Stop Competing, Start Defining: Q-Pac’s Category Design PlaybookStop Competing, Start Defining: Q-Pac’s Category Design Playbook

Stop Competing, Start Defining: Q-Pac’s Category Design Playbook 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 have never, in my life, been more excited for a podcast than I’m for this one. And I’ll tell you why. As much as I love the guest and the topic, I like even more that your voice may in some way be compromised, that you may be cracking, and therefore I have a fighting chance of having the best host voice on this podcast. So I’m going to light up a couple of cigarettes here. Grab a scotch whiskey so it can really get raspy, and try to best you on this. This is my only hope, Jeff. 

Jeff White: Yeah, the only important part there is that you don’t actually smoke. So starting that specifically for this is dedication to the task. 

Carman Pirie: All of a sudden, all I’m doing is coughing and hacking for a full half hour or something. Smoking isn’t the kind of thing you wanna just take up and think you’re going to perform initially. 

Jeff White: I don’t think that’s ever how people are thinking about that.

Carman Pirie: Tobacco is not a performance-enhancing drug. You have it on good authority from Mr. White. 

Jeff White: Unlike folks like Ross Rebagliati, a Canadian icon. 

Carman Pirie: Yes. See. That’s smoking of a different sort, and it is performance-enhancing or 

Jeff White: in snowboarding. Yes.

Carman Pirie: Indeed. That makes you less concerned about running into that tree that’s coming up.

Jeff White: Indeed. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah. 

Jeff White: That is…

Carman Pirie: But that’s not why we’re here. 

Jeff White: No.

Carman Pirie: I’m excited for today’s conversation. It’s funny, we’ve been doing this podcast for what, 300 and some odd episodes now and this kind of… this topic has been coming up a little bit more lately, so I’m interested to peel it back a little bit further and just help our listeners understand it more.

Jeff White: Yeah, I think so. It’s something that we’ve seen with recent guests. It’s also something we’ve seen with a few clients over the years, and it’s always a unique and interesting challenge, and I don’t want to get too much outta the way without letting our guests talk about it.

Carman Pirie: Don’t let, don’t stand on ceremony. You don’t have to wait for me. 

Jeff White: So joining us today is Brandon Clark. Brandon is Vice President of Marketing at Q-Pac. Welcome to The Kula Ring, Brandon. 

Brandon Clark: Thanks, guys. Happy to be here. Appreciate it. 

Carman Pirie: Brandon. It’s awesome to have you on the show. And I thank you for tolerating that extended introduction. 

Brandon Clark: You guys were talking about skiing and trees, and unfortunately, being based in Florida, I don’t know anything about such 

Carman Pirie: Exactly.

Brandon Clark: Dodge Alligators on the water. Maybe that’s about as close as we’re gonna get. So…

Carman Pirie: Exactly. Snow is not there. No, no Hills. Snow. Okay. 

Brandon Clark: Nope. 

Carman Pirie: It’s awesome to have you on the show. I would like to first kick off by learning a bit more about Q-Pac. Maybe the other listeners know a bit about the firm and what you’re up to there.

Brandon Clark: Yeah, so Q-Pac, we build a smarter fan for commercial air handlers, and so we make a unique type of fan called the multimotor plenum. And it is used in commercial applications for comfort cooling. So typically, our fans are found in mechanical and equipment rooms inside commercial air handlers, hospitals, schools, casinos, event venues like arenas, and transportation terminals like airports. So any critical facility that really cannot go without airflow, that’s where our product is applied. 

Carman Pirie: Really cool. How did you end up there? 

Brandon Clark: So, a little bit of a roundabout way. I spent the last nine years in retail and in, in grocery retail and running a large brand in the southeast here, and came across this role.

And what struck me is that even though it was in the HVAC space, it really felt more of a technology company. It’s heavy engineering. Most of the people who work here are engineers. They’re all about 30 years old, and they’re very different in how they think and how we operate in a very traditional space.

