Welcome to Brilliance@Work, a series of profiles about stellar marketing professionals and their best practices at work.  During the next couple of months, we’ll feature market research experts.

Organizations that focus on improving the customer experience will strengthen their customer relationships and their overall business performance. John Copeland knows this first hand. John is Vice President, Marketing & Consumer Insights at Adobe. He’s also a presenter at The Market Research Event (TMRE) on Nov. 5-7, 2019 at The Mirage Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada.

As a preview to his presentation, John shares his perspectives on “The Customer (Experience) Is Always Right: Adobe’s Data-Driven Operating Model.”

Peggy L. Bieniek, ABC: How can leveraging a data-driven operating model help shape an organization’s future success?

John Copeland: Using a data-driven operating model like the one we use at Adobe gives a company a customer-journey-centric view of the key performance indicators across the business. By understanding business performance at the key stages of the customer journey (e.g., “Discovery,” “Trial,” “Purchase,” “Usage”) leaders of the different functions of the company (Marketing, Sales, Product, Finance) can align on the most pressing issues and biggest opportunities and work together to address them.

PB: What are some examples of how you leverage a data-driven operating model at Adobe?

JC: Among the many use cases we have, we use DDOM (the Data Driven Operating Model) to help us understand if, when, and where we need to adjust what we’re doing with our marketing to do things like: increase traffic to our website (and for which products and in which regions); increase the number of people trialing our products; or increase our efforts on engagement marketing to increase the percentage of our users who are using one of our products.

PB: How does this approach help tell a compelling marketing story?

JC: With DDOM, Adobe has the ability to understand the impact of marketing throughout the customer journey (because we can see marketing’s impact at each stage of the journey and on different groups of customers across their lifecycle). We can, for example, demonstrate which marketing activities are more/less responsible (i.e., effective) for attracting customers to our business, and also which of those customers turns out to be more (vs. less) engaged in our products, are more likely to have higher loyalty and lifetime value.

PB: What will people gain from your conference presentation?

JC: Attendees will learn about the benefits of integrating their siloed customer data and applying a customer-journey framework (and operating model). We’ll discuss how aligning cross-company operations to this framework creates better focus, alignment and performance for the business.

Want to hear more from John? Join us at The Market Research Event (TMRE). Learn, network and share best practices with the most influential leaders in market research. Stay connected at #TMREVENT.