Spotlight : Dennis Juenger
Dennis Juenger is a German marketer living in the United Kingdom. As the Head of Brand of Sika, a global industrial specialty chemicals company with over 34,000 employees operating in 102 countries, he spends his time storytelling the impact of the work his organization has on civilization – on the construction of the modern world.
In your own words, what is the Sika story? What is so impressive about this organization?
Because we don’t slap branding on our projects, the Sika brand is completely unseen. So you wouldn’t really know about it, but Sika is everywhere around you. Sika is the foundation of the modern world. Without our products, the modern world could not exist; without our products, the modern world could not be built. And, what I think is so uniquely attractive about working at Sika, from a marketing and branding and communications point of view, is the opportunity of telling that story. We are at the forefront of creating these incredible modern infrastructure projects, but the stories are yet to be told. I think we are in a new era of understanding creative storytelling, and that is why I am at Sika—to help facilitate that storytelling to a modern audience.
You were born in Germany, yes? What was childhood like?
Yes, I had a very lucky upbringing. I was happy and filled with very good schooling. From a very early age I was taught to balance my creativity with discipline, which has proven very important.
From there?
I did my military service in Germany. It was three months with NATO in Holland, and then in the ministry of defence. Afterwards, I wanted to go into banking and asset management, which is what I got my degree in. I started working in that field, and I hated it from day one. All of the things that became obvious in the market crash in 2008 were already becoming visible in 1999, and it was clear that there was no morality in the field.
How’d you go from banking into marketing? They don’t usually go hand in hand…
At the time, in Germany, the marketing degrees were very technical so I came to the UK to get my degree, and I had a chance encounter with the marketing director of Jaguar. It all happened rather quickly. He later became my mentor and invited me to join Jaguar Cars. I loved my time there. It was half a decade of very formative experience. I was taught so many things about brand building specifically.
After Jaguar, I went into new technology fields: AI and industrial automation. I worked for an American organization in a high-technology defense application. Then, I was asked to join Bosch, a big German organization, and I stayed at Bosch for over a decade, but then my 40th birthday coincided with my ten year anniversary—my wife calls it my midlife crisis—I realized that if I stayed at Bosch for longer, I’d retire there and never see anything else. So, I moved on to a small, family-owned business for about a year and a half, but then this Sika opportunity came up.
Why’d you make that leap to Sika?
A gentleman named Tom, a real visionary leader, attracted me. He understood that the future is created by those who seek it, and in his time here he’s assembled a team to help him reshape Sika. It’s been incredible.
Back to Jaguar for a second. Unlike Sika, the Jaguar brand language and perspective is public – it’s ingrained in culture. Talk to me a little bit about that brand at its best…
I think Jaguar was part of my identity growing up. I was very lucky. My grandfather had motorcycles and cars and everything, but also he had an old Jaguar E-Type in British racing green with cream leather interior. He unfortunately passed away when I was twelve, but my very early childhood memories of the car and of the brand were something that was quite special and also quite different to what I was experiencing in German culture. It was something quite distinctly different.
I was very lucky to join Jaguar in 2002 just as they were reimagining the brand. I also think Jaguar did things that were very wrong, no doubt about it, but what they did very well was understanding how different they were to everything else on the market, and how they could capitalize on it. We always used to say you don’t have to be liked by 95 percent, you have to be loved by 5 percent.
I lived in Istanbul for a little while while I was at Jaguar and was really looking after that really high-end clientele. And that was really, I think, the heyday. I launched the Daimler motor car back into the market, a very ultra, ultra luxury version to compete with the Bentleys and the Rolls Royces of the time. And I found Jaguar to be a brand with incredible potential. I think where they went wrong in the end is that they tried to be mass market. They tried to be a car company, or a brand, that attracts mass appeal. And, with mass appeal becomes the ever dropping of your price point, and it just all fell apart a little bit in the end. That was one of the reasons why I left Jaguar. And I think also looking at what they are doing now, with a very clear cut, very new creative direction—although I think the way they launched it is maybe slightly different than I would have launched it—you can see that they are reconnecting with their ultra luxury layer. They are reconnecting with this understanding that a Jaguar should be something that very few people drive.
It’s a hell of a brand, isn’t it?