Which was very attractive. And part of it was the marketing aspect of them wanting to invest heavily in marketing and to position the products. As an industry leader. And I think when you have an industry that, you know, as you guys do a lot with the manufacturing, that’s traditional in the sense that marketing is not always the leader in that, to be pushed at the forefront of the organization. And so I really found that attractive. 

Jeff White: And I think the topic that we were alluding to in that overwrought intro was the, this notion that you have this unique way of handling a task that is typically done in a slightly different way. This multimotor plenum fan is a unique offering, and you’re effectively creating a whole new product category.

How does that create challenges for a marketing-led organization, like what you’re talking about? 

Carman Pirie: I don’t wanna interrupt Jeff’s question, but I just wonder if just telling us a bit about the difference between the products may help our listeners understand the marketing complexity. 

Brandon Clark: Yeah. So, traditionally, fans have been around since the early 19th century, and they move air, right? That’s what their focus is. Just like you have, on your ceiling or in your air handler at home. There’s a typical fan that blows the air, and one of those fans is called a blower. And it is just that, it’s a belt-driven fan that moves air. And then over time, in the nineties, what they call a fan array was introduced.

Which is a subset of a lot of smaller fans that essentially blow the same amount of airflow, but they build up redundancy. This way, if one of the fans were to go out, the entire system doesn’t go down, as it happens with a single blower. And what we’ve done over the course of time, and we started by building fan arrays in the mid-2000s.

Through that journey, we’ve eliminated a lot of the complexity that comes in that space. And we believe in deletion. We like to make things simple at Q-Pac. So instead of adding features and adding complexities and adding things, we look to remove them and to eliminate a lot of the frustrations that come from a lot of different components all coming together. And so through the fan array journey, we ended up landing on the multimotor plenum fan by deleting a lot of the complexities that the industry was introducing. And so instead of having to monitor a lot of different individual devices, we’ve architected it where you’re monitoring one single device, it just happens to contain multiple motors.

Carman Pirie: And I know I interrupted Jeff’s original question, but I appreciate that extra texture, and I wonder. You alluded to it as you talked about it’s a bit of a traditional category, and in traditional categories, oftentimes the traditional provider is the one that wins out, the brand that’s been around longer that does it the way it’s always been done.

You’ve taken that approach to think through, about like maybe we compete in a different category entirely. Take us through that decision, how you’ve defined that category, and what category you feel you compete in. 

Brandon Clark: It’s a good question. I think the key to this whole journey is recognizing that we weren’t the same and that there were significant differences, even though the product looks very similar to the existing array category. But when you get into the architecture of how the product is built and how it performs, that’s when you realize, like we really do have a new type of fan. And I think you mentioned earlier that, just in dealing with a traditional industry and being a marketer, there’s skepticism. 

Like, how do you just invent a new type of fan? Like it, it’s a fan, it blows air, right? There’s how do you make a new one? And when you. Really get into it, you realize that the way that the product is built and the way that it operates and the people that maintain it it is inherently different than what’s out there currently on the market and trying to differentiate yourself and not to be a lookalike or copycat when you really do have a different technology, it’s very important to stand, on your own and so that you can obviously, create that education that needs to happen to inform, especially the building owners and end users, what the differences are. And that’s been a really fun journey to go on. 

Jeff White: So, where do you start with that? Often, the biggest issue is defining a new category within an existing product architecture. People don’t necessarily know to look for it. They don’t know that it’s out there as a solution. They’re not looking for ‘show me the latest, greatest in fan innovation.’ So they’re gonna have a hard time finding it. How do you get ahead of that and educate the journey?

