How a CPG Playbook Turned Glass Display Cases into a Differentiated BrandHow a CPG Playbook Turned Glass Display Cases into a Differentiated Brand

How a CPG Playbook Turned Glass Display Cases into a Differentiated Brand 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 you doing, sir?

Carman Pirie: Look, all is well in my world, and you?

Jeff White: Great, thanks.

Carman Pirie: I’ve been looking forward to today’s conversation. I think it’s going to be another good one. And, Jeff, sometimes I think in B2B, particularly B2B manufacturing, it can sometimes seem, like, so different that some marketers wonder, “What can I learn?

Do I have anything to learn from…

Jeff White: There’s no playbook…

Carman Pirie: From CPG, from SaaS or something like that?” And even some of the B2B playbooks don’t seem to fit B2B manufacturing in the same way. So I kind of like it when we start digging into that a little bit more and find some inspiration from some other areas and lessons that we can pull.

I’m hopeful that today’s guest will be able to take us down that path a bit.

Jeff White: Yeah, and I think especially, when it comes to considering how to differentiate yourself from your competitors, there’s so many different ways of doing things, and I find that to just be an absolutely fascinating area of marketing.

Carman Pirie: Yeah. All good marketing is, founded on good positioning, and good positioning is fundamentally good differentiation and so without it, yeah, it’s kinda hard to do good marketing, which I guess that is a bit of the manufacturer’s challenge in some way because, my goodness, there’s a big sea of sameness out there.

An awful lot of people that basically make the same stuff in the same ways. I’m reminded that I was in a conversation just last week where somebody was telling me, “We do not want to try to differentiate based upon our product features and specifications.”

Jeff White: So we’ll have to find something else.

Carman Pirie: “Well,” I say, “I appreciate that honesty, but my goodness, like, all you do is make product.”

But nevertheless, it’s a, it’s an interesting world out there, and, today’s guest is going to make it even more interesting, I am sure.

Jeff White: Yeah. So joining us today is Patrick James Rooney. Patrick is a director of marketing at Structural Concepts. Welcome to The Kula Ring, Patrick!

Patrick Rooney: Thanks for having me. I’m glad to be here.

Carman Pirie: Patrick, it’s a delight to have you on the show. Thanks for joining us. Tell us a bit about the company to kick us off, if you would. What, are they up to there? What do you guys do?

Patrick Rooney: Sure. Structural Concepts Corporation has been around almost sixty years. They’re a manufacturer of fresh food merchandisers and displays, whether it be ambient, heated, refrigerated. And they’re one of those types of products that are somewhat unnoticeable, if you will. So if you go into Starbucks, you see the glass cases that hold all the treats, we manufacture those.

All the glass cases that you see in the supermarkets that hold the deli goods, that hold the bakery goods, fresh produce and such, we manufacture those. Anywhere in the convenience store market, when you want fresh chilled drinks, on a grab-and-go basis, we manufacture those as well.

So it’s a product that is obviously of use and a utility to the food service industry. But, in terms of where we stand, we are the leading manufacturer, but it’s a very, very small industry where there’s a lot of me too involved. And so our s- our strategy has been to how we de-commoditize our product not just from maybe an innovation or a feature set standpoint, but how we position it in the marketplace and from that positioning, all the value propositions that come around it, by identifying different markets

Carman Pirie: It’s an interesting product too, Patrick, ’cause it’s designed almost by its nature, it’s supposed to fade into the background a bit. It’s the things that it displays that you’re supposed to notice, right?

Patrick Rooney: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. In fact, one of our mission statements does involve that we manufacture the product so sleekly, designed so right that it almost goes unnoticeable, so it brings the more of the focus to the merchandise inside

Jeff White: I have a litany of design professors that I would’ve studied under that really wished that we would be thinking of that as we were creating very audacious concepts back in the day. I’m guessing your designers cannot be asked to create things that are really going to stand out and overwhelm the products they display.

Carman Pirie: Exactly. Well, Patrick, how did you end up there? Tell us a little bit about your career path and ending up there and just what has led you to here.

Patrick Rooney: Yeah, absolutely. I’ve been in marketing to some degree my entire career. I’ve spent some time with three major retailers on the marketing side. I’ve been with some CPG organizations, and I’ve also been with some manufacturing organizations as well. All of it has been in some level of discipline, whether it be brand management, marketing communications, advertising and promotion, creative services, marketing business development, as well as go-to-market strategy and commercialization.

