What do American Girl and Vivace have in common?

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 Spark reader,

Over the coming months we plan to dedicate a Spark to each of Vivace’s core team members and frequent collaborators so you can get to know the wizards behind the curtain a little better.

For this edition, Spark Editor Mimi spoke with our newly appointed Managing Director, Jeanette Juetten who brings over 20 years of business wisdom and a genuine passion for customer and user experience to our talent pool. Ryan and I could not be more appreciative that the stars aligned for Jeanette to join us at this stage in Vivace’s journey.

In other developments, many of you will know that a love of music runs deep here at Vivace HQ, so it will come as no surprise that we’ve decided to expand our media portfolio into music curation. Please come and join us on Spotify to Vibe with Vivace (sorry Apple Music lovers, we’ll add it to the roadmap), where we’ll be regularly sharing an eclectic selection of handpicked tunes.

Finally, if you’re in the twin cities in the coming weeks, we’d love for you to come and vibe with us IRL at our Vandalia office in St Paul on Thursday, December 5 – more details below.

And now we invite you to sit back, put on our inaugural playlist: Founder Mode, and get to know one of the most vital members of the vibrant Vivace team.

-joel

“I just find the area of customer interaction and customer feedback fascinating”

Team profile: Jeanette Juetten

I've always worked in corporate – I spent 13 years at American Girl in the digital and marketing space, spreading my time across E-comm and content, as well as brand management. I also amassed quite a few of their dolls over the years – you can see it in the photo above. I often say that I grew up there; not only did I have amazing female leaders who demonstrated what good marketing and leadership look like, I started when I was in my 20s and was able to really learn and grow with the brand. I then took those lessons forward into my career in many different ways.

When we relocated to the Twin Cities for my husband's job, I joined Thomson Reuters. So I got to work with a bunch of really talented people in the GCS [Global Creative Services] organization, put together and launch the TR.com revamp, and then continue on to work with their Tax and Accounting division.

From there I went to Ecolab’s Food & Beverage Division where I did more E-comm again. That was a lot of user experience, arranging product photography and content, as well as back end technology – all the pieces needed to launch a new site. One of the most compelling aspects of this initiative was the change management plan, which included cultivating internal employee "champions" as early adopters, conducting customer focus groups, and organizing onsite visits to refine and enhance the user experience and increase adoption.

After that I wanted experience something very different, so I went to a non-corporate role at the privately held company Dedicated Networks. It was still a B2B environment but working with in-house refurbished technology. So it was a really interesting marketing proposition in that you not only had to market to the people you bought the equipment from, you also had to market the refurbished tech to sell it on.

Recently I took some time off from full-time work and was at a transition point in my career. I began partially working with another small agency in the research and user experience space and I had some extra capacity. At the same time, Vivace needed to fill a gap that they had with a couple of big clients, which lead to me working part-time here initially. I then picked up more hours and ultimately took on the role of Managing Director, which I’m super excited about. So it was the perfect moment of everything colliding at the right time.

What I really liked about teaming up with Joel and Ryan is that I knew the both of them already from my time at TR and the pieces just fit together really well. We all have very different strengths and I think we're able to showcase that by working really closely together day in and day out and just making things happen through collaboration. We have some great clients that we're working with and we’re having some fun while we're at it too!

Long story short, I've always been in marketing and digital project management, and I’ve really enjoyed the organization and process that it’s brought me. But because I’ve straddled the line between digital and marketing, I've also developed a love of user experience.

User experience is one of the things that companies can have the most control over, and yet don’t put enough time and attention towards. It’s about thinking collectively of all the ways somebody can connect with your brand, through experiences and interactions; whether that's an email that you send regularly, your webinars, the product that they’re buying from you, or whatever that looks like for your business. I think we neglect that every single one of those touchpoints is a place in which you get to really sell your brand and its worth or destroy it.

For example, I have a doctor's appointment in two weeks in which I have had no less than 20 communications between text and email. Usually they come three at a time – at which point I really want to pick up the phone and call them to say, “hey, somebody needs to actually be a new patient and go through this experience, because this is really awful and you should work on fixing it!” The point being that I'm already turned off going to this specialist because of the ridiculous amount of communication.

So every interaction has the potential to strengthen your loyalty and your relationship with that brand and the potential to harm it. That is why I love to engage in research through focus groups with employees, stakeholders, or current or future customers:

• What are they thinking?

• How are they feeling?

• What are their ideas on how to improve things?

I want to really understand that customer's headspace, their personas. You can build out different personas that matter to your business and make sure that you're really reaching those customers in different ways at their level: through the right communication, messaging, frequency and touchpoints.

And while personalization has been around for a long time, user experience is broadening the definition of personalization. We used to think of personalization as: how do you customize a website interface or an app? And it's so much more than just “Hello, Jeanette” when I show up in my account space.

Putting time and attention towards this overlooked area is something that I feel passionately about. Engaging the customers that you're working for and making sure you're giving them every reason to come back to your brand, and not to look elsewhere, really makes a difference regardless of whether it’s a B2B or a B2C environment.

As told to Mimi Hayton.

Jeanette’s expertise spans digital marketing, user experience, market research, facilitation, strategy, digital communication, and execution. She lives in Wisconsin with her husband, teenage daughter, and their beloved Chihuahua-Pug mix, Olive. As well as being passionate about UX, Jeanette has been a Wisconsin Badgers season ticket holder since graduating from the University of Wisconsin-Madison over 20 years ago. She’s also visited almost 40 countries and nearly every U.S. state (just 5 to go!).

Coming up

📰 Spark
Jeanette shares her thoughts on why B2B organizations tend to under-prioritize UX/CX and lessons from more than 20 years of leading projects where it has made a difference.

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.