Brandon Clark: We just, were we really part of the fan array category? And if we were. Are we going to try to own it? So it’s either you’re gonna try to own and lean into and take that category, or was the product really different to develop a new one? And, obviously, through our discovery and our work with our engineers, we realized it was a new category. So then once you define that, then the education piece happens, right? The awareness of how to really reach out to folks to get them to one, acknowledge that the category is real. I think that’s the biggest thing: skepticism. It looks like a duck, quacks like a duck. It’s a duck, right? That’s the way people think. But it’s not always the case. I look at cars and I use that as a good example, an EV is a car, but not all cars are EVs, right? So there’s space within existing categories to carve out. Areas where your product is inherently different, and that journey has been fun to go on.

Carman Pirie: Yeah. One of the fine things I find about that is, in the car, EVs are a great example of it: you know, if you try to market EVs as a human transportation device, an ordinance, it’s not a car. It’s an EV and that’s somehow different, and it’s a different category, then you would have a different level of success. And another way is to say, ‘No, it’s a car.’ It’s just a different way. Do you see what I mean? I find there’s a hinge in category design, or thinking about it: are you comparing it or hooking off of an existing category in the customer’s mind, or are you trying to till completely new soil?

Brandon Clark: Yeah, so you know, interesting thing is. At the surface of it, it’s a fan, right? So we make a fan. So that’s an existing category. It’s an air mover. So that’s right there: we’re already in a bucket of fans, then in the blower category, and then in the fan array category. Then it was like, okay, we don’t really fit either one of those because.

What happened with fan arrays, and it was intended when it was developed, for the right reasons. It wanted to make redundancy this way. If one of the fans failed, you wouldn’t lose airflow, so you wouldn’t be completely shut down. And if you think about that for a critical facility, like a hospital, they can’t lose seven operating rooms just because there’s no air conditioning. As it is, it’s serious. But that addition added a lot of complexity, where now you’re monitoring, say, eight different devices. You’re right. Making eight different electrical runs. You’ve got eight different you’re having to address each individual motor on the network. So there’s like networking that’s involved.

So it added a lot of I would call it frustration to the end user who has to maintain that equipment. And so when that happened, people… they got jaded, and they got a little frustrated, and they felt like, oh, you sold me this thing that was supposed to solve all my problems, and all you did was introduce more. And so what we decided to do was to look at that and go, okay, what can we do as engineers to remove that? And so as we went on this journey, we started deleting. Our system doesn’t require any motor addressing. It doesn’t require any individual electrical power runs to each plug, fan, or motor. It’s a single point of power and controls, and we’ve brought all that complexity in so that if you do have a failure for whatever reason, you can swap that motor with another one or a plug fan with another one without having to address it or know which location it was in or any of the things that people deal with right now. Removed a lot of that. We realized, hey, this is its own thing over here, and we need to figure out how to define it. And so when we sat down, we were like what do you call it? How, what do you even name it? And so that started the process of developing that and then creating the foundation.

So, what qualifies you for this category? Because the category isn’t Q-Pac, it’s a multimotor plenum fan. And what we hope for is. Other people to join us in this category, to go on this journey with us. And those requirements are: it’s a single device, so it operates as one single fan, not eight individual devices or four. It has a single point of power and controls, and it consists of multiple motors. And those three are the baseline of what defines the multimotor plenum fan category. 

Jeff White: Brandon, have you ever looked at this from a regulatory standpoint and tried to use enforcement of regulatory standards to force people to consider the product or something like that? Or would you see that as a good way forward? 

Brandon Clark: I don’t think it’s a good way forward. I think the standards, as they’ve evolved, especially in energy efficiency, are really being implemented by local governments. You look at cities like New York, and they’re pushing for ratings on buildings for energy efficiency. If you go buy some of them, it’ll say it’s a D rating or a C rating. And so those local municipalities are driving those changes and were inherently just. Falling into a really good solution. I don’t necessarily know if pushing people, or I would call it fear-mongering tactics, to if you don’t do this, that’s not really our mo. We know we solve really big problems for really big businesses and for people affected every day. And I don’t really think that’s our place to. To generate that type of demand through that particular channel, if I’m saying that the right way. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah, that makes sense. You could see it in your hospital example, for instance, say, look at all of the legal risks associated with eight ERs going down if this isn’t happening, and we don’t have fresh air flowing and all of that. And you could go down that path, but I don’t know. It’s, I always feel like maybe it comes from my previous history of running a shared services organization, but one of the policies there, if you’re running a shared services organization inside of a big corporate, is that you can’t be the person that sets the rules and provides service at the same time.n And I feel like if you’re a marketer that’s trying to. Advise people of the regulation. It’s almost like you’re the rule setter as well as the people who help them follow the rules. It doesn’t work. Yeah. 