So what I’ve done here is take everything that I’ve gathered along the way and, repurposed it, for the benefit of Structural Concepts Corporation

Carman Pirie: Well, I appreciate you mentioning that CPG bit of the background because it was the CPG approach in some way, or I don’t know if it’s exclusively a CPG approach. I’m sure you borrow some other parts of your experience into it as well. But you really described what you consider to be a bit of a CPG approach that you’re taking to the challenge of decommodifying what the firm does.

What – I guess, what is that CPG approach, first off? How would we start to peel that back? What do you think is the biggest difference in terms of how CPG looks at differentiation versus big B2B manufacturers?

Patrick Rooney: Sure. I think first and foremost, I think B2B has a history of it being more transactional. It’s more based on the product attributes where I think CPG has traditionally gone at the hearts and at the minds of buyers. So maybe the end experience, whereas that those products on the CPG side bring those audiences the joy the laughter, the emotions.

Whereas on the B2B side it’s a little bit more, as I mentioned, transactional, where here’s the product, here’s the price, here’s its feature sets. When do we ask for the PO?

Carman Pirie: So when you say bringing a CPG approach to a… Is that shorthand for bringing a more, creative and maybe consumer-flavored image to the brand? What else more is there than that?

Patrick Rooney: Yeah, it is. All successful CPG organizations, own a North Star, where it’s inherently built within the organization and then it then externalizes itself among its core targeted audiences. And so that’s the approach we’ve taken is try to identify a one common understanding of what our organization stands for.

And behind it is all those deliverables, all those benefits, all those value propositions that, you know, that we would bring to all different types of customers and all types of vertical markets based on a needs assessment. And it – and to me it’s no different than what CPG has done within their respective industry.

Jeff White: Patrick, I believe the tag that the organization has gone with, Delivering Fresh. Always, was that the result of that foray into discovering what that differentiation was? And I guess, how did you arrive at that?

Patrick Rooney: Sure, sure. When I came into the organization over four years ago, as I mentioned, it’s a very crowded industry. We were a manufacturing-led first organization, whereas, fairly said, we were very exceptional on the operational side and on the innovation side too. But then once it gets to the marketplace, you’re fighting for mind share with distributors, dealers, or direct customers, for awareness and ultimately preference of our products.

And within our, in our industry they’re seen as these big glass display boxes or open coolers, if you will. So not every organization, if not all of them, didn’t go out really with, I hate to use the word a hook, but how they were positioning themselves. You know, they all led based on the heritage of their name.

And so what we did is I took a step back and looked at, okay, what are we doing at this organization that nobody else is doing right now? And what’s the emotional benefits that we can bring into this value proposition, which really elevates far above all the table stakes of the product attributes that a lot of the competition can, match.

And so when we talk about, keeping food fresh longer, the way we go to market in terms of our fastest lead times in the industry, the innovation that we bring, the consistency of almost sixty years of being in business, we arrived at what I deemed to the organization as an OCU, which was like one common understanding of what the Structural Concepts Corporation brand stood for.

And to your point, yeah, we landed on Delivering Fresh. Always. And Lincoln, if you were to dissect, those three words, starting with delivering, as I mentioned, it’s our speed to market, it’s our accessibility to our people, the way we set the standards, our responsiveness, our solution focus.

Then you look at the word fresh as part of that di-dissection. It’s our, the way we’ve taken things from a transformative way versus the traditional way. We’re very consultative, which is, again, less on the transactional side and more on the needs-based side. Innovation, first to market, a number of different products.

And then, that last word, always, we’re consistent, we’re reliable. We do have that long legacy and history. We’re sustainable, we’re accredited, and we do have those longstanding customers, with the loyalty that they built alongside us.

Jeff White: We, here at Kula, we always love a, a good double or triple entendre, and I love that Delivery Fresh allows you to also talk about the products that are going into the product that you sell as well. So there, there’s just multiple layers, and I, I love it when that kind of comes together

Patrick Rooney: Yeah. Yeah, and once we landed on that one common understanding, which, again, is our flag that we’re carrying up the hill, we globalized it internally. You ask yourself, “What am I doing every day in this office,” in terms of delivering fresh always?

That resonates throughout the organization to any position, within the company. And then s- once that was embraced inside the walls, we then took it outside of the walls and really wrapped everything around that presence.

Carman Pirie: I wanna understand a little bit more about that internal embrace that you just mentioned because I guess my question was going to be was, it’s great, sounds great to have one common understanding. I think a lot of people would dearly love to have it. Generally the challenge they have is making that understanding common, if it were like how, how…

So, I wonder if you could shine a light on just what were some of, what’s some of the secret sauce there to getting this common understanding to be truly common inside the firm? And what were some of the challenges that you encountered along the way of that?

