Please note: This article is by Michael Nutley and originally appeared on CMO.com

Old-school marketers think about acquisition first, then customer relationships. New-school marketers think about relationships and customer experience first. That was the key message from Scott Olrich’s afternoon keynote at the Adobe Digital Marketing Summit EMEA 2012, in London, yesterday. Olrich is the chief marketing and sales officer at email and cross-channel marketing solutions provider Responsys.

As part of his keynote, he challenged the audience to ask themselves whether their company thinks acquisition-first or relationship-first. Then he set down the key differences: “Acquisition-first companies are obsessed with the first purchase; relationship-first companies are obsessed with the third or fourth purchase. Acquisition-first companies market the product or the price; relationship-first companies market the experience. Acquisition-first companies have to market their own products; the customers of relationship-first companies market the product for them. And acquisition-first companies use digital to drive traffic; relationship-first companies use digital to tie everything together.”

Olrich invited Lou Ashton, senior multichannel marketing manager at UK fashion retailer New Look, onstage to talk about how the brand is using what he calls “new-school” marketing. They both stressed the importance of capturing permission from customers to market to them, as well as of combining different channels to do so.

By way of example, Ashton explained how his company is doing just that. “The New Look Photo Studio in our Dublin store is perfect for our audience of tech-savvy, highly social young women,” Ashton said. “They have their photos taken to remind them of what they tried on and we email the photos to them. That means we’ve captured their email so we can send targeted relevant campaigns to customers we know, and they share the photos with their friends on Facebook.”

Qlrich also talked about the revolution happening in digital display, where, he said, the ability to “buy” individuals in real-time as they surf is turning display from an acquisition channel into a relationship channel.

“Display is now working for us in the same way as email,” Ashton said. “It’s a huge opportunity.”