Brandon Clark: Yeah. You’re double-dipping there, I think, in my opinion.

Carman Pirie: Yeah. 

Jeff White: There’s an interesting sophistication in what you’re talking about there, and it, I don’t believe what you’re saying is that you’re open-sourcing the technology, but you’re suggesting that there’s an architecture that other people can use. And that the category becomes stronger when others join it. And that’s particularly sophisticated, I think, to be thinking about things in that way, and not just trying to say, this is our unique way of doing it, and nobody else shall take it. 

Brandon Clark: We talk about it all the time. We say we want to, and we built the arena. We want people to come play in it with us. You know what I mean? If we’re just shooting around by ourselves. It’s, you’re not, you don’t have a win-loss record. You’re not really competing. And so we believe that the category has a lot of room, and we’ve seen some people overseas recently that have started to creep in, and some of the things that we’re doing now, our product, to your point, we’ve got some significant patents and some of the stuff that we do and that obviously. Makes our product more attractive for certain things. And so we’re going to, we have an adaptable fan frame. We fit into any airstream in any air handler. The way we create our frames and panels is unique to our manufacturing process. That doesn’t mean somebody has to have an adaptive frame. If they had just one sheet-metal panel with four fans, it could still be a multimotor plenum fan. We just offer some additional value pieces on top of that. 

Carman Pirie: I think this is a really interesting part of this conversation, this idea of when you know you succeed? It’s almost like when you see the category leaders who did it the traditional way when they decide to spin up. Pun intended with the fan, come on, work with me.  

If this doesn’t make sense and it gets edited out, that’s totally cool with me. I will say to our listeners right now, if it does make it through, ’cause my favourite example of this in some way that I think everybody understands is toothpaste.

The idea: there was Colgate and Crest, and that was about it, and they did the same thing. And there was Aquafresh, which was like the fresh breath toothpaste, but that wasn’t different enough, all that much. The real differentiator that emerged was Sensodine, a toothpaste for sensitive teeth, which, to your point, is still a fan. It does what a fan does. It’s still toothpaste. It does what toothpaste does, but in a different way and with a different result. And I think. If I were Sensodine, which I’m not, I would’ve thought I was successful. The second Crest and Colgate bring out their sensitive-teeth toothpastes, which we all know they now have. But there was a period when that wasn’t the case at all. And it’s maybe a weird consumer parallel, but it’s one that just crystallizes it for me. Does that make sense? 

Brandon Clark: Yeah. I think we… To bring it to kinda what we do. I think, for us, success is having engineering plans specify multimotor plenum fans. That’s where you’re like, Hey, we’re gaining ground. The engineering community is recognizing this as a real fan type that they can write into the plans’ specifications, and manufacturers will build those air handlers with that fan. And that’s exciting.

Carman Pirie: And they don’t have to specify, use a Q pack. It’s the category that’s being specified to your point. 

Brandon Clark: Yeah. And currently, if you were to build a multimotor plenum fan, that would inherently lead to Q-Pac because we’re the only players in the game at the moment doing what we do specifically 

Jeff White: That leads to an interesting question because you mentioned how you have a team of very smart, relatively young engineers who are helping produce this, and you are selling to engineers who are, as you noted, inherently skeptical. Do you leverage your internal engineering team to figure out how best to speak to prospects who might be looking to purchase your fans?

