Looking the Part: How Snaptron’s Marketing Caught Up to Its Product LeadershipLooking the Part: How Snaptron’s Marketing Caught Up to Its Product Leadership

Looking the Part: How Snaptron’s Marketing Caught Up to Its Product Leadership 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. Look, couldn’t be happier to be here. It’s great to be joining you on the show today. 

Jeff White: Yeah. And interested in chatting with our guest today. You know what, not every marketer gets to do. I think it’s one of those projects that you may get to do one, maybe two, in your lifetime as a manufacturing marketer, but they’re pretty exciting and unique.

Carman Pirie: Yeah. Yeah. And Jeff is referring to rebranding initiatives, which can be a challenge. For a lot of manufacturers, they get pretty bought into their brand. So the notion of change can be challenging. Even if it appears as though the market may be demanding it, sometimes the manufacturer internally might be the last one to know. It’s always nice to chat with somebody who has successfully navigated these waters. 

Jeff White: For sure. So looking forward to diving into that. So joining us today is Nicole Kangos. Nicole is the Marketing Director at Snaptron. Welcome to The Kula Ring, Nicole. 

Nicole Kangos: Thank you, glad to be here.

Jeff White: We’re glad that you are here. 

Carman Pirie: Nicole, did Jeff pronounce your last name correctly? I just wanna make sure. 

Nicole Kangos: Yes, he did. Yeah. 

Carman Pirie: Nice, nice. I… 

Jeff White: They like to lord this one over on me. I see.

Carman Pirie: Yeah. We just haven’t had a look, so listeners who need to know, my considerably better half is Greek, and today’s guest is of Greek descent as well. So that’s why I wanted to make sure that the name is pronounced correctly, ’cause if it wasn’t, I would hear about it later. 

Jeff White: Oh, so this is about your own sanity.

Carman Pirie: It almost always is, which is tenuous at best. And then Nicole let’s jump along. I’d like to know a little bit about the company and how you ended up there. So, I guess first things first, tell us what you all are up to at the firm. 

Nicole Kangos: Yeah. Snaptron is a unique company. We have a very niche industry of tactile switches, and particularly what we call dome switches. They are essentially a piece of stainless steel that, when you press it, actuates and creates electrical contact. It’s in all kinds of devices. Everything from your key fob that you’re unlocking your car with to maybe when you press your Keurig coffee maker, or even things more critical like aviation cockpit panels and such. 

So the company’s been around for about 35 years. It was started in a garage. The first owner was an engineer. And then that kind of ownership has been the case really for the entirety of the company. Always had a strong engineering presence, and we do a lot of our engineering in-house. It’s located in Colorado, in Windsor, just about an hour north of Denver. Pretty small. We only have about 75 employees, but we manufacture. What makes us unique is that we manufacture everything on site at the facility. We source all our steel from the US. So we like to say that we are proudly made in the US. I started at the company just about six or seven years ago now. I was brought in as probably one of the first marketing hires at the time. And they didn’t have a lot of investment in marketing. In a traditional way, but they cared a lot about it. They always had a website. They always provided great products, samples and stuff to their customers. So it was always an important part of their strategy, but never very formalized.

Carman Pirie: It is an impressive trajectory, and it’s always a compelling story when you, like when you said that the company hasn’t, maybe hasn’t always invested a lot in marketing, but they’ve always cared a lot about marketing. And caring is the precursor to enhanced investment for sure, which has clearly happened in the fact that you’ve grown a team and expanded the role of marketing within the firm. And Nicole, I guess at what point in this evolution did the notion of a rebrand occur and the requirement formalize? How long ago was that? 

Nicole Kangos: For me, it was actually when I interviewed, when I first researched the company. This is common in manufacturing, where you see these really well-known brands that have been around for 50 to 180 years. But their look is, it looks almost 50, 80, or a hundred years old. So when I was interviewing with them, everyone was saying that the company is so well known in the industry and has a really great, holistic, high-quality product. And that’s what my research confirmed.

But I just couldn’t get over the mismatch between what they were presenting and what their product was and what the brand was. So the reputation didn’t match. So it was pretty early on that I pitched it to the owners at the time to see if they would go for it and prove the value that we could add, I think.