Patrick Rooney: Sure, sure. It’s a lot of the buzzwords these days is is talking about being a storyteller for an organization. How you go in front of your customers and you’re not selling, you’re telling the story. And this was really no different inside of our organization.

And to arrive at that one common understanding of Delivering Fresh. Always, it wasn’t that it just appeared to us. We did our research, across all customer segments and all co- all customer verticals interviewing them as well as interviewing our salespeople out in the field too, and really trying to get a hold on, where we were successful, where we were capable, and maybe perhaps where we had some shortcomings.

And then what we tried to do is try to wi-wind a common thread around each and every one of those, so you then have a story to tell within your organization is, “Hey, this is what we do well. This is what we can build upon. This is what we do that nobody else does, and this is what really it translates to.”

As I mentioned earlier in that dissection the sustainability, the innovation, the level of customer service, the legacy, the heritage, the fastest lead times in the industry. You can’t say all that all at once. And I think we had a real problem trying to do so.

But if you can package this into the story of Delivering Fresh. Always, and that’s exactly what I did, is, you said, “Hey, we do things very well. We do things very good. There might be a little bit of shortcomings that we can work on, but hey, here’s where we stand, not only with our external customers rather, but our internal customers as well. And this is where we’re arriving.” Thankfully and to be completely transparent with you, it was embraced, immediately because, again, I think that our leadership was looking for something to get behind. Our leadership was looking for that rallying cry or that North Star and, something to globalize around in a very, very crowded industry.

Yeah.

Carman Pirie: Hmm.

Patrick Rooney: Yeah, to be honest with you, where price somewhat in any industry in a B2B can dictate customer decision-making.

Carman Pirie: Absolutely. I wonder, is there… You know, in some ways it, it feels to me like, in leading that kind of a change, you almost have to… the people that you’re trying to bring along with that have to believe in you a little bit, have to have a reason for, “Why do I listen to this guy or girl anyway?”

And sometimes it could be that they’re the only marketer in the room, they have some experience, but that usually doesn’t get you very far in manufacturing organizations, candidly. I’ve found that the kind of, in some ways there’s almost like two different angles, and you referenced both of them, so I wanna know which one was more powerful.

One is sometimes you get the credibility because you’re speaking back to the organization what it’s already told you, so they can see themselves in the idea. “Okay, delivering fresh. Oh, okay, yeah. Yeah, that I can see how that connects to our value prop. I can see how that connects to the work I do every day.”

So in some ways, because you’re holding a mirror up to the organization and they see themselves in it, that can often be a very powerful moment. The other way is to say, “You should listen to me because I’ve listened to the customers. I’ve done the external research. I’ve gotten the validation.”

You’ve mentioned both of those a bit. I wonder which was more powerful in your case? What do you think influenced the organization to believe in you more?

Patrick Rooney: No, I think it’s a combination of both, really. I think, the first example you said where we’re holding up the mirror, to those folks, I think that’s where they really got that aha moment. We’ve always done things well, but how do we – how can we articulate this?

How can we articulate this, so much more differently at a higher level, that we can ultimately optimize it in the marketplace? But to your second point the research definitely helped. You need the – those level of insights, those market insights, those customer insights, not down the road necessarily to prove your point, but further upstream to have, at least some area to set up those tent poles, if you will.

So it’s like, you need to know what, not just the validation, but, hey, what are we talking about here? What are we looking at here? How do they feel about us? That type of thing.

Carman Pirie: It’s almost like what do we have permission to say? Is that a way to think of it?

Patrick Rooney: No, it’s along the lines of what are the customers in the marketplace, what are they saying about us?

What do they, what do we really think about us? Because, as everybody knows inside the walls thinks the customer thinks a certain way about them. And typically, half the time those organizations could be a little off, right? In terms of that value judgment there.

But that’s what I wanted to do. We’ve been, like I said, we – it’s been more of a, let’s just say, an outbound push, over those last forty, fifty years of, hey, we’re manufacturing things, we’re pushing them out, we’re selling them. We’re holding our own, and we’re being very successful in a number of different spots, within the industry.

But to be able to take that information back into the organization and, tell that story to those internal stakeholders, “Hey, th-these are what the customers are really saying. These are our s- this is what our sales organization, our own people are saying about us, too.” That brings a lot of honesty and a lot of candidness in, into those conversations.

