Cold Storage, Warm Leads: Marketing to Diverse B2B NichesCold Storage, Warm Leads: Marketing to Diverse B2B Niches

Cold Storage, Warm Leads: Marketing to Diverse B2B Niches Transcript:

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 I think today’s conversation’s gonna be great. 

Jeff White: Yeah, it’s a pretty interesting topic, interesting product. I love it. We get to talk about manufactured products that you might not even necessarily think are a thing. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah. Which happens more than you think. 

Jeff White: Yeah, no, I love working in this space just because of that. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah, absolutely. It’s like an endless turducken rather than there being like three or four layers, or sometimes I think it’s like a, more, like a tinfoil ball or something like that. There are 4 million of them, but yeah. 

Jeff White: For sure. We should get into it. So, without further ado, joining us is Michael Frank. Michael is the Vice President of Marketing and Communications at Arctic Walk-Ins. Welcome to The Kula Ring. Michael. 

Michael Frank: Thank you for having me.

Carman Pirie: Michael, you’re very welcome. Thank you for joining us. It’s really nice to have you on the show. I wanna know a bit more about Arctic Walk-ins. What do you all do there at the firm? Tell us what you do. 

Michael Frank: Sure. Arctic Walk-Ins is a 40-year-old company that specializes in custom and quick ship cold storage. So we manufacture walk-in coolers and freezers and combo units for food service and commercial purposes. We have factories on both coasts. We were originally founded in Miami, and we acquired a company here in Los Angeles, where I’m based, and now we have two facilities covering almost all of North America and some countries just outside. 

Carman Pirie: The applications for walk-in cold storage must be incredibly diverse.

Michael Frank: My goodness, incredibly diverse, food service is the bread and butter of the business. Food service operations can be anything from a chain restaurant to a mom and pop, but also food service operations at a hospital or a hospitality space, or quite commonly, K-12 food service colleges and universities. 

Sticking with that, we also do stadiums. Beyond the food service, though, I think it’s a lot of an engineering feat. We do maritime applications. We do agriculture applications, meat processing, pharmaceuticals and biotechs or cold storage purposes, temperature-controlled rooms. The list goes on.

When I first started with the company almost a year ago. I had a relationship prior to me being in-house with them. It just opened my eyes in terms of how much value these things bring to small businesses across a number of different industries and sectors. 

Jeff White: Now, these are not all just like the refrigerators you would see, just bigger versions, in the appliance stores. But you do have, I believe, some products that are designed as a quick ship item, and then others are custom solutions. Is that right? 

Michael Frank: Yeah, that’s exactly right. So, quick ship is our blue line. Those are meant for the efficient delivery of economic solutions. If you’re in a pinch and you need something, a box either indoor or outdoor, we can deliver one within a matter of days if it’s standard sizes. And then the real fun comes with the custom box, which is what we call the signature series. And that’s where we’re engineering for very specific use cases, very specific spaces.

If there’s a column that we have to build around, if there’s a slope in the roof. If there’s an outdoor factor for the northeast, we take in a snow load requirement or out here on the West Coast, it’s seismic oriented. So there’s so much detail and nuance that goes into each one of these, and it’s really fun to be a part of.

Jeff White: How did you end up there? 

Michael Frank: Oh man. Long story short, I was running a marketing agency as a managing partner for about four years, and when I first started with that agency, they were the first client that I was assigned. So I was essentially their lead strategist on primarily the digital side, but I ended up doing a lot more than that, including branded collateral, trade show partnerships, and the list goes on. And after about four years, they brought me in-house to lead channel growth for them. And that was last year. And I was just recently promoted to the VP role of marketing communication. So now overseeing a ton of different requirements for the brand and the business across digital and physical, and all of the dealer relationships that we have as well.

Carman Pirie: Now, the selfish agency guy in me really wants to just take this conversation down the path of being on the inside versus the outside and all the nuances they’re in. And I’m only gonna state that so that you all keep me from doing it. So…

Jeff White: Six people want to hear that episode, and two of them are here.

Carman Pirie: Exactly. I would like to explore, Michael, a little bit about what it’s like to build a brand and position a brand when it serves such a diverse category. On the one hand, food service from a restaurant perspective or food service in hospitals, you can make some parallels.

But then when you start talking about biotech, pharma, things of that sort, they’re very different categories and it does strike me that, maybe I’m just I’ve watched too too much Anthony Bourdain or what have you, but it feels like in some ways the food service industry is onto itself. It’s like you’re either in the club or you’re out of the club, and you wanna be in it if you’re selling to it. Help me understand how you think about that. 

