Powering the Future: Brand-Building in Emerging MarketsPowering the Future: Brand-Building in Emerging Markets

Powering the Future: Brand-Building in Emerging Markets Transcript:

Announcer: You’re listening to The Kula Ring, a podcast made for manufacturing marketers. 

Jeff White: Welcome to the Kula Ring, a podcast for manufacturing marketers brought to you by Kula partners. My name is Jeff White and joining me today is Carman Pirie. Carman, how are you doing, sir? 

Carman Pirie: I’m doing well. And look, it’s always a pleasure to it was a pleasure to bring another smart marketer to our listeners here on The Kula Ring, absolutely. 

Jeff White: It’s been a fun day. We’ve recorded a number of episodes today. Podcasting is always an adventure. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah. So now that you’ve disclosed that we’ve recorded a number we have really no excuse cause we have, we were supposed to be practiced now. All warmed up. Yeah, exactly.

I must say, I’m still ingesting espresso, if anybody is curious. It’s 

Jeff White: three in the afternoon here. So that’s, yeah, the brain 

Carman Pirie: will start working right around four 30. I reckon that’s what things normally come online. Exactly. No, I’m excited for today’s conversation. I think it’s an interesting dynamic.

A lot of manufacturing marketers face marketing into new verticals or emerging verticals for their, within their category or an emerging category overall. And I’m excited for the expertise and insight that today’s guests will bring. 

Jeff White: Yeah. And I think in this particular case, we’ve got both.

Very much emerging and very much lots of verticals to play with. Yeah, let’s dive right into it. So joining us today is Paul Drabble. Paul is the global marketing director at Delta Q. Welcome to the Cooler Ring, Paul. 

Paul Drabble: Hello, Jeff. Hello, Carman. Thanks for having me on. 

Carman Pirie: Awesome to have you on the show, Paul.

And look, I can we can hear a little bit of an Australian accent. I think they’re on the other end. So perhaps let our listeners know how you ended up at Delta Q and a little bit of that background and then tell us about the company as well, if you would.

Paul Drabble: Sure. Okay. I’ll keep my little story short. I am an Australian expat, but I’ve been living in Canada for 23 years now, so I’m about as Canadian as you guys.

But throughout my career over 20 years in marketing, I’ve been in all sorts of different business settings. Public companies, tech companies consumer products. But I’ve had a pretty good stint in the tech space in manufacturing, particularly, in power electronics manufacturing.

I’ve been with Delta-Q Technologies which is part of the ZAPI group for coming into my third year. But prior to that, I worked for almost 10 years with Alpha Technologies, which is a manufacturer of DC power solutions for the telecommunications network. So I’ve seen a little bit in my space lots of change for sure.

So happy to share that with you guys today. 

Carman Pirie: Very cool. And I must say, for somebody who’s been in Canada for 20-some-odd years, you’ve maintained a nice little healthy bit of that Australian accent. That’s what’s nice to see.

Paul Drabble: I don’t think I’ll ever lose it.

Carman Pirie: And tell us a little bit about Delta Q. What do you all do? 

Paul Drabble: Oh Delta Q this is actually our 25th anniversary this year. We’re located in Vancouver. In British Columbia. We design and engineer, design and manufacture battery chargers for industrial and recreational electric vehicles.

We cater to a whole, a pretty broad range of electrifying segments. Some of them are mature. Some of them are emerging. Some of the more mature ones are in material handling, which is very electrified. Golf cars, and scissor lifts, but the newer ones that are emerging are e mobility applications and construction agriculture, which is electrifying too.

Jeff White: I don’t know that everybody would have thought that material handling was necessarily an EV type of entity, or that there was a lot of electrification there, but that’s really interesting to hear that’s been going on a long while. 

Paul Drabble: No, it has. A lot of it’s indoor, right? So if you take away a combustion engine, then it’s a lot cleaner and quieter and in material handling it’s really about the warehouse of the future, which is 24 7 and a lot of it’s becoming automated too with robotics. So you can have a 24 7 operation and electrification makes that possible for sure.

Carman Pirie: What an exciting space to be in, and an interesting kind of dynamic between the recreational and industrial as well as more emerging verticals versus those where the technology is quite mature. Maybe I’d like to zero in initially on those verticals where your products really just beginning to take hold where electrification is really just more of an emerging change versus the established status quo.

