that’s just to set the tone. It’s not a cul-de-sac. It’s an on-ramp to something preposterous. Adobe is saying, “Bring us your disconnected, your anonymized, your pseudonymous masses. We’ll make sense of ‘em.” Bring us your X.
They’re embracing the X. I’m embracing the X. And if you’re building commerce or content or campaigns for businesses with ecosystems instead of pipelines, you should be too.
The Moral of the Story
If you’re still only talking about B2B or B2C, you’re back there sending faxes when you should be connected to this millennium.
Business today is B2X. And B2X isn’t just a strategy. It’s a condition, a life force. Like gravity or regret.
If Adobe’s AEP is an empty house, then B2X is the architectural blueprint. And it doesn’t matter if your customer is a person, a business, or a replicant with a sub-400 credit score. If you don’t understand the chain of interactions, you don’t understand much of anything. So don’t panic. Just map it, tag it, connect it, and maybe you’ll survive the chaos. Embrace the X.