Julie Bailey Blanche

I lead the team that drives iRobot’s strategy around marketing and the customer experience. At the highest level, I think about our customers in terms of the moments when our products can benefit them the most: allergy season, bringing a new pet home, or when they just need an extra hand around the house. Through this lens, I guide the development of our marketing strategies, planning, and partnerships. My goal is to craft creative and engaging approaches to differentiate iRobot’s brand based on the thoughtful intelligence we develop and the beautifully designed, high-performance robots we deliver. One of the perks of my job is that I get to work within an amazing executive team that embodies the partnership, humility, and acceptance we should all aspire to bring to our work environments. My colleagues value my contributions and let me be me, for which I am grateful. I lead efforts to promote consumer engagement with our brand and am responsible for CRM processes, email campaigns, and iRobot’s social media presence. I always view our work through a critical lens and focus on answering several key questions: How effective is our media presence? How efficient is our spending, and is it driving demand? Is it capturing demand? Are we efficiently spending on media and seeing benefits from that spending? As a leader, I strive to be transparent, authentic, and above all else, to lead with love.

iRobot hired me to spearhead a customer-first transformation within the company, and my primary responsibility was helping the company become more consumer-first and less product focused. It was also my job to make sure consumers saw the true value of the robots we produce beyond just the hardware. I helped our customers see how iRobot products would positively impact their lives. The technical aspects of this role concentrated on developing and using data-driven marketing tools to better understand our customers and their needs, so we could design our customer experiences with a clearer end-user in mind. My work also contributed to iRobot’s growing direct-to-consumer (D2C) platform, as I developed and executed strategies to drive more traffic to our newly established D2C websites. Outside of marketing, I worked with iRobot’s claims teams to help craft a new understanding of claims within the organization. Rather than simply focusing on the hardware, I helped our teams become even more customer-oriented and focused on solving problems.

I led strategic growth for the North American market at Digitas, where I was the account team leader and lead strategist responsible for several high-profile clients, including Dunkin’, Baskin-Robbins, CVS Health, Bank of America Corporation (BAC), Aflac, Living Social, PUMA, Ally Bank (GMAC), Baxter, Fidelity, Stop & Shop, CA Technologies, and AT&T. My teams developed effective digital marketing solutions for complex global clientele. I also handled strategic development for more than 80 prospect brands. I authored the plan of attack for each prospect based on the ever-changing environment, consumer behavior, brand goals, and brand health. Within Digitas, I assisted in developing a new brand narrative along with a CRM strategy tailored for higher performance in business development. The strategy I delivered led the agency with an 87% new business conversion rate. I managed multiple cross-functional teams of up to 50 employees covering various disciplines, including creative, user experience, media, planning, analytics, technology, and project management. Over the course of my 18 years with Digitas, I worked my way up from an entry-level sales position and made positive, lasting impacts at every level of the organization.

In this role, I was responsible for repeatable and consecutive growth with multiple high-priority clients, including CVS Health and Dunkin’. My accounts generated year-over-year revenue growth in excess of 50%. I managed multiple cross-functional teams of up to 50 employees, including creative, user experience, media, planning, analytics, technology, and project management professionals. I was responsible for marshalling all the resources needed to build complex digital solutions for our clients. I also led and optimized a cross-agency team structure for all strategies and executions supporting high-profile projects for CVS Health, Bank of America, Aflac, and Fidelity. In this capacity, I managed up to 10 unique digital, PR, branding, and general agencies.

I served as the head of prospecting for the Boston and Detroit Regions and developed internal business development tools such as Connect IQ, which was a proprietary tool built to evaluate a brand’s end-to-end experience and quantify the revenue opportunity being left on the table (in relation to the top competitors within their category). In some cases, this strategy resulted in revenue growth of more than $1.3 billion. I also served as the national retail lead for DigitasLBi.

In this role, I managed several high-profile accounts and served as the Digitas Marketing Director Level Team Meeting Lead. I was also co-chair of the Digitas Women’s Forum and a member of the VivaWomen’s International Committee, which focused on mentorship.

In my first executive-level role, I led several marketing teams and took a leadership role in developing training and curricula to promote professional growth across the agency. My accomplishments include developing and teaching an “Agile for Agency” process, revamping the Marketing Core Competency Model, developing the Marketing Employee Rotation Program, and teaching the Presentation Storytelling cross-capability employee course. I also led all marketing pro bono work for the MGH 100 new digital and event campaign and developed and taught the curriculum for the marketing portion of the Digitas Marketing/Project Management union.

I led and mentored a team of 15 marketing professionals who supported numerous key agency accounts.

As a marketing manager, I led a small sales team.

I joined Digitas as an entry-level sales associate. In this role, I gained valuable face-to-face sales experience working with several key accounts.