As a leader in the space, are you taking the approach of? Of education first I guess to what extent are you leading or educating that market versus simply reacting to and processing demand? 

Paul Drabble: I think it’s about understanding the marketplace and what the opportunity is there, right?

And, our audience is probably not aware of who we are. And the value of electrification. So I think the initial challenge is really about getting your brand in front of your audience and helping them understand who you are and what you’re trying to do there, I think.

So it is about brand awareness. Brand impressions getting in all the right places and getting your message or your presence or your people into all the various touch points in that B2B space, whether it’s a live event or it’s digital marketing. So I think it is an educational and informative approach at the start is definitely the sales pitch and how great you are.

That comes a lot later in, in the communication funnel, but at the start, it’s about just letting everyone out there know who you are and then what you’re good at and why they should care. 

Jeff White: I would imagine that a lot of that early discovery of you as a provider of this type of technology is coming through those in-person events, is it?

Paul Drabble: Yeah, I think so. Yeah. Yeah. We do quite a few international events in Europe and North America every year. And we’re always looking for opportunities to get on stage and speak. Within our organization, we have a very good representation of different subject matter experts in engineering and regulatory product design, but also, the people who interact directly with the customers understand the customer pain points and how we, provide that we’re a solution provider to their pain points.

We like to get those guys out there and in, front of the industry and speaking takes advantage of those speaking opportunities for sure. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah, I love it when a manufacturer leans on the talent that they have a resident around the room if you will, or around them, whether it be the head office or the factory floor and I could see that making sense in your category for certain.

I’m curious, how much is that, or how much are you scripting that versus how much are you just simply getting the experts in the right room and getting out of their way? Thank you. 

Paul Drabble: Oh I think we, our part is that we have a number of programs within marketing, particularly our PR agency.

They go out and they pitch a lot of the trade outlets and they pitch ideas and they get engagement on a topic. And then, we really try to create an outline of the topic that works for both sides. So we pre-agree on that. And then it makes a lot easier for us.

For our subject matter expert to come in and speak in a sort of relevant and engaging way on a particular topic without drifting off. 

Carman Pirie: Man, we could probably use that in this podcast.

It that, that strikes me as a kind of a nice balance as well, because I think so many, so often marketers find that the subject matter experts that are sitting throughout the organization, maybe, they’re not necessarily comfortable just winging it. Or being left to their own devices.

It sounds as though you’re, you’re taking a solid approach thereof shaping the outline, giving it some guidance and then giving some room to roam within it. 

Paul Drabble: Yeah, I think I’m pretty fortunate that a lot of the guys I work with, they’re all veterans, right?

They’ve all got deep industry experience, but we do have some, new guys that come in, particularly in areas like application engineering that they’re pretty fresh out of, college or whatever, and they maybe haven’t developed those sorts of presentation skills and, Just the overall, I think, domain knowledge so they can get up there and they can feel that they can speak authoritatively on a topic in an authentic way an engaging way.

So I think, people have to start somewhere if they’re going to become a subject matter expert, but all the folks that I work with I have no concerns about their ability to get up on stage and speak in a really organized way. 

Jeff White: Are you also leveraging Those subject matter experts in a digital fashion as well?

Paul Drabble: Okay. Yeah. We’re doing some video if we can we’re always looking for opportunities Not just to do written articles and editorial pieces that get published on websites doing some kind of live interactive and just mixing up that media a little bit Everybody knows that video has a high engagement rate we try to mix it up a little bit and spread it out and offer different kinds of pieces for consumption to our audience.

Carman Pirie: Paul, what would you say is the vertical that you’re marketing into currently that’s the most immature from its adoption? 

Paul Drabble: I’ll say it’s probably, immobility in construction because it’s growing so fast it’s spreading in, it’s largely driven actually by by regulations and that that are trying to transition away from combustion engine reduce greenhouse gas emissions and things like that.

But I think it’s changing actually because the technology is changing the dynamic in terms of the total cost of ownership, which has been a bit of a hump to get past for a lot of these RVMs that want to electrify. But lithium-ion battery cost has gone down and other things have gone down and overall the longer-term cost of ownership is with less maintenance and other things.

