Welcome to Spark, a newsletter from Vivace. We curate and publish the most interesting thinking and ideas from our community on themes ranging from business and finance to culture and creativity. Send pitches and feedback to [email protected]. We’d love to hear from you.

Hello {{ First Name | Spark reader }},

There’s something that many B2B marketers are quietly feeling right now: modern marketing has become optimized for activity, metrics, and output, while the real customer slowly fades into the background.

This week’s Spark contributor Jessica Hetherington has been questioning exactly this. Reflecting on her career in marketing, from Account-based to Integrated and now Product, it’s become clear that customer-centricity has been the thread that delivers sustainable growth, trust, and long-term value.

I know Jessica’s perspective will resonate with marketers who’ve felt this tension themselves — producing work that performs on paper, but doesn’t always genuinely connect.

By the way, you might notice a new shade of pink in today’s newsletter. I’m delighted to share with you that we just relaunched Vivace’s website and evolved brand. More to come, but for now, we invite you to check it out here.

Enjoy,

—Joel

Mimi Hayton in conversation with Jessica Hetherington

When we talk about ‘value’ in marketing, what do we really mean? 

Jessica Hetherington’s LinkedIn newsletter ‘Understood’ is all about the answer to that question and the challenge it continues to pose to B2B marketing teams. Because true value isn’t a what, it’s a why. It’s not what we sell, it’s why what we sell matters to the customer.

Understood will reflect on this and more over the coming months. The first edition, ‘The marketing unlock’, explores the gap between marketing that performs and marketing that connects. In this Q&A, we discussed the career moments that inspired the series and her perspective on what can make B2B marketing more valuable to customers.

If you care about keeping your customers at the heart of your work, you'll find a lot to love and learn from in this series.

I’ve always been drawn to understanding how people make decisions, what they value, and what builds trust, and I’ve found that those are the same questions that sit at the heart of marketing. Psychology shaped my perspective of marketing as something deeply contextual, and perhaps less about persuasion and more about understanding how different people assign meaning and value. That mindset has stayed with me throughout every role.

I’m originally from the U.S. but had the great privilege of being sponsored by Thomson Reuters in London, which eventually led to becoming a key member in building their account-based marketing (ABM) team. At the time, I was pursuing my MBA, writing a dissertation about work I was very passionate about, which was deep research into the ‘why’: Why does this resonate with one persona, one region, or one company so much but not another? Why does the same product mean something completely different to a portfolio manager versus a CEO?

Now, I work in product marketing, which also forces you to translate what an organisation offers into what a customer actually cares about. This is not so much about features, but understanding the contextualised value to the customer, then building the positioning, product story, and personalised go-to-market strategy around that.

It came from moving across functions. Digital, operations, integrated, account-based, and product marketing all gave me a different vantage point on the same underlying challenge: how do you build trust and make what you offer genuinely meaningful to the customer, creating a symbiosis with commercial impact?

I noticed that every team was trying to solve that problem with their own strategies, at times in isolation. Product marketing defined the value, automation, and campaigns activated, ABM personalised, and insight sat somewhere else. Marketing works best as a system: insight uncovers what matters, product marketing translates that into positioning, and activation brings it to life at the right moment, for the right audience.

Product marketing has become my anchor in this system because it sits at the intersection of customer, product, and strategy. When we share positioning, every part of the system benefits, and the business can develop a much stronger sense of where the value lies.

Value is defined by context

The most important thing ABM taught me, and it’s something I always come back to, is that value isn’t defined by the product, it’s defined by the customer’s context. The same platform capability can mean efficiency to one client, risk reduction to another, or competitive advantage to a third. It might be the same feature but it translates as a completely different currency.

In ABM, I worked closely with our most strategic accounts on programmes shaped around what mattered to them, not just to us. They came from real conversations about what clients were trying to solve, the pressures they were under, and the outcomes they were aiming for.

Marketing should shape strategy

That level of proximity changed how I think about marketing. It reinforced something I feel quite strongly about, which is that marketing shouldn’t just activate strategy, it should shape it. When you’re that close to the customer, you have access to insight that often the rest of the organisation doesn’t have. That’s what I’ve carried into product marketing. It’s at a larger scale, but the work is still about value translation; connecting what our offerings can do in accordance to what a client actually cares about.

Organising around execution and insight

B2B Marketing teams are usually organised by a channel, function, or output, which means that the thing that should sit at the centre – a shared understanding of what customers actually value – often doesn’t meaningfully exist. That’s why I think product marketing is having a moment: it’s one of the few functions that naturally bridges customer, product, and strategy. It can provide the whole organisation a common language for value.

Resolving scale versus relevance

B2B buyers expect you to understand their world, but organisations need to operate efficiently across portfolios, platforms, and segments. Great opportunity comes when ABM, segment marketing, and product marketing teams complement each other.

The value discovery system

Both challenges can be solved by orienting marketing teams around a value discovery system. Insight informs product, which then sharpens positioning, which is then personalised at scale and activated. When this works in a virtuous circle, marketing can stop being a team that just communicates value and become a function that helps the business find it.

Jessica Hetherington is SVP of Platforms Marketing at BNY, with a passion for marketing that makes a lasting impact with tangible results. Understood is a monthly exploration of insights and ideas learned over her 15 year career, dedicated to unlocking the real value of marketing within B2B organisations.

Understood is produced in collaboration with Mimi Hayton, Personal Brand Strategist and Thought Leadership Consultant. To find out more about unlocking your own value through insight-led personal brand building, reach out to her on LinkedIn.

Thanks for joining us this week. Anything we missed? Something we should include next week? Send us your shout-outs and strong opinions to include in next week’s edition at [email protected]. 

Spark is a production of Vivace, a global B2B creative studio and consultancy that helps businesses drive meaningful brand and commercial impact. Get in touch if you’d like to chat with any of the team. Have a great week ahead.