The Kula Ring PodcastThe Kula Ring Podcast

For 42 years, StarTech.com sold cables, docks and adapters to IT professionals through the channel, building its reputation on quality and service. Then more IT buyers started shopping outside the channel, often on Amazon, and startup competitors arrived with consumer-style brands already built. CMO Michael Barber has spent 14 months on a brand refresh for that buyer. He argues that B2B buyers still choose the way consumers do, and that a refresh only gets buy-in when sales, support, operations and customer panels help shape it. He also explains why most B2B companies wait decades between refreshes, from the career risk for whoever leads one to budgets that favour demand gen, which finance can measure in-quarter.

Most manufacturers are great at making products and weak at showing them. Hammed Arowosegbe, co-founder of SwiftXR, argues the fix already exists inside most engineering departments: the CAD file. He walks through how SwiftXR turns those files into 3D, augmented reality, and virtual reality experiences that buyers can explore on a website, with a what-you-see-is-what-you-get accuracy that photos and AI renders can’t match. Hammed shares the practical gotchas marketers face when asking engineering for files, including missing colours, file size, and format. He also looks ahead to smart glasses, and why AR may finally find its moment once people browse in 3D by default.

Structural Concepts makes the refrigerated and heated display cases in coffee shops, supermarkets, and convenience stores, products designed to fade into the background. In a crowded, me-too category, Director of Marketing Patrick Rooney brought a CPG approach to the challenge of standing out. He explains how customer and sales research led to one common understanding of the brand, “Delivering Fresh. Always,” and how leadership embraced it inside the company before it went to market. Patrick describes giving sales teams fact-based stories for 10 to 12 segments in place of the catalog, and he offers practical advice for manufacturers who want to find and commit to what makes them different.

Eve Chen has spent nearly three decades asking how companies turn market opportunity into predictable revenue, and her answer centers on who is actually doing the buying. With Forrester putting the average B2B buying group at 13 internal stakeholders plus nine external influencers, she argues revenue teams need a buyer’s playbook as rigorous as their seller’s playbook. Drawing on a night navigation exercise from her time in the Australian Army Reserve, Eve explains why the map stops working when the terrain changes, and why manufacturers should raise safety and procurement concerns early. The payoff is readiness on both sides of the deal, and forecasts built on evidence instead of gut feel.

Marcelo Kreindel took an unlikely route into manufacturing marketing—from an Argentinian software career to fifteen years running a wholesale gelato business to building North Shore Steel’s marketing department from scratch. That winding path shaped a rare kind of patience, and it produced the insight at the heart of this conversation: the message discipline marketers apply to customers is exactly what they fail to apply to their own sales teams and leadership. Rather than complaining that the organization doesn’t appreciate marketing, Marcelo turned the lens on himself, treating internal misalignment as a communication problem he owned. It’s a candid, empowering look at how personal responsibility, continuous learning, and trust move marketing from tolerated to understood.

Inbolt’s AI vision guidance now steers 200+ robots across 100+ factories at Stellantis, Toyota, Ford, and GM, and Carl Standertskjold runs the entire marketing function alone. He joins Jeff and Carman to talk about what changes when a startup shifts from landing first logos to expanding inside a plant, and how a team of one holds up under it. Carl builds every plan down from the business outcome, leans on an AI-first stack, and still draws a hard line where human judgment and creativity can’t be handed off. The conversation explores the two roles he’s hiring, why systems thinking separates the marketers who thrive, and where real buyers actually spend their time.