It’s. Making it more attractive for OEMs to get into the space and electrify. Regulations have driven, but, I think. Generally, it’s enabling more OEMs to consider that this is the future and when everybody else is doing it, your competitors are doing it as well they need to either get on it or get left behind.

We want to be. Positioned in that space to be that solutions provider. And we’re looking at all sorts of ways that all those different kinds of channels that we can get our brand Value proposition out there. So when they are ready to electrify they come to talk to us. 

Carman Pirie: How do you find the experience translates from some of the other more mature verticals?

I think one of the interesting pieces about you mentioned golf cars and I can imagine that a lot of people making the decisions around the electrification in the construction space have spent a little bit of time inside an electric golf cart as an example. Does that, I’m sure the experience translates from a technical perspective in many cases.

But does it from a marketing and sales perspective, do you find that it resonates with the fact that you’ve had this kind of frosted mini-week kind of personality of the industrial and the recreational? 

Paul Drabble: Yeah. Yeah. I think that’s definitely part of our messaging is that we have a legacy.

Being part of the Zappy group, which is an enterprise of. Independent companies that are all, around electrification drivetrains we’ve had great success in some of these mature electrification industries like golf cars material handling equipment, scissor lifts and things like that.

Success in those industries and overcoming all the challenges and working with some of the biggest OEMs gives us a lot of credibility, I think and, working closely to enable these OEMs to electrify make, makes our message, a lot, more credible because, a lot of these OEMs They’re really looking for evidence-based validation who are these guys, are they, have they been around, are they, do they know what they’re doing, can they help us get to market quicker?

So all that helps, absolutely. Having success in other industries, allowing us to pollinate the pollination concept to new industries is a real advantage. 

Jeff White: How are you organized from, an overall sales structure, a sales team structure perspective? Is it by vertical or is it more by product type offering or something like that?

Paul Drabble: With Zapper Group, it’s a little bit more complex because, we’re doing not just battery chargers, we’re doing motors and inverters and controllers. Just looking at the charger. Business. A lot of it is in direct-to-OEM sales, right? Working directly with the big OEMs either, nationally or globally, but with the smaller verticals.

And the newer ones we look at, through channel partners they could be distributors, they could be integrators, right? So these value-added guys that can come in, they have some technical expertise, you can help, they not only sell our charges, but they can tell the customer how to put it together and get it working right.

We also look for other partnerships like battery suppliers too, right? We try to access their customers and help each other out there. There are a number of ways that you know we can try to get to market other than just having, a sales team that has direct relationships.

Carman Pirie: I wonder, especially with those integrators that you mentioned, there are a number of manufacturing enterprises that kind of target similar people or try to go to market via a value-added partner such as that. , I wouldn’t mind drilling in on that a little bit. Have you? Have you found any secret sauce there of support for those partners or a method of working with them that just seems to over-index in terms of the results it yields?

Paul Drabble: I think a lot, I think it really comes down to, technical capability. We work closely with these integrators to train them. But in the end, and we support them along the way we have an internal application engineering team that can that can help them overcome some of the technical challenges around integration.

For sure. But at the end of the day, I think they have to have a core of their own people that have the capability to do this on their own, right? And I think that’s a big part of the success. If that is missing, then it’s, it tends to put a lot of the strain on us, to support the success there, right?

So I think the ones that we look at that have been really good for us have a very strong engineering capability within. 

Jeff White: Putting the engineers together on both sides. 

Paul Drabble: Yeah, I think so. Yeah. Yeah. I 

Carman Pirie: Wonder too if there’s some secret in there around just the information or know-how asymmetry if that makes sense.

I don’t know, Jeff, if that, yeah. Look, 

Paul Drabble: We’ve had a really diverse landscape of applications that we’ve been able to problem solve through and have success in, I’ll tell you almost every customer has required some kind of level of customization without products, right?

, it would be a wonderful world if we could just have a standard product off the shelf, take this, plug it in and to A and connect A and B and away you go. We, a lot of it comes down to the algorithms, in fact, right? Every end user might Have a different kind of battery chemistry or battery type, which requires a specific charging algorithm or connectors or something like that their application has, space constraints and they need a special connector.

So all of that, gets has to be problem-solved either by us or the integrator, right? 

Jeff White: This isn’t really a marketing thing. Or sales question per se, but I wonder is there a time you think that maybe we would get to a point where there are more standard off-the-shelf integrations for these things, where there, there are standardizations that are applied even across industries or within individual industries?