Michael Frank: Yeah, that’s a great point we have… man, there’s so much to unpack there. Food service really is the bread and butter. So that kind of operates with a lot of relationship-driven people who have been in the industry for 20 to 30 years is what I find. The commercial applications are a little bit newer for us and a little bit harder to break into, but they’re still relationship-driven. And sometimes these take months, if not years, to really cultivate and earn the trust. And what I often come across is that there are 40-plus manufacturers of walk-in coolers and freezers in North America alone, right? So we’re one of many, and often bidding on projects with a lot of competitors.

So, when a lot of customers think of us as a commodity, how do we break apart? And I think it has to come through in the quality of the craftsmanship, the box that we make, the reliability and the customer support that we also offer, because things do happen, and how do we address them? And I think if we’re looking at it from a full sales to support process, then over time, we continue to really stand out amongst the crowd. And quite frankly, what is not always a sexy industry, walk-in cooler manufacturing, it’s foamed in place, panels with hard rails and steel aluminum on the outside, right? And a box is a box. And many people consider it just that, but we definitely consider it a lot more. 

Jeff White: Do you find that the competition is more fierce in the food service side, and that’s what’s making the other niches a really interesting opportunity for you? Or are you seeing the same competition across all of the different verticals you serve?

Michael Frank: The competition varies, and I think some excel where others don’t. I think food service obviously is something that everyone’s going after because it’s just so common and so frequent. What we have noticed is that there are some competitors that don’t want to play in the custom space because of the investment that it takes, whether it’s the tech investment or the tooling investment or the manufacturing investment, or, quite frankly, just the time investment.

That’s left us an opportunity, especially on the commercial side, most recently, to really extend what we do best and deliver a superior product in the way that they need it. And I think that’s where we’re seeing a lot of success lately. 

Carman Pirie: This is, people that work at Kula Partners will know exactly what I’m about to ask, probably when I start talking about the QSP trap, because I often… manufacturers are a little notorious for saying, when you ask them why people ought to buy from them, they’ll say that we have the best quality and the best service delivered by the best people.

And I always push back on that a little bit to say. How sustainable is that competitive advantage? To your point, a box is a box. How difficult is it to maintain a quality advantage there? I can see on the custom side, there’s a barrier to entry. But how do you go about messaging the benefits of better quality and better service without it sounding like a “me too” play?

Michael Frank: Yeah, I appreciate that. And it’s a challenge. I think we’re all facing it, and I do as well. We take strides, I think, beyond just quality, craftsmanship and reliability to be an innovator in the space. One of our taglines is engineering reimagine. So we’re never just resting on what we do on a daily basis and expecting everyone to believe this.

And I think a few things that we’ve done in an innovative way lately are really around flooring. We’ve essentially created a floor testing machine. Which I understand is one of the first in the industry, at least in terms of our competitive set, to really get an understanding of what the static and rolling load ratings of different applications are gonna be. And we do everything from the bottom up in our economy. And then what we just rolled out, most recently, for one of these commercial applications was a floor suitable for an electric pallet jack. Which is crazy because that’s a lot of weight consistently being used. And to be able to confidently say, we have a floor, we’ve gotta be able to test it. And it’s vetted by third parties, in independent labs. So that’s just one example where we’re not necessarily just saying that we are, quality, support and craftsmanship above all else. 

The other thing we’re trying to do a little bit differently is ceiling panel length. And right now, we can go up to 25 feet, which is not something I believe a lot of competitors are doing just based on their standard manufacturing processes. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah. I appreciate you tackling that question head-on, and because it is… It’s difficult for an awful lot of manufacturing marketers, and they have to try to find a way to wrap words and proof points around what is often just a felt sense of better craftsmanship. And so that’s really interesting. I wonder in this kind of space too, I’m gonna almost double speak a little bit and disagree with myself because as I’m sitting here, it occurs to me that I’m drinking out of this steel cup that’s made by YETI and I am not a brand YETI guy, which is why they always stood out to me as something like, it seemed like they just took coolers and things that everybody else was making and did a bit of a better brand and was able to deliver a more premium experience.

Oddly, has what’s happened on the consumer side in refrigeration and cooling rubbed off on the B2B side of the category? 