Jeff White: How was that received? 

Nicole Kangos: It was not received well at first; it was definitely… There was definitely pushback, although, in all fairness, I would say I have great leadership, and they are always open to listening and hearing their team’s ideas. They brought me in for a reason. So they trusted my expertise in the area, and it really. Beyond just some initial hesitation and resistance, once I pitched it formally and provided my overview, strategy and plan to them, there was not much resistance at that time.

Carman Pirie: Nicole, you touched on something that I… In our work here at Kula even, I’m thinking in the last eight, nine years of working with manufacturers, and how often it is probably the most frequent thing I’ve seen that the visual presentation, the marketing and sales presentation of the brand writ large, does not match the quality credentials of either the workforce producing the product or of the product being produced itself.

Like in so many cases, it seems like the marketing and sales apparatus is just being outshone by the actual thinking and the actual production, whereas it’s almost always the reverse in the rest of the world. Like the marketing, usually the sizzle, the brand is awesome. Yeah. And you don’t know if there’s anything in between. It’s a really interesting thing about manufacturing, isn’t it? 

Jeff White: It is, but there’s also the part that… How often are the founders or the family that owns a company, or whatever, really attached to the existing brand? No matter how, from the outside in or when someone with a visual eye or a marketing eye looks at it and says, This is dated and here’s why. The reaction is not necessarily always positive. 

Nicole Kangos: No, you have to be strategic in the way you bring up that conversation initially. And my first and foremost priority when I started was building trust with my team and proving my value. So there were a lot of other little wins that I could take care of before I brought this up in a conversation and built that rapport. Which I think is a very important step, and I would recommend that anyone do that. They listen. You need to listen a lot before you come in and talk. 

Carman Pirie: That’s a great bit of advice, and I hope the folks listening pay attention to that because you’re right. I think the timing of this type of proposal is key. I’m also curious, was there anything happening in the competitive dynamic of the company when you were, for instance, have you seen competitors updating their look and potentially rebranding to connect with the market in a more or an enhanced way?

Nicole Kangos: Yes. So at that time, my initial investigation was very niche. So we only have a few handful of competitors. But one of our main competitors in France had just done a complete rebrand, and it was being really well received, and they were repositioning themselves to some degree to be dominant in the aerospace sector, which is a core industry for us as well.

So they came in very flashy. They are a bigger company that works in a lot of other spaces, so they just have a lot more revenue than we do. However, that was a big factor too. What I was seeing in the landscape is that we have a better product, we have a quality product, we’re very much the leader in the space; however, we need to start looking like we are.

Carman Pirie: So it’s as much about maintaining the leadership position as anything else. 

Nicole Kangos: Yes. Yeah. 

Jeff White: How did you begin once you had buy-in and folks were interested in seeing your vision and bringing that to life? Where’d you start? 

Nicole Kangos: Yeah, so at first, I started with my director. My immediate boss got her buy-in at the time and presented to her my proposal. And that came with some education as well, around branding and why it matters and why it’s important. And she fully supported me, bought into it, agreed with my direction and strategy, and then suggested we go forth in front of our ownership and senior leadership team. And so I presented a very similar presentation to them and expanded on what is going on in the competitor space. That was a big part of it because we say we’re leaders. So I really needed to drive home that we were looking behind. And then also our customers as well, a lot of our customers had gone through rebranding as well in our space. So we were seeing the industry really look a different way all of a sudden, from the visual identity perspective at least.

So it was very much just pitching my idea, breaking down the cost. My boss helped me to discern what would be a reasonable budget, which I felt was a lot smaller than what I probably needed. Which I can get into a little bit more later in the conversation about how I had to get creative to work within my budget constraints. But once I pitched it and got that initial buy-in, there were obviously questions, but a lot of education on branding, why it’s important. I think everyone sees companies like Nike, and they get it. They get why branding matters, but how do you make that relevant in the manufacturing space?

Carman Pirie: Yeah, they get why it matters, but they may not think that it applies to them.

Nicole Kangos: Exactly. 

Carman Pirie: How did you get them to understand that the same rules may apply to them, too? 