Paul Drabble: I think so. I think you could, you’re seeing it a little bit more on electric vehicles particularly with the standardization of connectors, right? Our North American Jade 1772 connector and receptacle is, it’s different in other parts of the world, right? So I think there’s a when you look at an industry like rental which is really huge in supplying electrified vehicles in North America, for example, right?

Massive fleets. If you can standardize on, on, on things around that, it’s going to make it a lot easier and reduce costs. We all saw the, you see the craziness with smartphones, everybody having their own proprietary connectors and stuff. And now we’re slowly getting to USB C now, and even Apple have dropped their lightning connector.

It’s standardization I think is going to make sense for sure. 

Jeff White: Yeah. Thank you. European Union for forcing me to use that standard. Honestly, I don’t think it’s a, it’s been a terrible thing. Yeah. 

Carman Pirie: Every Apple user has at least one drawer in their office and home dedicated to those connectors that no longer make any sense.

Paul Drabble: Yeah. It’s like a museum, right? Of history, museum, connecting peripherals. 

Jeff White: The Apple profit center. Yes. 

Carman Pirie: I think when I. When you think of these various verticals and different levels of maturity, you mentioned bringing subject matter experts into play across a range of them. So I get the sense that’s certainly part of the playbook.

What else would you say is a standard piece that you say is, if you have you’re only going to do two or three things in each of those verticals, what are they going to be? 

Paul Drabble: Oh, in terms of actual sort of tactics. I think, one tactic that we’ve had a lot of success with is webinars.

And leveraging the webinar platform, we have, there’s a great tool set out there now, whatever you use, whether it’s Zoom or anything like that. The whole, Registration process and we’ve got tools for all the database management and all that kind of stuff all the outreaches everything’s so measurable now And you know if you’ve got a really well-defined topic and a good speaker, it’s a terrific asset once you’ve done it you can keep using that over and over again.

Honestly, when you’re in a technology transition some of these pieces have a bit of a shelf life, right? They can age quickly but still, if you can really nail it and do a great webinar and and people got a lot of it out of that webinar, they’re going to come to the next one, right?

And they’re going to tell the contacts within their network, other people that we want to meet. They’re going to tell them that these guys put on a really great webinar and they’re doing another one. Come along and join that. So I think, webinars, take a bit of work. There are a lot of moving pieces that have to be combined to create the deck and everything else.

And but I think, They’re definitely worth doing that. There are other easy ones. There’s social media posting and there’s paid ads and stuff like that. I think we, working with our partners to share content and use them as a channel, because they have these big networks too, of customers that we want to talk to.

Sharing our white papers infographics and case studies has to be a win for them too, relevant to them. We invite our partners from battery supplies to come to do a webinar with us. So that collaborative thing is actually really good too. , I think amongst the many different tactics you can take the one I just decided there is really good.

Jeff White: I would have to imagine too, that selling more chargers is a great upsell for the vehicle manufacturers and the battery manufacturers too, like being able to have more of those available in different locations and things like that. Like you might have one vehicle, but you could have three or four chargers for it.

Paul Drabble: Yeah, it’s we want to make the journey to electrification easy, right? It’s surprising that, like my time in this space and talking to a lot of our go-to-market team not every customer really understands how to do it. It sounds easy, right? It makes a lot, it makes sense.

It’s perhaps where the world’s heading, but our value proposition is that. We make it easy for them. We’re a strong, we’re a safe pair of hands, right? We know what we’re doing. Had decades of experience doing this and we can help them electrify and overcome some of these challenges.

So they don’t really need to have that expertise. We can help them do that, bridge that gap. And we can also partner with really good battery suppliers because, the batteries are actually the most expensive thing on the end application, right? When you look at the bill of materials, it’s probably the battery bank that costs the most.

Proper battery care and maintenance and battery health. And you don’t have to, replace that battery. Prematurely. That’s a big thing. And a lot of manufacturers aren’t aware of that, right? They, it’s an afterthought, like how to charge and the charging and the batteries are they think of other things first.

So anyway we’re safe hands and a great enabler for electrification. 

Carman Pirie: I’m curious Paul, as you. You mentioned, how, the wind is in the sails for certain, as you mentioned it’s the way the world is going not a lot of people out there betting against the latrification in the long term.

