Experience Delivers

Transforming customer experiences by designing processes from the customer-in, enabling rich, meaningful interactions

Kevin Cochrane
VP, Enterprise Marketing, Customer Experience
Adobe Systems Incorporated

As Vice President of Enterprise Marketing, Customer Experience at Adobe, Kevin Cochrane leads the company’s worldwide enterprise product marketing efforts to enable companies and government organizations to provide engaging business experiences via next-generation customer experience management (CEM) enterprise solutions. Cochrane and his team are responsible for defining Adobe’s enterprise go-to-market strategy and product launch process. He drives organizational readiness, messaging, positioning, packaging, pricing and competitive analysis for the Adobe Digital Enterprise Solutions Business Unit.

Cochrane joined Adobe through its acquisition of Day Software where he served as Chief Marketing Officer, responsible for worldwide corporate and product marketing, along with global partner, OEM and customer support programs. Prior to Day, Cochrane was one of the earliest hires at commercial open source pioneer Alfresco and served as Vice President of Product Management. He was the fourth employee at Interwoven and was responsible for the Interwoven TeamSite product line and suite of web content management offerings.

Cochrane holds a degree in International Relations from Stanford University.
Adobe revolutionizes how the world engages with ideas and information – anytime, anywhere and through any medium. For more information, visit www.adobe.com.
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On Nov. 10, Gartner, Inc. positioned Adobe in the Leaders Quadrant of its 2011 “Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management” research report (see our press release here). Our completeness of vision and ability to execute were noted by the firm, which looked at 20 different vendors for the report. From an Adobe perspective, the research centered on CQ5, now part of our Web Experience Management (WEM) solution.

The evaluation criteria for a vendor’s ability to execute included product/service, overall viability, sales execution/pricing, market responsiveness and track record, marketing execution, customer experience, and operations. Criteria for completeness of vision included market understanding, marketing strategy, sales strategy, offering strategy, business model, vertical/industry strategy, innovation, and geographic strategy. We believe this recognition, combined with our previous placement as a Leader in “The Forrester Wave™: Web Content Management For Online Customer Experience, Q3 ’11”, is strong confirmation of our overall WEM and Digital Marketing vision.

At Adobe, we believe Web Content Management plays a crucial role as part of a larger digital marketing strategy for engaging and serving customers. Take, for example, world leader in anti-aging products, Nu Skin.

After experiencing tremendous growth, Nu Skin is now active in 52 markets across Asia, the Americas, and Europe. As a result, the company’s marketing and IT teams have to manage more than 50 websites, with most available in at least two languages, to present local distributors and their customers with comprehensive overviews of the products available in their regions. Using our WEM solution, Nu Skin is able to manage more than 4,500 online product pages and eight web properties along with 350GB of assets. The company pulled off a complete redesign of its European websites three times faster than prior to working with us, and has reduced content localization from weeks to minutes. You can check out the details in this video.

It’s this kind of result that can lead to accolades from customers and industry. But, of course, it doesn’t happen in a vacuum or overnight. As I’ve written here before, I’m incredibly proud of my Adobe colleagues who work tirelessly to perfect our offering and its various integration points, ensuring customer and partner success every time. Wherever you are, take a moment to reflect on how far we’ve come and how we’re changing the way people do business. And to our customers, I encourage you to check out the full Gartner report and to stay in touch to continue the conversation.

-Kevin Cochrane (@kevinc2003), vice president, Product Strategy and Solution Marketing, Adobe

About the Magic Quadrant

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in our research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Last week, we announced exciting news around the joining together of our Customer Experience Management (CEM) and Online Marketing Suite teams.  This alignment is part of our enterprise strategy of transforming how marketing organizations drive brand affinity and revenue growth in today’s multi-channel digital age.  Over 2011, we’ve seen tremendous excitement around our combined portfolio for helping digital marketers Make, Manage, Mobilize, and Monetize digital experiences.  Our customers have asked us to do more, to essentially “double-down” on our digital marketing focus.  They’ve asked Adobe to be their strategic partner in defining a new era of marketing leveraging the power of our creative tools, developer runtimes, web analytics, and our Adobe Digital Enterprise Platform (ADEP).  We’ve heard our customers and we’re excited to respond.  With our joined CEM and Omniture groups, we’re bringing together as one team a complete platform for digital marketing we believe will help customers transform for agility and growth.

With this change, we’re also taking the opportunity to bring our Omniture and CEM customers together in an exciting, expanded customer conference this coming March 2012. This event, the Adobe Digital Marketing Summit, will build on the existing and successful Omniture Summit. It will be the premier event for digital marketers to learn and share key strategies for driving marketing innovation.  We’re eagerly working on the details of this exciting event, and look forward to broadcasting more details following our Adobe MAX conference in October.  It’s going to be a great show; we hope to see you all there.