Nicole Kangos: I pulled examples of other manufacturers that went through something similar, maybe not manufacturers per se. For example, I remember in my presentation I included Cisco. And their rebrand spoke to that example. I also broke down my competitor, my direct competitor’s example. And I think that was very hard for them to see and hear, and it got the gears moving and excitement around it. Wow. Okay. We say we are number one in this space, but all of a sudden, our kind of competitor came in here, and they looked at that as part of it, which was just bringing those examples that felt more relevant to the space. 

Jeff White: That is really smart. And I think that the way that you’re able to leverage FOMO is a really great way to make a point in terms of getting somebody’s buy-in and getting them to see what’s possible. 

Carman Pirie: And a great example too, Jeff, I think of a marketer being able to show a company what the label looks like on the outside of the jar of the company versus what it looks like inside. It sounds like what Nicole described to us, there is just this realization, this is what it looks like from the outside, this competitor over here, which we maybe underestimated in the past, or what have you. We certainly didn’t think that we had the leadership position we have, that all of a sudden appears as though it looks to be more of a leader like that. That perspective can only come from outside, really. 

Nicole Kangos: Yeah. Quality is perceived.

Carman Pirie: I have a former life spent working inside politics, and one of the senators who tried to give us the rules of the road used to say perception is reality, truth is negotiable. You’re kinda knocking on the same door there. So when we talk about the rebrand. How much of it is a visual representation of just how we look and feel? A reimagination, if you will, of the visuals of the firm versus how much you delve into brand voice, the way the brand expresses its values, things of that sort.

Nicole Kangos: Yeah, there was a big component of what you said. I definitely positioned it in terms of more of a refresh because I think that’s what more accurately reflects it. A rebrand, I always associate with a little bit more of something like an example of Comcast and Xfinity or something, when there’s a really negative perception, maybe of the company or the product. So I was positioning and using the term refresh a lot with my leadership team. But that being said, there was a great opportunity to revisit our mission, vision, and values, right? And that goes into a lot of what the brand is, right? That is the brand to some degree. So, that being said, when I wanted to do this, one of the bigger things that I pushed for in the process of rebranding was getting engagement from our employees. So we did a series of surveys with our employees. To get their feedback on what the brand is, why they work for Snaptron and get that side of it, that kind of internal brand. And then we use that information to inform a workshop that we had with our senior leadership team, and then some other key individuals that we identified in the company. It was funny, we were doing this during COVID, so we were all masked up, six feet apart in a room in a circle talking to each other and went through a full workshop where we really looked and dived into what the mission is, what is the vision? Where are we going in five years? Because that informs the visual identity, too.

That informs the voice, that informs the positioning. All of that matters. ‘Cause if we were gonna say, oh, we are changing, industries we’re focusing on completely, or we only wanna be competitive in this space anymore, then that impacts the look right. 

Carman Pirie: Could you point to what would be the biggest shift or change in your impression of how that was going to go versus how it actually went once you engaged with the internal team? To that extent, I’m always curious how much, ’cause holding up a mirror a little bit and you often see some things that you hadn’t seen going in. 

Nicole Kangos: I think I was really pleasantly surprised by how engaged everyone was in the process. I thought that I would get resistance, but what I actually saw was that everyone really cared about the company, cared about the brand, and invested in it. And we have a great history of a lot of our employees being at the company for 10 plus years. You know that was very much reflected in those conversations, and I think being new to the company at the time, I was very impressed to see just how much everyone cared about the success of the brand. As well as I did. 

Jeff White: When you’re coming out of those sessions and reconciling what you had learned and speaking it back to them, what do you think they latched onto the most in terms of what you were able to discern and learn from them? What were the key points that made them go? Yeah, no, I really get that, and I see where you’re going with this. 

Nicole Kangos: That’s a great question. I think that there was an obvious gap in some of our messaging that we were saying internally, we’re good at this, we’re great at doing this, but we weren’t capturing that in the messaging and the positioning of the brand. So I think those conversations were very informative in that way for me, especially to say, wait, okay, we are really good in this part of it, but we’re not saying we are. We need to bring that forth, the communication and the position, when we redo this. 