What do you see as the Major things that are going to stand in your way then over the next couple of years? You have lots of wind in your sails. You have markets that know that this is an imperative. No, this needs to happen. You mentioned battery costs are decreasing. Is it all upside or what are you most concerned about?

What keeps you up at night? 

Paul Drabble: I think a lot of the barriers are slowly starting to shift or minimize costs are coming down. There are programs in certain parts of the world that provide subsidies. There’s one called I think core or I forget the name of it in the U.S. right where you literally get a rebate on the spot for purchasing electric equipment. I think the barriers that we’ve seen over the years are access to utility power and charging. That does present an issue for sure. It’s no good having electric equipment if you don’t have a convenient means of powering it.

There are solutions that are emerging, whether they’re portable that can recharge equipment off in, away from utility power for sure. There’s the build-out of the electrification network for passenger vehicles, which is opening up opportunities for recharging.

But, the barriers still, people are looking at cost when you compare the costs of certain equipment relative to, combustion engine it’s, people get sticker shock, I think without looking at the bigger picture of total costs of ownership, right?

Some parts of the world moving faster than others in terms of the regulations, okay, we’ve decided for you that you need to electrify, right? And that a lot in Northern Europe, they’re really starting to close in on that, but it’s slower in other parts of the world. 

Yeah.

Paul Drabble: And there’s other, there’s there’s other technologies that are out there that we’ll push up against electrification. You see a clean diesel and all this other stuff. They’re trying to re-rebrand old technologies high diesel, combustion is not going to go anywhere for a while.

Particularly with a higher power bigger. Construction equipment, for example, it’s here to stay, but there are hybrid systems that are coming in and retrofitting combustion engine equipment. We’ve we’ve electric systems as well. But it’s overall it’s the the incentive at the end of the day is the OEM thinks that it makes sense, to electrify, whether it’s an economic decision or it’s the competitors are doing it. Each of them at the end of the day decides whether they want to go in, all in or not, and do they have the engineering capability and manufacturing capability to be able to support that. 

Carman Pirie: I want to close out the show by hearing what you’re most excited about.

I’m always curious as we get towards the end of the year, I like to hear what people are thinking about the year that’s ahead. What are you most excited about in the world of marketing and sales? 

Paul Drabble: Marketing and sales, I think just the toolset, just is, it’s you know what, in a past life I built an e-commerce website, using all the Shopify and a lot of people do that, but that’s just an example how, the platforms and the software are enabling folks to, to make that sort of jump, I can do it myself, I don’t need to hire a guy to do these sorts of things. But I think all the features that are being added to platforms like marketing, automation a lot of.

B2B companies use marketing automation. We do it’s a very valuable tool that we use for many things in marketing, but also, lead management as well. And so I think, you see AI starting to creep into there and an example of that is translation of localization of websites.

And you go back 10 years, I’ve been building websites for a long time. And some of the widgets that you would put in to translate were absolutely terrible, particularly if you had a technical website, it would be so bad. You’d have to, turn it off because it was just hamming it up. But from what I know now, they’re actually very good.

, these AI-driven localization tools that often come with things like HubSpot, for example, have one that’s actually pretty, pretty pretty spot on they really help enable marketing programs to grow at relatively affordable costs, I think. And with fewer resources needed.

So I think, it’s opening up the possibilities of things that we can do, but I think you just. You can’t boil the ocean at the end of the day. You have to decide on the tactics and whatever the channels and the ones that are going to make sense for you and focus your energies on that and not spread out too thin.

But it is a very exciting time for sure. 

Carman Pirie: Sitting out here on the Atlantic coast, speaking to somebody on the Pacific coast and ending on the note of not being able to boil the ocean seems just about appropriate to me. Thank you for sharing your expertise with us today. It’s been a fun chat.

I’ve really enjoyed it. 

Jeff White: Yeah. I love how wide-ranging it’s been you’re knowledgeable about both the marketing and sales space, but also just deeply knowledgeable about electrification as well, which is really interesting. 

Paul Drabble: Yeah. Yeah. It’s been a great year. Thanks guys. It’s been a really fun chat. And at the end of the day, you feel like you’ve kind of part of something that’s going to improve the world, hopefully take us to a better place.

But thanks, guys. 

Jeff White: Thank you. 

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