Living the Dream: Julie Cottineau
Email this article to a friend 
Print this Article
Name: Julie Cottineau
Age: 42
Location: New York
Education: B.A. in Communications, Minor in Creative Writing from the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Pennsylvania
Job Title: Vice President Brand, Virgin USA
What She Does: Julie oversees branding strategy for new Virgin companies in North America. She recently worked on Virgin Money, a peer-to-peer lending financial-services company that launched in October 2007.
How She Got Her Gig: “I’ve been in branding since I was born,” says Julie. “When I was a child, I wanted a pet and my parents said no—so I got a Cool Whip container, put some grass in there, poked some holes in the top, and created a pet rock. This was years before the pet-rock craze hit.” After interning at CBS, she spent 10 years working in advertising at Grey Worldwide and eight years at Interbrand before joining Virgin USA.
An American in Paris: During her time at Grey Worldwide, Julie decided to reinvent her career and asked to be transferred to Paris! “I was 26, single, and looking for adventure,” she says. “When you find yourself getting bored, reinvent your job.” She spent three years there as an International Account Director.
Lyrics to Live By: On her commute to work, Julie listens to Unwritten by Natasha Bedingfield. The lyrics “Staring at the blank page before you/Open up the dirty window/Let the sun illuminate the words that you could not find” remind her to take a blank page, create her own job and bring her whole self to work.
Taking the Good With the Bad: “The best part of my job is the brand—it opens doors, and if it was a person, it would be the kind of person I like to be around.” (The perks aren’t bad either: She recently got to fly on the jet of Sir Richard Branson, Virgin’s founder.) But balancing a powerful brand and a successful business is also the most challenging part of her job. “Before I could make a recommendation to a company, have the best intentions, but not be ultimately responsible for the impact on the business,” she says. “Now I work directly for the brand.”
This Job’s for You if: You have an insatiable curiosity. “The best way to be good at branding is to be interested in everything around you—people, trends, music, politics—read every section of the newspaper,” says Julie. It doesn’t hurt to be resourceful, either. “You have to be always looking for new ways to solve common problems.”