Carman Pirie: I wonder, when people are, when they say, oh look, we’re really good at this thing, or this, whether it’s this kind of service area or a typical, seen in a lot of different ways, but when they say, we’re really good at this, but the brand really doesn’t communicate ever how good we are there. Kind of, seems like almost two starting places, and I’m curious what your experience has been, Nicole, because it’s now a result of the company’s efforts to be so good at it for so long, they just take it for granted, and it’s almost just baked in. Or alternatively, it’s been innovation that’s sprouted up from the employee base that is more significant than maybe leadership had understood it to be. I wonder which of those… Which bucket? It might fall in there. 

Nicole Kangos: That’s very interesting. I kind of wanna say a little bit of both. And I say that because it’s always been a foundation of the company to have this very innovative mindset. It was actually part of their kind of slogan when I first rebranded Innovative Switch Solutions. So they said it a lot, and they said that they were innovative, and they very much are, and they were. But that’s all, that’s where it kind of started and ended. Where they said is right in the slogan. And it wasn’t really baked into the rest of the positioning and the messaging, and the how, like how and why, how we are innovative and why we weren’t really being answered for our customers either.

Carman Pirie: So those proof points weren’t really being articulated in a meaningful way. 

Nicole Kangos: Yes. 

Carman Pirie: Now, you mentioned that this process was happening during COVID. And it strikes me that as hard as it was for you folks to collaborate internally during COVID, my goodness, it must have been really hard to get input from customers during COVID so did you have any kind of external kind of customer input into this process, or did you find a way to get their voice of customer fed into this?

Nicole Kangos: Yeah, that’s a really good point. Glad you didn’t overlook that. So we did have in place what we call a technical advisory board. And we were meeting with them face to face yearly or bi-yearly. However, when COVID happened, we transitioned to meeting virtually with them. We didn’t wanna lose that touch point with that group. So this was one of the first bigger initiatives we brought to them in that capacity, in a virtual way. And actually, it was nice because we could share visuals with them very easily. We could record the conversation easily. So there was a lot of great structure; it actually worked out nicely for that use, and that is such a crucial part of the process. It’s nothing you should overlook. So we definitely made sure that the look felt right, to our customers, before we move forward with it and that we were doing this for the right reasons. So they were very much advisors in that capacity and helped us make sure this was the right move for our business.

Jeff White: So you’ve got the internal feedback and you’ve got the external feedback, and you have a sense of what people don’t necessarily know about you as it comes to life in the brand. How did you approach that in terms of bringing it to life visually and in words?

Nicole Kangos: Yeah, and I’ll give you an example. So I took all that information from the workshops and assessed it, broke it down, created a creative brief for it, and then looked at partners, right? Who do I wanna partner with to help me do the visual part of it? And take a hard look at that and say, yeah, how are we missing the mark here? How do we appeal to a different audience and a broader audience at the same time? We, for example, manufacture equipment. But we couldn’t tell that from looking at our logo or our identity from the get-go. So we know, we knew we needed to appeal and have a broader appeal. In the visual look, I think that helped inform itself. When I did the creative brief and then the partner picking the partner, that was super crucial. So we went with a partner very much like yourselves, who was familiar with the industry, manufacturing the sector, I should say. So we knew that part of it was really crucial to getting the visual appeal right. That was an important choice that we made. Funny enough, though, we picked a creative partner, and the cost of doing the actual logo and a piece of it from that partner was too big at the time. So we decided to go with this other solution. We basically went with this, I think it’s called 99 designs or something of that sort. I don’t even know if it’s called that anymore. But we essentially took this creative brief, pitched it to the design firm and the marketing firm that we wanted to work with, and got their feedback on it. And then, unfortunately, I would say for them, we wound up going with another vendor to actually design the logo. And did it in that way, and then went back when we did finalize the logo and look, went back to the marketing partner and had them design the rest of our assets, which was interesting. But in the grand scheme of it, I think it allowed that real creative freedom for the designer that actually did the logo to come forth with all kinds of different ideas and bring those to us unobstructed. Then the marketing partner knew exactly what brochures were, knew what our design guide looked like, and had a lot of familiarity with our customer base already. So, I think, how would that look in terms of materials 

Jeff White: You had mentioned earlier about the budget constraints. This is one of them. Were there others that impacted the project? 