With this change, we will also be canceling the Adobe Digital Enterprise Summit, previously planned for October 2011, and folding it into our new, expanded Adobe Digital Marketing Summit event this coming March. I know many of you were looking forward to the opportunity to connect with Adobe and others in our customer community at the Digital Enterprise Summit, and we look forward to helping you take advantage of that opportunity this coming March.  We aim to make our upcoming show richer, deeper, and more engaging for each of you as you work to transform your marketing organizations.

And, of course, we still look forward to seeing many of you in our developer community at this year’s MAX in our Envision track.  The Envision track at MAX continues to be the pre-eminent destination for technical audiences to get hands-on experience and a deep-dive into our new ADEP platform and innovations around Web Experience Management, Customer Communications, and more.   If you’ve not dove into the details of the Envision track, I encourage our developer community to take a look into the track sessions – it will be a great showcase.

I look forward to seeing many of you at the Envision track at MAX this October and hopefully all of you at our expanded digital marketing conference in Spring 2012.

-Kevin Cochrane, vice president, Enterprise Marketing, Adobe

On July 13, Forrester Research Inc. provided us with well-timed recognition as a Leader in “The Forrester Wave™: Web Content Management For Online Customer Experience, Q3 ’11” report.  From an Adobe perspective, the report centers on CQ5, which is now part of our recently updated Web Experience Management Solution. See the press release we issued about the report here. This independent report evaluated the current wave of 10 Web Content Management (WCM) products across approximately 115 comprehensive criteria such as overall strength of vendors’ current offerings, a clear product strategy and vendor market presence.

There are several notable elements of the report that make it a must-read for any business or technology leader faced with the tough decision of selecting a vendor-of-record to transform web initiatives into customer engagement and experience platforms.  At minimum, this speaks to the incredible opportunity unlocked when a web-savvy customer base helps you move your business and brand experience online.  In a recent post on Customer Experience Management and our own Adobe Digital Enterprise Platform launch I wrote about the strength of that brand being critical to helping any company achieve higher rates of revenue growth by entering new markets, innovating new products, acquiring new customers, or in-selling products to an existing loyal base.  The web, and the customer experience there, is a fundamental part of this – but it is not the whole story.

In the report, Forrester defines the category CXM (Customer Experience Management, which has also been shortened to CEM elsewhere) as having WCM as a cornerstone with many other technologies playing a critical supporting role.  Using survey data gathered from 218 WCM decision makers, Forrester was able to forecast the prioritized integration points that are fundamental to making WCM a key component of CXM success, which also points to the importance of working within an established ecosystem of technology and service providers to ease these integrations.

Adobe Recognized as Leader in WCM

The following excerpt from the report explains the positioning of our leadership and gives well-deserved recognition to our Adobe Solution Provider Partners who are instrumental in our success with the many deployments we have successfully launched over the past year:

“Adobe’s WCM is especially strong on enabling business users to manage presentation as well as content via slick user interfaces, and benefits from a rich media product that was built on the same architecture as its WCM product, a differentiator in this evaluation… The vendor is early in its integration plans. But it has great potential, and implementation firms report a good deal of success behind Adobe’s offering.”

The positioning is also attributed to our “excellent offering in terms of technology and features.” The report added, “Its integration with other Adobe-owned CXM components shows potential.” Adobe received high scores across a broad range of criteria such as authoring tools, customer experience management, library services, presentation management and product strategy. Adobe also received a 5-out-of-5 rating in product architecture and the highest rating for content publishing and deployment in the report.  I would like to return to that 5-out-of-5 rating and the depth of understanding that went into their assessment of our technology and offerings.

This would not have been possible without the cast of hundreds that have contributed to our success behind the scenes at Adobe, working tirelessly to perfect the platform and its various integration points, the many late nights to meet the release milestones and the supporting teams that ensured our customers and partners would be able to succeed each and every time.  A heartfelt thank you to everyone who helped us achieve this milestone is warranted – you know who you are.  We’re not done by any means, but we have been able to keep our promises and deliver what our customers want time and time again.

For our customers, I’ll close by saying simply that the Forrester Research report is timely and shows how critical WCM is to a great customer experience.

-Kevin Cochrane, vice president, Enterprise Marketing, Adobe

What makes a good company great?  How do some companies achieve commanding market share, innovate new product markets, and become iconic brands in their industry?  In the current economic climate, it’s a meaningful question to ask (and one we can help enterprises address via news we made this week…but more on that later).  We live in an era defined by the proliferation of mobile devices and social networks that’s given rise to a new connected, empowered consumer.  In response, organizations are investing in new mobile apps and social media initiatives to engage customers and drive new growth initiatives.  But is simply adding a new mobile or social channel sufficient to compete in today’s economy?