And it was me-mainly to be a fact-finding mission rather than, “Hey, you guys have been wrong for the last half-century.” It wasn’t anything about that. It was more about really, like I said, putting those tent poles in place to hopefully, like I said, ultimately weave that, weave that through thread to arrive at that single denominator or that, as I mentioned, that one common understanding.

Carman Pirie: Hmm.

Jeff White: You mentioned, getting these tent poles in place so that people would have, a way of talking about it. As you began to roll this out before maybe you saw an impact on the business overall, what were some of the early indicators that people were hearing this new messaging that, that it was having an impact?

Patrick Rooney: I think especially with our salespeople who are on the front lines of the organization, I think that they had something that, you know, they, that they could talk about. Maybe not as, verbally direct as, “Hey, do you know that we’re Delivering Fresh. Always now?”

But I think, the way we went out and globalized it from a visual merchandising or visual branding standpoint, where it showed up, we updated our website. We updated, all of our sales presentations. We updated all of our collateral, our catalogs, virtually every touch point that…

So now you’ve got this bound of continuity across the board, to deliver more and more of those impressions. And at the same time, we took this Delivering Fresh. Always, and we built out a overarching fresh, if you will, strategy. So for example, like our Fresh Connections is our series of podcasts that we do right now.

Our Fresh Offerings are our outbound email campaigns. Our Fresh Perspectives, those are our, our quarterly trend reports that, that we produce. Our Fresh Takes, that’s our, that’s our media room, and the fresh goes on, on and on and on. So as part of this rebrand, it wasn’t just that we were slapping a new logo on existing materials.

We were taking a step back and looking, again, looking at the marketplace, doing the research, especially with our sales organization, saying “What is needed out there, in terms of, resources and tools?” And so we were able to take inventory of everything we had as well as everything we didn’t have at the time, and really reset the stage by taking that Delivering Fresh. Always approach to it, where the messaging was always clear, concise, and consistent.

But yeah, and at the same time, we brought all these new materials and resources and tools into the market, in, in support of that fresh strategy

Jeff White: It’s the word that keeps on giving, isn’t it?

Patrick Rooney: It is. It is. I mean, it was, just say, okay, freshen this up, right? But, yeah, it began to take shape through every touch point and then it physically started taking shape at our trade show approach.

It took shape in our customer, innovation center that I personally redesigned. So really it was extending itself beyond anything that, we had thought, because really it’s part of this rebrand. It’s not, again, as I mentioned, were we redoing anything.

We essentially reinvented everything in terms of, those tools and resources.

Carman Pirie: And Patrick, as you, started answering Jeff’s question a, a while ago, you talked, you joked about, well, it’s not like we’re having salespeople wax poetic about Delivering Fresh. Always. And we laugh about that. But I think we’ve either maybe… ’cause we’re all of a bit of a similar vintage on this podcast, which for those listening is 23.

But, but we know it’s maybe a little more advanced than that. We probably imagine that either we’ve seen previously in our careers the, this, the mistake that I’m about to mention, or we’ve committed the same mistake ourselves, which is to say we have tried to tell those salespeople to talk like that or sometimes marketers focus the attention in a rebrand a little bit about how do we get the salespeople and the engineers to talk like a marketer in some way, or to speak about things in a certain way.

And then the other side of it is, I feel like some of the success is in just giving those people something that’s interesting to talk about, and they’ll figure out how to talk about it. But it’s interesting, so they’re talking about it, and that’s better than not talking about it. Can you reflect a bit on that duality?

’Cause it feels to me like you, you didn’t spend a whole lot of time trying to teach those people to talk like a marketer or to talk in marketing speak.

Patrick Rooney: No, that essentially wasn’t the goal to use a bunch of fancy buzzwords. My approach or my strategy was to Give them the tools and the resources that they needed, but with a new, let’s just say, spin on them. So when we talk about a CPG approach, so in my former career of being in CPG and having called upon every major retailer out there, we did what was called fact-based selling.

So we would come into that merchandising buyer of any retailer chain out there, and we wouldn’t lead with our product. We would lead with a story. Here’s the situation. Here’s what your customer based on our research or your shopper based on our research, here’s what they may be looking for.

Here’s a problem that they are looking to solve. And so you bring in all the insights, all the data points, and you get to the story arc, if you will, and then that starts to create some sort of aha moment. And even more so starts keeping and holding the interest of your audience.

And then you come in with the actual solution, how you’re gonna solve that for your customer. That’s usually in the form of a product and say, “Okay, well, based on the insights and the research we have for your shopper, they’re looking for this or they’re, they’ve got a problem with this.

