Marketo vs Adobe Campaign

That's how it's been historically. Marketo has had a strong focus on B2B whereas Adobe has focused on B2C. I don't see why the acquisition would change that - I think that was Adobe's strategy from the get-go, to have more penetration in the B2B marketing world.

Adobe Campaign is not just for B2C. It is equally popular for transactional messages. I have seen companies like McDonalds use it for running their order update emails in some part of the world.

At the same time, I have seen many B2C companies using Marketo. The decision to choose one over the other depends on the business case, the volume of the emails, and complexity.

I agree with Rachit, Marketo can also be used for B2C but it depends upon business decision.

Also, Adobe campaign has a separate tool to handle Transactional message. It is called "RT- Message Center". It requires a separate license. Message center will work like the trigger, it will listen to the event and send the message. If you need to use the Message center for your business then you have to integrate it first with Adobe campaign.

Adobe Campaign is pretty squarely aimed at the B2C space. It has a more limited integration with Salesforce and doesn't have key B2B features such as lead scoring, lead lifecycle management, or any sales tools that sales reps can use within Salesforce (or other CRMs). It also doesn't integrate nicely with many (non-Adobe tools) that are typically B2B, such as webinar or event platforms.

While Marketo can certainly be used for B2C and has all of the functionality a typical B2C company needs, it is not made to handle the volume that comes with a lot of B2C operations. Adobe Campaign offers some pretty robust data integration abilities and can easily handle a database with tens of millions of contacts and hundreds of millions of emails. Marketo is just not built for that and will struggle.

I wonder if this is an area where being bought by Adobe will eventually benefit Marketo since they may have access to some of those tools Adobe has to manage large data sets, but right now they don't.

I'd say it's a lot more nuanced than B2B versus B2C. I know a lot of B2B businesses with huge volumes who want to focus on transactional email that have bought Adobe Campaign, and I've worked with many B2C orgs that need Marketo's lead management functionality.

I think it's more useful to think in terms of business need. As someone mentioned above, Marketo is strong wherever an organisation requires a lead management function - scoring, CRM integration, sales capabilities, account based marketing, etc. Essentially you can consider this either B2B or what Marketo calls B2C considered purchase. If it takes a while for a consumer to make a decision (financial services, cars, luxury purchases, higher education, there are many other examples) and they need to have leads managed, prioritised, assigned, scored, and the lead needs to be nurtured, Marketo comes into play. Adobe Campaign struggles at all those things, but they have a wonderful toolset for consumer/web/segmentation/targeting/adcloud with large data volumes.