Cora Locke has spent two decades marketing things that ask people to change a habit. First came satellite television, then healthcare services, then the television recorder that taught viewers to treat airtime as a suggestion. Since 2017, she has worked at AliveCor, where a small piece of technology must carry a large explanation. The objects changed. The central assignment did not: make a complicated proposition clear enough to enter ordinary life.
Locke is now AliveCor's Chief Marketing Officer, Consumer. The title puts her in charge of consumer marketing and corporate communications, with responsibility for global media, messaging, narrative and positioning. It is an expansive list, and one that makes the word “marketing” seem almost comically tidy. She is not only arranging how a product is introduced. She is helping decide how an entire company sounds when it enters the room.
The scale is easy to state and harder to picture. AliveCor says Locke played a significant role in expanding its consumer, retail and subscription businesses across 40 countries. Forty sets of expectations. Forty markets with their own retailers, habits, language and context. A message has to travel without arriving as a stranger.
01 / The apprenticeship
A career assembled in four very different rooms
Locke's first long chapter began at DISH Network in 2005. She spent seven years there as a senior marketing manager, working in a business whose technology was visible on the roof but whose value had to be understood on the sofa. Consumer choice, packaging and channel discipline were not abstract concerns. They were the business.
In 2012, she moved to DaVita as provider marketing and sales enablement manager. The audience and vocabulary changed. So did the relationship between the message and the people delivering it. Sales enablement is marketing with its sleeves rolled up: claims must become useful tools, not merely attractive sentences. The work has to survive contact with a real conversation.
TiVo followed in 2015, with Locke serving as senior channel marketing manager. Here again was consumer technology moving through partners and into the home. A channel marketer works between worlds. The company has a strategy; partners have shelves, incentives and customers; the public has a few seconds of attention. Someone must keep those interests from behaving like guests who refuse to speak to one another.
- DISH Network
Senior Marketing Manager - DaVita
Provider Marketing and Sales Enablement Manager - TiVo
Senior Channel Marketing Manager - AliveCor
Director, then Vice President and Senior Vice President - AliveCor
Chief Marketing Officer
The route looks eclectic only if industries are the sole measure of continuity. Read by craft, it is remarkably consistent. Each role sits at the junction of a technical product, a distribution system and a person deciding whether any of it belongs in daily life.
The objects changed. The central assignment did not: make a complicated proposition clear enough to enter ordinary life.
02 / The long promotion
Eight years, four titles, one widening brief
Locke arrived at AliveCor as director of marketing in October 2017. Two years later she became vice president of marketing and public relations. In March 2024, the title widened again: senior vice president of global consumer marketing. Four months after that, she became chief marketing officer.
Quick promotions make announcements. A progression across eight years says something else. It records accumulated context: which launch argument survived, which retailer needed a different explanation, which phrase became too broad after crossing a border, which team knew the answer before the org chart did. The record does not reveal those private meetings, and it need not. The sequence of roles shows a company repeatedly enlarging the territory entrusted to her.
Her present portfolio joins work that companies sometimes scatter across several desks. Consumer marketing must create demand. Retail marketing must respect the realities of a shelf and a partner. Subscription marketing must earn the next month, not just the first purchase. Corporate communications must make the institution intelligible. Global media and messaging must hold these pieces together in public.
That final verb matters. AliveCor's biography of Locke singles out her ability to unify people, information and ideas. Corporate biographies are polished by design, but this description has the advantage of matching the job's architecture. Her portfolio is made of interfaces. Its success depends less on a lone flourish than on groups agreeing about what they mean.
The three commercial lanes also run on different clocks. Retail is governed by buying calendars and shelf windows. Consumer campaigns arrive in bursts. A subscription relationship is renewed through hundreds of smaller moments. Corporate communications must be ready when the calendar is not. Holding those tempos together is part editorial judgment, part operations and part diplomacy. The public sees a sentence. The organization behind it sees a chain of decisions.
Consumer + retail + subscription + corporate voice = one brand that must still sound like itself.
03 / The public signal
A rare all-caps word and the team behind the title
Locke maintains a restrained public profile. There is no sprawling archive of keynote aphorisms or personal-brand choreography. Her visible record is largely professional: company work, colleagues and recruiting. That makes a 2022 LinkedIn post unusually revealing. AliveCor was hiring a senior digital marketing lead, and Locke asked her network if it knew any performance-marketing “ROCKSTARS.”
“Know any digital media / performance marketing ROCKSTARS? Please send my way.”Cora Locke, recruiting for AliveCor's consumer marketing team in 2022
The all-caps enthusiasm is charming because it breaks the otherwise measured surface. More importantly, the post points below the C-suite line. A broad consumer function is not an individual performance. It is made from specialists, briefs, handoffs and decisions about what deserves measurement. Before a leader can claim a strategy, someone has to assemble the people who can execute it.
Locke's own education offers another line of continuity. She earned a Bachelor of Science in marketing from the University of Denver and remains based in Denver, even as AliveCor is headquartered in Mountain View, California. The geography quietly contradicts the old picture of leadership as a row of offices beside headquarters. Her remit extends across countries while her professional center of gravity remains in the city where she studied.
In 2024, she was credited on AliveCor's British television campaign “A Heartfelt Chat,” made with the creative production company Be The Fox. The spot centered a candid conversation between friends. Its premise fits the broader shape of Locke's work: technology does not become personal because a marketer declares it so. It becomes personal when it finds a believable place in an ordinary exchange.
04 / The work beneath the message
Clarity is a management system
Marketing is often described as the art of winning attention. Locke's career suggests a less glamorous and more useful definition: the discipline of coordinating meaning. At DISH, that meaning moved through a consumer channel. At DaVita, it supported providers and sales teams. At TiVo, it crossed partner relationships. At AliveCor, it now travels through products, retail, subscriptions, media and corporate communications.
A campaign may be the visible artifact, but the difficult work comes earlier. A company has to know which promise belongs to the product, which evidence supports that promise, which audience needs which detail and which words can survive repetition. Every extra market introduces another chance for the message to fray. Every new business model adds another definition of success.
That is why the 40-country figure is more than a piece of executive decoration. It is a coordination problem disguised as a number. The consumer business wants reach. Retail wants motion. Subscription wants continuity. Corporate communications wants coherence. A CMO responsible for all four must keep them from becoming separate brands that happen to share a logo.
There is also a useful restraint in Locke's public story. Her biography emphasizes launches, campaigns and global scale, but her own public activity gives the microphone back to the company and the team. The posture is operator first. The work appears in the expanding brief and in the reach of the business, not in a torrent of self-narration.
Two decades after beginning at DISH, Locke occupies a role that gathers every earlier strand: consumers, channels, services, technology, partners and public language. Careers are often tidied into a ladder after the fact. Hers is better understood as a sequence of translations, each one giving her a larger and more intricate text.
The product on the table may be small. The organizational problem around it is not. Someone still has to turn many specialists, markets and messages into one comprehensible story. Locke has spent her career practicing exactly that.