Michael Frank: That’s a great question. I might have to come back to you with a long-form answer after this, but in my initial response, I’d say consumer branding has worn off on everyone at the end of the day, as consumers, and I think there are applications in the B2B space that are relevant. But in technical marketing. The product marketing still differentiates itself, right? I think at the end of the day, we’re all browsing, we’re all being inundated with media. We’re all gravitating towards things that we like for one reason or another, whether it’s the shape of the cup, the name on it, or the colour.

And I think if we can take those sorts of core psychological components. Still apply them to the B2B model, understanding that it’s not an immediate purchase, it is a longer form. It is going to take a relationship to really understand the value that we bring. And quite frankly, we have to show up, and the proof is in the pudding. And I think over the course of time, we can have the same brand affinity that a consumer package brand does in a different way. 

Carman Pirie: This is the part where I pause because I’m assuming Jeff’s going to have a question, and I don’t wanna ask them all. 

Jeff White: I guess my question would be, I’d like to go back to the segmentation of your niches that you serve.

I am not sure we spoke about how large a company Arctic Walk-ins is, but I’m assuming that you don’t have a 40-person marketing team. How are you going about crafting the messages, and just from a tactical level, delivering marketing in all of these different areas with different messaging and probably different tactics for where those audiences are?

Michael Frank: Yeah, sure. We think about it in terms of all of the different sorts of communication or audience points and where they’re gonna be. We run paid media through Google primarily, and we have keywords and ads that are speaking to the use cases around the different sectors and industries that are going to need this.

Obviously, not a ton of people are necessarily searching for a pharmaceutical cold storage cooler, right? So we’ve gotta get creative and we’ve gotta tap into other mediums and platforms, such as, we use one called Construct Connect. And Construct Connect is essentially a database for every construction project that’s happening in North America.

So we’re looking at that data to see what’s being uploaded and actually used, critical key search terms within our sectors to really get demand coming into us and publishing and reaching out to the people who are either general contractors, architects, project managers on these very specific projects, and reaching out and crafting newsletters that are personal, to emails that are personal. We’re creating brochures that are very highly dedicated to the service that they’re serving. And really trying to broaden the reach in terms of how we expect people to find us. 

Carman Pirie: I don’t know what some, it’s often said you shouldn’t ask a question unless you already know the answer. And in this instance, I’m just not sure. It feels to me in some ways that the competitive benefits and the key features of this type of product are. Maybe don’t differ such a crazy amount between the different niches. Would that be accurate? Because if that is it, maybe it makes it a little bit easier at least? 

Michael Frank: It comes down to a lot of the features, accessories, and, quite frankly, refrigeration that’s needed. And that’s where a lot of it comes in. And we work with vendors on the refrigeration side to really understand what is needed, how many people are gonna be in the space, how frequently the door is gonna be opened. What are you trying to store? Is it food, or is it medical supplies and equipment? And those definitely require different environments within. So that’s where the engineering comes in, not just in terms of the box, but how are all these different parts gonna be connected in such a way that it maintains the service that someone needs for their usage specifically.

Carman Pirie: What has been the biggest challenge then for you in speaking to a food service audience versus, say, a pharma biotech audience? 

Michael Frank: The Food service audience is highly dependent upon a group of people called consultants, food service consultants, right? And they’re the ones coming into the space, working with a general contractor, working with the end user, as we’ll call it, to really figure it out.

And those people have a lot of power in terms of who they spec and why. And whether it’s a refrigerator or a hood, or whether it’s a service line, those are the people that we’re trying to reach and really help out. And, because there isn’t a lot of differentiation between the boxes, we have to stand on merit.

And we have to stand on the relationships and the quality that we’ve been really producing for 40 years in the industry. On the commercial side, it is because of the segmentation. We have to get really granular and really critical and try to get creative with where these people are and do a lot of the outreach ourselves, and really sell what the capabilities are and then ultimately build backwards from there. And one of the recent projects I mentioned that we’ve just had some success on that took almost a year to close, and that was a lot of fine-tuning over the course of time. Food services, obviously, where it’s like How quickly can you get me something? What are we waiting for?

The commercial side, especially in pharmaceuticals, has longer lead times and a lot of technical components that tie in not just to the cooler, but the overall environment that they’re creating. 

Carman Pirie: That’s really interesting. One kind of has that middleman side of it, and the other is that you can lead the technical knowledge transfer piece a little bit more directly with the client.

Michael Frank: Yeah, and that’s where I think for us, the sales model is also differentiated because we have people on the commercial side who are able to sell directly in. Whereas on the food service side, we actually can’t do that. We work with manufacturing representatives across the entire country, and those people are actually selling our product on our behalf to the dealers or to the consultants.