Great companies are often associated with strong brands.  The strength of that brand can be directly quantified in any company’s market valuation.  Companies with strong brands can achieve higher rates of revenue growth by entering new markets, innovating new products, acquiring new customers, or in-selling products to an existing loyal base.  But a corporate brand is more than just your corporate identity – it’s a direct measure of your company’s current connection with prospective customers and its future potential for generating new sources of growth.

Building brand has fundamentally changed in this post-Facebook, post-iPhone world.  Consumers have heightened expectations of quality, engagement, service, and immediacy.  They want products uniquely matched to their needs.  They want to know that a company understands who they are, and they want helpful staff.  They want all of this every time they access your website, walk into your store, call into your call center, or meet with an agent in the field.  When these expectations are not met, today’s consumer speaks up.  They text their friends, post a diatribe on their blog, or make snarky comments on their Facebook Wall.  In more dreaded cases, they post a video of a bad experience on YouTube with a Tweet announcing, “United Breaks Guitars” that gets seen by millions of people.  We live in a world of not only heightened consumer expectations, but also heightened sensitivity of our brands. So then, how do good companies build great brands?

Good companies become great by understanding who their customers are, building a customer-centric culture, and delivering at all times on their brand promise.  At the heart of this is delivering a customer experience that attracts new customers to your business, keeps current customers coming back for more, and generates a loyal base of advocates that amplify your marketing message and provide deep insight into new areas in which you can grow your business.

That customer experience, your customer’s perception of your brand, is defined by the multiplicity of touch points they have with your company – from initial marketing communications, to engaging in research on your website or online community, to the point of sale and service either through your call center, an agent in the field, or online self-service portal.  Each customer is unique, and each has his or her own journey.  Each customer forms a perception of your brand.  Companies become great by knowing how each customer is unique, how they interact with your company, and understanding their expectations at each interaction point in terms of quality, engagement, service, and immediacy.  Companies become great by doing this repeatedly, for each customer, building a base of happy customers that become the embodiment of your brand value.  Organizations need to transform for customer-centricity to build brand, accelerate growth, and become market leaders.

Customer Experience is the new battleground in this era defined by the connected, empowered consumer.  Forrester Research highlights this Era of Experience as a third wave of our modern economy:  first, in the Era of Production, we competed on our ability to mass produce goods; second, in the Era of Distribution, we competed on our ability to optimize our supply chain and logistics to deliver those goods more quickly and more cheaply to broader markets; today, in the Era of Experience, we compete on brand and the insight and relationship we have with our customers.

Here at Adobe, we can help you compete in this new Era of Experience.  With 25 years of design heritage and focus on user experience, we help organizations transform for customer-centricity and redefine how they drive customer acquisition, loyalty, and retention.  Our new Adobe Digital Enterprise Platform, announced Monday, lets organizations break down operational silos and establish a new platform – a system of engagement – that leverages back-end systems of records to optimize individual line of business functions.  This enables organizations to deliver personalized, targeted experiences for each unique customer across all devices and channels that are consistent in their message and brand experience, and that build customer intimacy and drive higher rates of satisfaction, brand advocacy, and lifetime value.

We also provide specific solutions for business to execute a holistic customer experience strategy mapped to an organization’s brand objectives and operational goals.  These solutions, mapped to each specific stage of a customer’s lifecycle, aid companies in Attracting, Engaging, Selling, Helping, and Inspiring today’s mobile and social consumer, helping organizations to respond to new market conditions and drive fundamental changes in building and managing customer relationships to become iconic brands.  Combined with our market-leading Adobe Online Marketing Suite, the Adobe platform for Customer Experience Management helps organizations develop unique insight into their market, their customers, how consumers perceive their brand and how that perception can be guided to drive market share growth.

We’re here to help make good companies great.  We do this by putting today’s consumer at the heart of our efforts.  With the Adobe Digital Enterprise Platform and our market-leading Adobe Creative Suite and Online Marketing Suite, we’re helping organizations worldwide lead a customer experience revolution and redefine how they build brand and drive demand in today’s economy.

For additional perspective on this week’s announcement, CEM and our new platform, check out Rob Tarkoff’s post and video.

What are your thoughts? I look forward to continuing the conversation, so please share in comments or by reaching out on Twitter. I’m @kevinc2003 and, as always, you can talk with our team @AdobeCEM.

-Kevin Cochrane, vice president, Enterprise Marketing, Adobe