Well, in short, this is how our product or product line solves that problem, which will, help you, optimize on shelf and more turns, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.” So I brought in that same approach as part of this Delivering Fresh. Always go-to-market strategy. So typically in B2B, I don’t know if there’s many sales decks out there.

A lot of the folks, in B2B typically sell right out of the catalog. Here’s your catalog page. Here’s the picture of the product. Here’s four or five or six bullet points, and here’s all the terms at the bottom, right? But what we did is we did our research, first and really identified the 10 to 12 different segments that, you know, that we are selling to, but we’re going out with a shotgun approach.

And so we conducted all the insights of why or what they’re looking for in food service equipment, and it could be different from the C-store channel to the K through 12 channel to the travel and entertainment channel. So we gathered all those insights, and we were able to create stories for each one.

And so what we did is we cr- created customized sales materials for our teams to go in there and lead with that fact-based selling approach as opposed to opening up the catalog. Hey, take them through a story. For example, do you know that C-stores now are, 38% of them are selling more and more fresh made food made that morning?

Or do you know that 50% of audiences CC stores as a viable option than rather going to the supermarket? So you start presenting those types of opportunities to those buyers or those, those insights, it really gathers the attention and it… what it does for us, it gives us credibility, it demonstrates thought leadership, it shows that we’re in touch with the market, with their channel, with their business, their needs.

That type of thing. I’ve always said in any of the presentations derived from the insights or all the content that we share over social media or in all of our outbound campaigns, I’ve always said, “Don’t tell people how to tie their shoes. They already know how to do that.

Bring them new news. Give them some level of interest, because that level of interest will capture that attention, and that opens up the door to more and more conversations.”

Carman Pirie: It really sounds as though with your sales approach has been to say, “Let’s give the salespeople all of that information. Let’s give them basically a whole suite of new tools.” And they – it happens to show up in this Delivering Fresh. Always. wrapper. But you’re not asking for adoption of Delivering Fresh. Always, you’re asking for adoption of the new tools and things of that nature that you wanna use anyway.

Patrick Rooney: Yeah, the adoption of the Delivering Fresh. Always. is more of a mindset. It’s more of an approach. That’s, when you guys go out and call on these folks, you are gonna deliver fresh. Like I said earlier in our conversation, when you ask each employee, “What are you doing each and every day, in your process of Delivering Fresh. Always?”

Carman Pirie: Bit of the secret sauce in that is nobody wants to say that they deliver stale.

Jeff White: The alternative is terrible.

Carman Pirie: Yeah, you’re forced to find a way to how you deliver fresh. Yeah. Yeah.

This is great, Patrick. I really enjoyed kinda kicking this around. This has been a unique conversation for the podcast.

I thank you for bringing it, to the organization. I just wonder, I wonder what advice you have to people that are staring down a s- maybe a, a somewhat similar branding challenge. I appreciate that some of that advice may be take a CPG approach like I did. But more specifically, what, what’s a thing that they maybe need to look out for in doing so, or the one key piece that you may say is gonna either make it pass or fail?

Patrick Rooney: Yeah, I think on a B2B approach, anybody who’s charged with this or any team that’s charged with this, you’ve gotta get the organization to, first identify or if they even can, who they are. What do we stand for? What makes us different? What are we bringing to our market?

What do our customers think of us? What are the folks inside our own organization, what do they think of us? That type of thing. And once you gather all that up, and hopefully that there’s that willingness on the leadership on that B2B company side, the organization should then be committed to it.

Because what it does, it not only carves out a level of differentiation, but as I mentioned, it provides a rallying cry, through the company. It’s a consistent basis and the end game of any brand transformation is to be aspirational. So how is it ultimately gonna drive and impact culture in a positive way?

But on the external side of it is that if you do land on something, you need to get behind it, and you need to support it. You just – it’s, you’re not just, saying that you’re doing this now or you are this now. Everything needs to take a new approach in the way, not only how it looks and feels, but, the overall means, you know, in terms of how you get there

Carman Pirie: I think that’s a really important bit of advice, Patrick. There isn’t a single brand on the planet that’s born and immediately has all the meaning that it needs to succeed. That meaning is is put into the brand over time through investment in the brand.

Jeff White: And invention too. I think it, you know, both are important there.

Carman Pirie: Mmm.

Jeff White: Yeah

Carman Pirie: Yes. Fantastic, Patrick.

Thanks for joining the show today. It’s been great to have you on.

Patrick Rooney: Thank you so much. I appreciate it

Jeff White: Thanks a lot.