Yeah, very good. And I hope they will do very well. I hope that they will survive. I think the difficulty in today’s world is that you have to, as a brand, really find your reason why. And your reason why can’t just be you doing what everybody else is doing. And I hope that Jaguar can reconnect with that purpose.
You talk a lot about superpowers. I think it’s such a great concept because I think it’s obviously complimentary, but it’s also recognition that some elements are inborn. And I think that that’s something that we do forget : that we are individually born with remarkable skills that are all different. And, it takes a leader, someone that is older and wiser, to not just leverage theirs, but to identify others’ and put them in positions. Talk to me a little bit about that concept. And then if you wouldn’t mind, what do you think your strengths are? What are your inborn superpowers?
They’re the most important variable when I’m choosing a creative partner, like you, I’ll tell you that. I think one of the things that I’ve seen and that I’ve learned over my career, which is now coming up to 25 plus years, is that some people just have it. And, together, we can make magic. My wife and I always joke about a saying we heard ages ago … ‘style, for some as natural as breathing, for others as elusive as the Holy Grail’. And, I think especially in the creative field and in the brand building field, there is only, I think, about 60% of this that you can teach. And I think there is a lot of this that really has to be inherently within you. And I think what I’ve seen in a couple of individuals across my career is that superpower of being able to demonstrate and tell the story of why a brand should matter.
I think that is also why I distinguish a little bit in marketing and brand building. I think marketing, the what, is very much identified by a lot of information. You think just because you tell somebody a lot of details about something, they will be able to make the connection of why that is relevant to them? Whereas, in brand building—and that is maybe also where I see my superpower—how do you distill the essence of something down and down and down to the point where you can connect it emotionally to your target audience.
One of the things that I always say at Sika is that I don’t really want my team to see the difference between business to business and business to consumer. I don’t think that exists anymore. I think for now, it is about business to human. There is a human being on the other side of every phone. Today, with social media, you’re on somebody’s device while they wait for a flight, you’re in somebody’s living room, you’re in somebody’s moment of relaxation, for example. And I think, or I hope, my superpower is that I can creatively tell a story that matters and creatively tell a story that connects with somebody, wherever they might be.
Could you give me a really high-level overview of what the concept was behind the piece that we worked on together?
Each time we link with one of our customers, it’s very specific about one of our products. So each time you would see something from Sika on your LinkedIn feed or your TikTok feed or wherever we were trying to get in touch with you, it’s very technical and very product specific. And, although I think those elements are very important, I think as part of a super brand, you need to be more than just transactional. It needs to be emotional. I think you need to hold a space in your customers and consumers consciousness, and the piece that we worked on together in Florence— the sponsorship of a racing team—was about how we can convey all the values of Sika and how they compare excellence, performance, teamwork. How do they compare and connect to the values of this racing team and how do we do this in a very engaging and creative way?
In your podcast I think you said it so beautifully that the city, Sika, and the racing team become characters. And you know, how do you link those characters together, and how do they interact with each other in a way that connects to your customers’ audience? That was the purpose of this piece. And of course, there will be many people who say, oh, well, you’re a business to business organization, why do you do stuff like that? And for me, it comes back to the business to human approach, because the human on the other side of what you’re trying to convey, they have to be interested, they have to be engaged with your content. They have to love you.
Outside of your professional career, who’s been a storyteller that has impacted you? Who has impressed you?
I suppose it’s a cliche, but maybe my grandfather. He had a wonderful yet traumatic life. He was a horse breeder in eastern Prussia, from a very long line of very successful horse breeders. He married my grandma literally 20 minutes before he was shipped out to Russia during the war. He then fought the Russians, went to Stalingrad, one of the most horrific battles of humanity, survived, came back, and was captured by the Gestapo on the 7th of May 1945 because he refused to fight on. He would have been shot on the morning of the 8th of May, 1945, which is also his birthday, and Germany surrendered on the morning of the 8th. He then was captured by the Russians and was a prisoner of war for six years. His farm in East Prussia was burned to the ground by the invading Russian army, and he literally started again with nothing. And still, he never lost his spirit. He never lost his ability to see the good in people, and he never lost the ability to find happiness in the world. He rebuilt his fortune, and he became very successful again. And the stories he would tell you, they were incredible.
He died on the way to get breakfast croissants for my grandma. He had a heart attack in the car. I was twelve at the time and he was 70, and I wish he would have lived to 100 because I would have loved to hear some more of those stories.
