The Kula Ring

A podcast for manufacturing marketers

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Customer Experience Episodes

Episode 130

Understanding Customer Use Cases to Inform Product Marketing

Featuring Fin Watterson, Director of Product Marketing at Stratasys.

Posted on April 20, 2021

Some manufacturing marketers need to help customers envision how to use their solution while also learning how customers use their products. This week on The Kula Ring, Fin Watterson, Director of Product Marketing at Stratasys, talks about the role of a product marketer in a manufacturing organization, translating product information from the engineers and builders for customers. Additionally, he discusses how Stratasys worked with one customer to develop marketing messaging around their application use case.

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Episode 129

Optimizing Marketing Initiatives to Get Closer to the Customer

Featuring Mike Kazmierczak, Vice President of Marketing, Digital Energy & Buildings End Market at Schneider Electric.

Posted on April 6, 2021

How can manufacturers use customer trends to inform their marketing decisions during critical changes in the marketplace? In this episode of The Kula Ring, Mike Kazmierczak, Vice President of Marketing, Digital Energy & Buildings End Market at Schneider Electric, shares how he’s using data and voice of the customer to optimize new marketing initiatives. Additionally, he discusses how Schneider Electric is changing roles across the company to cater to customer types and personas and how this structure impacts the marketing content they produce.

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Episode 128

How a Manufacturer Adapted Relationship Selling for Virtual Environments

Featuring Ryan Carley, Vice President of Sales & Marketing at Mason Controls.

Posted on March 30, 2021

As trade shows and conferences continue in virtual forms for the foreseeable future, manufacturers must identify ways to optimize relationship selling. In this week’s episode of The Kula Ring, Ryan Carley, Vice President of Sales & Marketing for Mason Controls, talks about how relationship selling has changed for his team during the pandemic, how they are adapting the sales process with new remote tactics, and where he thinks relationship selling is going as virtual connections continue to be the norm.

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Episode 125

How an ERP Rollout Can Benefit From a Marketing Lens

Featuring Sam Gupta, Principal Consultant at ElevatIQ.

Posted on March 9, 2021

During an ERP rollout, manufacturing marketers in small and medium- sized enterprises often find themselves on the outside looking in. Sam Gupta, Principal Consultant at ElevatIQ, says marketers should be integrated into ERP initiatives because of their unique ability to identify new products and new markets. In this week’s episode of The Kula Ring, Sam talks about what marketers bring to the table that service personnel might miss, and how providing all team members with access to real-time ERP data can improve customer experience.

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Episode 118

How a Manufacturer Leverages a Distributor-First Ecommerce Model

Featuring Jeff Bercume, Director of CX Marketing at Berry Global.

Posted on January 19, 2021

How can manufacturers leverage their distributor relationships through ecommerce? In this episode of The Kula Ring, Jeff Bercume, Director of CX Marketing at Berry Global, shares how the company’s subsidiary brand, Laddawn.com, operates as an ecommerce site with a distributor-first model. He talks about how the website’s workflow is geared towards distributors, and how this ecommerce configuration can address capacity issues across manufacturing.

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Episode 113

Manufacturing a Self-Service Platform for Customers of All Sizes

Featuring Melanie Virreira, Director, Global Commercial Enablement at Ball Corporation

Posted on December 8, 2020

How can manufacturers better serve customers of various sizes? In this episode of The Kula Ring, Melanie Virreira, Director of Global Commercial Enablement at Ball Corporation, talks about how her team created a digital self-service portal for multiple customer segments. She shares lessons learned from mapping customer journeys on the self-service portal, and how her team integrated the portal with sales.

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Episode 106

Integrating Marketing into the Manufacturing Enterprise

Featuring Heather Smriga, Marketing Communications Manager of EaglePicher Technologies.

Posted on October 20, 2020

In lean manufacturing environments that focus on product development, how can organizations prevent marketing from becoming an afterthought? In this episode of The Kula Ring, Heather Smriga, Marketing Communications Manager of EaglePicher Technologies, shares how the company’s Voice of the Customer research is fueled by feedback across the enterprise and provides insights on how leveraging different talents in the organization improves their approach to marketing strategy.

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Episode 105

How a B2B Manufacturer Leverages Data Sharing to Improve CX

Featuring John Joyce, Global Marketing Director of Brennan Industries.

Posted on October 13, 2020

Customer demand for real-time data is driving manufacturers to build web-enabled systems to share information more efficiently across channels. In this episode of The Kula Ring, John Joyce, Global Marketing Director of Brennan Industries, talks about how he helped his organization make data more accessible to their distribution channels and partners. He shares insights on how leveraging data improves customer experience and the role of the marketing department in implementing customer-facing technology.

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Customer Feedback Lessons from The Kula Ring’s First 100 Episodes

Featuring Jeff White and Carman Pirie, co-hosts of The Kula Ring.

Posted on September 15, 2020

To celebrate 100 episodes of The Kula Ring, co-hosts Jeff White and Carman Pirie share lessons from remarkable podcast guests on customer feedback across the manufacturing enterprise. They reflect on insights from Greg Palmer, Director of Marketing at National Nail, on how to develop a customer-centric approach to product development and marketing. They share thoughts from Tim Bay, Head of Digital Marketing at Fellowes Brands, on how his team leveraged customer feedback to introduce new products. Finally, the co-hosts talk about digital transformation in light of comments from Augie Ray, Senior Research Analyst & Executive Advisor of Customer Experience at Gartner, Inc., on how marketers should focus on CX and customers’ unmet needs.

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Episode 91

How Customer Collaboration Informs B2B Marketing

Featuring manufacturing marketing veteran Ahsan Javed

Posted on July 7, 2020

Digital marketing enables manufacturers to fine-tune their tactics down to their best-fit accounts, but it can also create a false expectation that each marketing engagement can provide a guaranteed ROI. In this episode of The Kula Ring, Ahsan Javed, manufacturing marketer veteran, talks about his customer collaboration framework and how his background in engineering and marketing guides his iterative approach to co-creating products and solutions.

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About Kula

Kula Partners is an agency committed to helping leading B2B manufacturers craft digital experiences that transform how they engage buyers, serve customers, and outpace their competition online. We are headquartered in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada and work primarily with North American-based manufacturing clients marketing within complex B2B selling environments.

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