“The brand Adobe is misunderstood”

Once you said you would like to make Adobe a Love-Brand. Why do you see a need for this?

ANN LEWNES: Yes, I think the brand Adobe is misunderstood. People don’t know what the brand really means. They only see a narrow cutout of the company depending on the products they use. Creative professionals and designers connect Adobe to Photoshop, office workers know pdf but nobody understands or really knows the whole enterprise. Adobe is in the process of changing right now. At first, our history is connected to creation and creativity. Then came Macromedia. With that, we had Flash and Web expertise. Then we realized that two big parts are missing. We were able to create and distribute content but we weren’t able to measure what impression the content leaves on the user. So we took over Omniture to scale how successful contents are in the interaction with the customer. Finally, we also purchased Day as a content management provider last year. Now we can offer the whole chain of added-value. When a publishing house gets in contact with us, we can offer graphic solutions, which can be connected to our Content-Management-System, then distributed over our distribution technology and finally we can measure how successful the whole project was. So, compared to the beginning, our company changed completely. People see Adobe in an absolutely positive light, but they don’t really understand the vision of the enterprise. And that is my job now.

LEWNES: Many people didn’t understand that deal. Why should a company for creatives purchase a measurement-company? But the aim was that every piece of content is measureable, whether it brings traffic, or means a response on actions. And people who develop content can also be the same ones who later on scale the success. I think at the beginning many people didn’t notice that, but slowly they understand what we are planning to do. Many publishing houses and marketing departments are already using both tools.

LEWNES: We have to find something people really love. And we have things that people love. Photoshop might be the most beloved brand in the world. And people who use it can’t be stopped once they started talking about it. It was always our aim, to invest a lot in the product brand Photoshop. Now we’d rather talk about the corporate brand. So far we communicated a lot about product brands and the positive image was projected on Adobe. But that’s not enough. People should understand and love the corporate brand as well. To achieve this, we have to bring a certain kind of value in people’s lives.

LEWNES: Especially in current times, our products are of certain relevance since we are in the middle of a digital revolution – and we are a service provider which can help other companies become a digital enterprise.