Carman Pirie: Like to address that skepticism? 

Jeff White: Yeah. Is there something that you can learn from there and incorporate? 

Brandon Clark: Yeah, so transparently, I’m not an engineer. As I mentioned earlier, I come from retail, and I’ve got a traditional marketing background and spent a lot of years in regular marketing roles. But one of the things I require, especially for the people on my team who are customer-facing, is that they’re engineers. They’re degreed engineers because I believe that. If you’re going to go into a room and speak to someone, and if they have a question, we’d better be able to answer it and not say, Hey, let me get back to the office.

Lemme go check. I’ll talk to the engineering team. Like, I wanna be the engineer that can answer those questions. And it is because of that skepticism and because that exists, we, and here Q-Pac have just launched or built the world that we know. So I’ll caveat that we’re aware of the largest airflow tunnel in the world, which will, that is, be built to the AMCA 270 specification, which is for testing fan arrays. And so that is the current standard that AMCA has. AMCA is essentially, for lack of a better term, the governing body of air movement or the Air Movement Council. And they set the industry standards. And when we went to bring this fan to AMCA and to market, there wasn’t a lab that could test it. For what we built. Therefore, we had to go and build one. And so we’ve invested a million dollars in a 12-foot-by-12-foot-by-30-foot airflow tunnel to, for lack of a better word, put our money where our mouth is. That we didn’t, this isn’t just marketing spin; we really did develop a new type of fan that will have its own fan curves and will perform as a single device. And we’re excited to debut that here in the next few months, 

Jeff White: My guess is that’s gonna get noticed. 

Brandon Clark: Yeah, it’s gonna raise some eyebrows, especially in the engineering community, because again, to your point, they are skeptical by nature. That’s just part of who they are, and they’re built to question, find answers, and poke holes. We like that, and we encourage people to keep bringing those conversations up so we can be transparent and talk about it.

Carman Pirie: Yeah. You like it’s if you’re selling to car guys or what have you, and you built a racetrack for them to come check it out on. Who’s gonna get mad at that? 

Brandon Clark: We’re excited for people to bring ideas to us to test what happens if two of the motors fail, and/or what happens if you run them at variable RPMs and they don’t all spin at the same rate?

To bring these tests to say, Hey, I’d love to see this. And we encourage that. We’re gonna live-stream our tests, too, so we’re gonna have ’em live-streaming on the internet for people to watch. And I said in a meeting, I said, What if we, what if it all comes back and it’s all wrong? And our owner was like, how cool would that be? Like, he just loves it. 

Carman Pirie: You mentioned that a bunch of the engineering team are younger, and I don’t know if the ownership of the firm is as well, and if that all translates. I guess I kind of wonder how much that does. Do you feel that plays into the willingness and desire to be as disruptive as you all are?

Brandon Clark: I think a lot. Our owner is 37 years old. And so we have a culture here, and it’s not that, it’s an age thing. I think it’s that we tend to hire people from outside the industry who don’t have preconceived notions of what it should be or how it should work. Because one of our core values here is curiosity. And I think having that curiosity to question and to do things differently and to challenge a lot of what’s existed for so long. The technology’s. It hasn’t changed in 40 years, and before that, we’ve seen some blower fans in Chicago from 1897 that are wooden paddles still running. So there’s, it really hasn’t been an industry that’s especially embraced technology, which has really evolved a ton over the years. And so getting just fresh eyes on things to think about them differently has been really cool to see. 

Carman Pirie: Wonder as we, yeah, I feel like Brandon, I feel like we could sit here and have this con, we could talk for another five hours or something about this. It’s kind of fascinating. Give our listeners some instructions here. If they find themselves in a space where they are like, you know what? This, what we’re doing here is fundamentally different. It’s like its own category. They see that they’re knocking on the door of what you’ve discovered.

