For years, the Content Management System was the center of the digital universe. Write something. Publish it in Wordpress. Send the email in Constant Contact. Check the box. That’s fine if your idea of digital is about organizing and publishing content.

But in 2025, managing content isn’t enough. A CMS still has its place, but the real battleground is experiences. Customers demand personalization, relevance, and evolution. If it isn't there, they're gone. That’s where a Digital Experience Platform (DXP) comes in.

A DXP doesn’t just publish. It adapts. It learns. It personalizes. It improves over time. It treats digital not as a single destination but as a constantly evolving experience that reflects your customer’s humanity. And if that sounds a little “soft,” here’s the hard part: 84 percent of companies using DXPs see improved retention and 62 percent report higher conversion rates.

Why This Matters Even More in the Mid-Market

Enterprises can afford inefficiency. They have armies of marketers, bloated budgets, and a tolerance for systems that take months to update. Mid-market organizations do not. Every dollar has to perform. Every interaction has to count.

Mid-market brands are also competing with giants who set the bar for digital experiences. If you’re running on a CMS, you look small-time, no matter how good your product is. A DXP levels the playing field. Capabilities once reserved for the Fortune 1000 are now available at mid-market prices. It lets you punch above your weight.

Most important: mid-market companies are growth hungry. They’re expanding. Into new markets. Searching for new customers. They need platforms that evolve with them. A CMS preserves the status quo. A DXP drives what’s next.

When Waiting Backfires

We’ve all seen it. Companies cling to legacy CMS platforms like they’re “good enough” until one day the website feels like a museum exhibit. Updates take forever. Customer expectations keep rising. That one employee in the back of the office who knew everything finally left and now nobody really knows how to manage the website. Suddenly the brand looks out of step with the world it’s supposed to be leading.

The risk isn’t just embarrassment - it’s irrelevance. In a mid-market environment, that can be fatal. The competitors that move faster, test more, and personalize better will eat your lunch while you’re still wrestling with templates and workflows. And yes, that’s the sound of your competitor toasting marshmallows over your fire pit.

When DXPs Spark Advocacy

Ben & Jerry’s: Scooping at the Speed of Culture
Ben & Jerry’s business is cultural relevance, not just ice cream. Flavors are fun, but the stories - Cherry Garcia, Half Baked, Colin Kaepernick’s “Change the Whirled”- are what people share. For years, managing that storytelling across dozens of markets meant wrestling with a CMS that treated updates like heavy lifting.

The move to a global DXP wasn’t just a tech upgrade. It was a recognition that standing still was brand death. With the new platform, marketing teams could localize campaigns daily, respond to cultural moments in real time, and surface flavors and causes that resonate with communities in their own language, their own context.

Traffic doubled and tripled, yes. The real win is that Ben & Jerry’s can now behave like the brand they’ve always wanted to be: nimble, irreverent, values-driven, and constantly in conversation with fans. The DXP is the infrastructure. The mindset is timeless: stay relevant, stay human, keep people talking.

Also: stop hoarding the Phish Food. We see you.

Now, yes, Ben & Jerry’s is a household name, but the principle is the same for mid-market brands. You don’t need their budget to steal their playbook. What matters is recognizing that constant motion is the only way to compete. Mid-market organizations may not have 20 languages to juggle, but they do have the same mandate: adapt fast or fade fast.

Solo Stove: From Product to Ritual

Solo Stove could have sold fire pits as just another piece of outdoor gadgetry. Instead, they built a movement around ritual. Their fire pits are the centerpiece of s’mores nights, backyard storytelling, and Instagrammable gatherings.

That cultural positioning demanded a digital experience that kept pace with the energy of the brand. When they moved to a composable DXP, the impact was immediate - a 200 percent jump in online orders and a 60 percent traffic spike. The sauce was the ability to scale story-driven commerce. They could launch new campaigns on the fly, integrate user-generated content into the shopping experience, and treat every click as part of a shared brand narrative.

The DXP here isn't a shiny object. It was the muscle behind a deliberate cultural strategy that recognized growth doesn’t come from static product pages. It comes from experiences designed to get people talking, sharing, and returning. That’s word of mouth at scale. And, conveniently, fire pit scale too.

This is the mid-market playbook in action. Solo Stove didn’t outspend the giants of outdoor living. They out-moved them. They used experience as a lever to punch above their weight. That’s the power of a DXP for mid-market challengers: it turns scrappiness into strength and lets you behave like a brand twice your size.

New Tech. Old Results.

DXPs are built with the latest toys: composable architecture, AI, omnichannel delivery. But they succeed when they deliver old-school outcomes: growth, loyalty, and word of mouth.

When 55 percent of DXP adopters report higher customer satisfaction and 58 percent say they improved efficiency, that isn’t hype. That’s the math behind why the switch pays for itself. Happier customers mean higher retention. Efficiency gains mean less money wasted on manual workarounds and duct-taped systems.

Call it a better mousetrap. Or, in Solo Stove’s case, a better s’mores trap. The point is: DXPs are not a shiny toy. They’re how timeless fundamentals like satisfaction and efficiency show up in hard numbers.

The Larger Point

Neither Ben & Jerry’s nor Solo Stove set out to buy technology. They set out to build movements. The DXP was simply the enabler. The scaffolding that allowed timeless marketing fundamentals to play out in a world that refuses to sit still.

That’s the provocation: A DXP isn’t new-school tech for tech’s sake. It’s how you take the fundamentals of relevance, loyalty, and advocacy and make them work at the speed your customers expect.

If you want to learn more about DXPs and how they can enhance your business, feel free to contact us here.