There are so many people on the food service side. It’s fascinating to try to understand how this works, and this is where people are often taking over a family’s company that’s been doing it for decades, in some cases. There’s no shortage of things that pop up when you’re working in either space. And they each create a lot of challenges, which is why I love this. 

Jeff White: Is that the same on the food service side? If you’re dealing with somebody opening a single restaurant versus, say, a larger organization with locations in multiple cities?

Michael Frank: Typically, yeah. Even if it’s not quite a chain, but you’ve got a strong base and you’re looking to expand. A restaurant owner or an operator doesn’t really want to take on the purchasing, the sourcing, the installing of all that equipment themselves, right? So they are gonna work with a food service consultant, someone who’s licensed, someone who understands this. They’ve been through it before. And even if it’s just a single mom and pop that’s trying to open up a neighbourhood cafe, that’s also a lot of consideration for how all these pieces are going to fit together. Both back of house and front of house. So they’re considering all these different elements. And I think this is where, when you bring in experts, it really helps simplify the process, the selection process. They understand the different brands, what they do well, what they don’t, and I think it just helps everyone along the way.

Jeff White: Do you do any bottom-up marketing where you’re getting some messaging into the people who own and run the restaurants so that when they see your brand being recommended by a consultant, they’re already aware of it? Or is it all net new to them and brought to them from the consultant side?

Michael Frank: It depends, I think, on how long they’ve been in food service themselves, right? So we do try to tap into a lot of the end users that we’ve worked with. Jersey Mike’s is one. There are a few others that draw the attention of people in this space. So while we don’t go hand-to-hand combat, I would say we do try to tap into some of the relationships that we have, so we can at least bring some level of credibility and notoriety to the project that we’re working on.

Carman Pirie: I typically work a little hard, at least to try not to be too tactical on this show. But, since you used to work agency side digital marketing expertise, now working client side, and you mentioned that there’s at least some dependence on paid search for lead flow, et cetera. So I want to just zero in very tactically on the changes that are happening currently in the world of search.

We know that AI is dramatically impacting both organic and paid search lead flow and introducing new opportunities for optimizing for AI search, for that matter. Are you folks experiencing those? Are you experiencing those impacts now, and what steps are you taking to think about what’s next or how you evolve?

Michael Frank: Oh man. This is a never-ending, evolving conversation between me and some of our internal team and our agency partners, as well, I’d say. Yeah, we’re definitely seeing a start to lesser Google search volume in general. I think overall, we’re seeing some trend numbers start to play that out a little bit.

So, how do we combat that? Or how do we pivot away from it? Not entirely pivot away from it, but start to balance it out. I still think SEO has a lot of value. I think a lot of these AI engines are pulling from websites directly. And I think there’s gonna be an added dependency upon quality content to really rise to the top.

And I think that’s gonna be a focus for us in the back half of the year, how we can continue to, not just written content, but video content specifically, really try and tap into what the new era of search is going to be, which is AI-based. And I don’t have all the answers right now for you, I’ll be honest with you, but I think LinkedIn is gonna become extra critical for us.

I think tapping into other platforms that we haven’t really reached, specifically around social, and getting creative on those is going to bring a lot of added value. They’re resource-intensive, right? To do a really great… I should say, resource-intensive with tools at hand to create quality content for an Instagram or for a TikTok, which I think have audiences that, while they may not be endemic to us, are interested in what we’re doing. And I think that’s where the creativity’s gonna come in. And we’re gonna know a lot more by the end of this year in terms of where our marketing is gonna go for 2026 and beyond. 

Carman Pirie: You are certainly not alone when you say you don’t have all the answers. I don’t know if somebody does, I hope they show themselves soon because I haven’t heard of them. I do think you’re right. A lot of the blocking and tackling of search engine optimization still helps things rise to the top in AI search. And of course, I think even more important are things like schema and et cetera. It’s an interesting time to be alive, it feels like in marketing. It seems like things were a little stagnant there for a while, the playbook was samesies and while the digital marketers had a different playbook than the analog marketers, the analogs almost went away. Now it’s a different playbook again. Are you, I’m curious, still obviously working with agency partners? Does part of you as a marketer think that in this crazy time, are you happy to be client side, or are you thinking, oh wow, I’m missing out on all this craziness that’s happening over on the agency side? Not that you don’t get some of it anyway. 