Nicole Kangos: Just, I think the staggering we needed to do. There was an initial capital investment that we made in the project, but there were pieces that we wanted to do that didn’t happen until after, for example, apparel. We wanted to get our employees updated apparel. That kind of happened in the next fiscal year, right? So while we did push it through and got a lot done in that first 12 months. We also took certain things and said these things can wait until the next cycle. Branded apparel was one of them. Even things like mugs, we really just ordered new updated mugs for our employees, so there were pieces that we couldn’t really finalize right away. I just think the message is that there are creative ways to rebrand and figure it out. Within the constraints that you might have that might be coming down from your leadership team?

Carman Pirie: Yeah. Not if you’re reasonably new to the organization, but it wouldn’t matter if you’re there 10 or 20 years; it can be a hard sell to find all the budget necessary to do a project like this. I appreciate your candour and talking about how you can navigate that situation. Quite honestly, I think it’s one of the hardest sells for a marketer. It is to try to sell their coworkers and senior leadership on what appears to be a pure creative investment. Like, why this logo that you can get 500 different versions of it from a website for $50? Why is it better to spend a hundred thousand dollars with Firm X? And I could try to articulate some arguments for that here on this podcast, but I would just say I think people listening should just know that they’re not alone. That this is a tough sell. And so if you find yourself trying to make it, it is a challenge. 

Nicole Kangos: Yeah, exactly.

Even when we decided on the marketing firm that we worked with, we picked some core materials that they were gonna design for us, some of our more important pieces. And then the rest was up to our team to design and mimic and take elements from that, build out the brand guide. So there were even pieces like that. I created our brand guide. We didn’t have a firm to do that. So there are ways around the constraints, and I think especially in manufacturing, you run up against those. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah, I don’t disagree. I wonder, Nicole, as we close this out and we are reflecting on the rebrand, ’cause now it’s been a few years and you brought it to life, and I appreciate, it is an ever evolving initiative and it takes a little while to get all the swag built up and into that nature with the new identity. But what would you, as you look back on it, say are there any either qualitative or quantitative indicators that you would point to say, this is how we know this is working for us? This is why it was worth it? 

Nicole Kangos: Yeah. Great question. So we set out, when we first saw it, proposed it to look at external links and, then, also direct traffic. So, how much of our traffic is coming in from just awareness about who we are in the first place? And we can confidently say that we’ve grown in those two areas over the last four or five years. That’s been a good indicator. It’s really hard sometimes to attribute the value to a project like this, but that being said, I think more people searching our brand online and knowing who we are really speaks for itself. There have been some bigger projects that we’ve gained over the years that we can tie to that direct traffic as well, which is really exciting proof for us. Not everyone gets that and has that clear of an indicator, but I would say looking at where you started with your external link traffic, specifically, and then your direct traffic.

Carman Pirie: And were you able to look at anything? Because I’m thinking through the brand, the quality of the way the brand presents the credentials of the firm can sometimes show through and just in sales close rates. If we’re communicating the quality credentials of the firm more appropriately, then often more people will say yes. So, have you noticed any kind of close rate differential as well on the sales side? 

Nicole Kangos: That’s a great question. I would love to get back to you and say yes or no on that. I can’t confidently say it would be a nice bow tie for the story to say yes, but.  

Carman Pirie: It’s bad of me to put you on the spot right at the end of a podcast with that very specific question, but I…

Nicole Kangos: I can say that our, I don’t know if this is an indicator of that, but I can say that our lead conversion rate has been a lot higher in the last three to four years. So that just might indicate that we’re closing the business faster, and I wonder if that has anything to do with the reputation of the brand, the trust in it. I don’t know if that’s very interesting, but I will dig into the numbers there. 

Carman Pirie: Well, we look forward to having you back on the show to explore the numbers in more detail in version two, but no, Nicole, it’s been amazing to have you on the program. It’s been nice to get this insight into your rebrand initiative. Thank you for sharing it with us today. 

Nicole Kangos: Yeah, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. And look forward to a follow-up conversation. 

Jeff White: Yeah, great to have you on the show. 

Nicole Kangos: Thank you.