What’s been the, maybe, the most challenging thing that you’ve had to navigate in trying to go down this path? Is there some dark corner of it that you may illuminate for them so they don’t stumble over the same thing? 

Brandon Clark: Yeah, I can tell you it’s not a dark corner. It’s a bright light, so it’s skepticism, and it’s people being unable to believe that things can be different, and when they. They’ll continue to challenge. So if anybody is going on a category design journey, even to figure out how to position either their product, if it’s hardware, software, service or whatever. If it’s what you’re trying to do is make people uncomfortable, keep going. That is the piece you have to hedge forward on, and you have to push through that because.

You’re constantly hitting roadblocks of people telling you it’s the same thing. It’s a marketing spin. It’s not really different. And it’s you’re the closest to the product. You’re the closest to what you built your service on. If people are telling you that you’re wrong, there’s something to be said about that. We talk about this all the time with AI, like if you search for something or you put it in there, and it comes back. With results, it’s because it’s been done, right? So if you go in there and you start asking questions and it’s not really returning a strategy, or if you’re figuring out a go-to-market or something different, you probably have something different, and you can, and you can leverage that and actually define it and create it. And I just, my advice to people if they go on this is to not let skeptics and critics. Derail you from your mission of actually defining what you believe to be true. 

Carman Pirie: I’d rather sue them as a sign that means you’re heading in the right direction, most likely. 

Brandon Clark: I believe so. The book Build by Tony Fadell is a big inspiration for us. And, he’s the inventor of the iPod. He’s the inventor of the iPhone and the inventor of the Nest. The Google Nest thermostat. You used to hire people to do it right? You would hire the guy with the truck, replace your thermostat, and then he decides to create one that you could do yourself.

You never sold thermostats in retail. That wasn’t at Best Buy, so they couldn’t even figure out a place to put it. They didn’t even know how; at one point, they put it with calculators because they didn’t know where it went because it was inherently a new category and that led to the start of smart home and smart home devices and like that one thing then created a category which had to be defined in the store to figure out where to place products because it didn’t exist, but everybody, was skeptical and told him, you can’t do a thermostat by yourself. No one cares about thermostats. You need to get somebody to install it. And, he just believed in a simpler way. And so that’s the thing: when you get criticism, and people push back, telling you why you can’t do something, it’s a little bit of a good sign that you’re moving in the right direction.

Carman Pirie: Brandon, as we bring the episode to a close, you mentioned that you obviously have a strong background that was not in this more technical HVAC space, and you’ve moved from a marketing role into something more technical, manufacturing-oriented. I wonder what advice you might give to other marketers looking to make a similar jump.

Brandon Clark: Yeah, that’s a great question. Your experience. In other industries is very applicable here. And I would even go as far, and this is my personal opinion, this is not an opinion of anyone else but me at Q-Pac. I think the manufacturing industry lacks a lot of the basic marketing knowledge that brands and businesses should have. You talk about customer journeys, personas, and stakeholder types. We talk about analytics, talk about UTMs and just tracking behaviors, watching data behaviors, and there’s a, it seems so foreign for a lot of. A lot of the brands that we come in contact with, in particular in HVAC.

And if you come from a different industry and you are thinking about moving into this as a marketer, know that your experience and your skills will translate and will make a very big impact. Very quickly, I’m not saying there’s a low bar, but some of the things that we as marketers might take for granted in other industries especially if you talk about SaaS or if you’re in any type of like software base or even retail, there’s a lot that translates, especially even if you’re B2C or you’re direct to consumer and now you go B2B. Don’t be afraid of that jump because a lot of it, it still carries over. 

Carman Pirie: That’s fantastic advice. Brandon, thank you for joining us on the show. It’s been wonderful to have you. 

Brandon Clark: It’s been great. I really appreciate you guys having me, and it’s good to, to have this conversation about marketing people like in the manufacturing space, and I think what you guys are doing is great.

Carman Pirie: Really appreciate that. Thank you 

Jeff White: Very much.