Michael Frank: Now that I’m about a year in being back on the client side, I’m definitely I’m realizing, quite frankly, the value that agencies bring is more so than ever, because agencies, in my estimation, are supposed to be the thought leaders for their clients’ respective businesses to some degree, right? They’re looking at things trend-wise. Three to five years out, they’re trying to anticipate what is going to happen and how they can support that client’s business. So I actually have a lot more appreciation for the agency and the role they’re doing. With that said, I’m very happy to be client-side. It’s a little bit of a different pace.

You guys probably know, there’s obviously a lot of long nights, a lot of strategy sessions. Intellectually, I love that; I get a lot out of it, especially collaborating across different departments within an agency and coming up with solutions and presenting those solutions. I still really get a lot of just, at least, energy from the idea of it. But I’m happy with a little bit more of the internal kind of work that I’m doing now. And quite frankly, it’s just a challenge that I was ready for and needed to be a part of. So it’s all happening the way it’s supposed to.

Jeff White: Folks, we didn’t pay Michael to say that agencies are good. Just so we’re clear. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah. And nor did he set this up so he could tell his employer that he was thankful for being there. 

Michael Frank: All organic. 

Carman Pirie: It was just an interesting time, though, to maintain in this space, and so much is going to change over the next while. It’s going to be, I think, that both agencies and the client-side marketers are gonna have their hands full. There’s no question. What do you think, since we’ve already done a little bit of crystal ball around the notion of AI, let’s get away from that? And what other big changes do you see on the horizon? What’s the other thing on the back of your head? 

Michael Frank: Oh, man. I think we’re all navigating a really weird time economically and otherwise, and there’s a lot of transition that’s gonna happen. And I think the uncertainty of the macroeconomic climate, the longer that goes on, the harder it’s gonna be for businesses to plan properly and resource that. And I think there’s gonna be more mergers and acquisitions across the board. I think, if we drill down and even in a little bit more into, just the B2B environment, I think there’s a ton of businesses that are ripe for opportunity that are being led by people who have been doing it for so long, they don’t really have someone to hand the baton off to. And I think that creates a massive opportunity, whether it’s in refrigeration or HVAC or just these businesses that people have gravitated away from in the last 20, 25 years as they’ve chased tech or chased SaaS or now chasing AI. And I think there’s gonna be a return or a responsiveness to that. And people are realizing the opportunity that lies on the B2B side, and heartened entrepreneurs are gonna take these on and really create some great things out of them. 

Jeff White: I love that optimism for the manufacturing industry as a whole. I think that there are some really cool things happening and a renewed interest, obviously, potentially driven by some of these economic factors. But I think just more broadly, people really do see the value in understanding how manufacturing works and how it impacts our world. It’s a pretty important piece without a doubt.

Michael Frank: And I think, because there’s so much creativity that happens behind the scenes, it was hard for a long time to communicate that creativity through most of the media channels that existed. But because we’ve had such a broader distribution now of channels that are available, which are mostly interest-based. I think we’re moving away from the social component of social media and more to the interest component of social media. And I think that’s gonna bring a lot more attention and people to whatever craftsmen or creative outlet they have, and whether that’s more standard influencer marketing or more standard B2B influencer marketing. I think there’s gonna be an opportunity for voices and creative ones to come through. 

Carman Pirie: That’s a fascinating point that I had never really thought of, you can look at manufacturers from the outside looking in, and it could affect an awful lot of people. I always hate the fact that it gets called a boring industry sometimes, because the fact of the matter is that once you start peeling and looking under the hood, it can become endlessly fascinating with the innovation and the creativity that is happening in almost any manufacturing environment.

I hadn’t thought through the notion of media availability, connecting with the media channels we used to use, in favour were supportive of hiding that from us in some way, or didn’t facilitate at least the exposure of it. Michael, that’s… we could just hit record again and do a second show on that, really interesting. 

Jeff White: Yeah, no, I thought that was great, and the notion of moving from social to interest-based media as well, I see it myself, just in my own habits and patterns and how I’m using the internet now compared to when Twitter was good. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah. Exactly, and it is much more interest-based. Michael, what a fascinating way to leave the show with this kind of food for thought. And something for I think all of our listeners to ponder. Thank you so much for sharing your expertise with us. It’s been wonderful to have you.

Michael Frank: Thank you both for having me. It’s been great to chat with you guys, and I hope we can have another one soon. 

Jeff White: That would be cool. Thanks a lot.