Feeling Like an Alien: Marketing Advanced Manufacturing by Finding a Common LanguageFeeling Like an Alien: Marketing Advanced Manufacturing by Finding a Common Language

Feeling Like an Alien: Marketing Advanced Manufacturing by Finding a Common Language 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: I’m delighted to be here, Jeff. How are you?

Jeff White: I’m doing great, thank you

Carman Pirie: This is like one of the last official duties that you have prior to summer vacation.

Jeff White: This is true. I have a number of other recordings between now and then.

Carman Pirie: What are we talking about today? We got a great guest.

Jeff White: Yeah, I think it is really interesting. We’ve had the opportunity to speak with some folks up in the 3D printing space before, and it’s always– To me, it still feels like rocket science, even though I know it’s been around for decades at this point, which, seems unlikely.

But, I think our guest is going to illuminate a lot of the things that go through as a marketer in order to kind of fully understand the offering and what that sort of technology can do, and also helping their customers understand that as well from a technical standpoint, which is always pretty interesting.

Carman Pirie: Yeah, it’s a valid point though, as you mentioned about additive. Like it, it still seems very new even though it’s not.

Jeff White: Yeah.

Carman Pirie: Yeah.

Jeff White: Kind of like AI seems like it’s very new, but it’s not. But now it finally works, which is probably a lot like 3D printing.

Carman Pirie: I think it’s just like, I think there are newer developments and so, I don’t know. Yeah, so yeah. It’s interesting that in the manufacturing space, additive manufacturing has held that, mantle for so long in some way.

Jeff White: So joining us today is Benjamin Toomey. Ben is the marketing manager at JuggerBot3D. Welcome to The Kula Ring, Ben.

Benjamin Toomey: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Carman Pirie: And it’s awesome to have you on the show. Thank you for joining us. Look, it’s quite a name, JuggerBot3D. So maybe I’ll let you explain a little bit more about what y’all are up to at JuggerBot before we go into the rest of the conversation.

Benjamin Toomey: Sure. So JuggerBot3D is a industrial large format additive manufacturing machine builder. We’re based out of Youngstown, Ohio. We specialize in large format, 3D printing of thermoplastics and thermosets, a wide range of them. Everything from your commodity grade materials like what you see printing on most small printers like ABSs, all the way up to your high temperature, high performance thermoplastics like polyetherimides or Ultem compounds.

On the thermoset side of the house, we’ve done some work where you’ll work with silicones or epoxies all the way up to really complex materials like vinyl esters.

Jeff White: Is a lot of the breakdown of categories within the 3D printing space based on the substrates that you can print, or is it more size-based or is it more kind of the type of material in terms of how you go to market?

Benjamin Toomey: I think it’s mostly focused around the actual process. We fall under a specific ASTM categorization called material extrusion. Underneath material extrusion falls multiple different areas. There’s some change, or I guess there’s some differentiation that happens from time to time and also some semantic overlap for things like fused deple- fused deposition modeling like, FFF or fused filament fabrication to what we do, which is fused granule fabrication.

Fused granule fabrication basically is like, marrying an FDM printer with an injection molding screw and barrel system. So larger deposits of material, higher yields and throughputs for ultimately larger parts.

Carman Pirie: That is an incredibly detailed explanation, Ben. You don’t normally get an explanation like that from a marketer.

Jeff White: No, and then I think that kind of points to a little bit about what we’re going to be diving into today, just the, the notion of how much you have to know about these kinds of products in order to potentially be a good marketer there. But before we get into that, I’d love to– You have a really interesting story about how you ended up at JuggerBot.

I would love for you to tell our audience about it.

Benjamin Toomey: Yeah. So I initially started in the greater marketing industry in consumer-grade fireworks. It was high volume, marketing deployments in seasonal periods. I’m sure that the people in the marketing team at the company I used to work for are currently either pulling their hair out with a lack of sleep, or they’re just having a good time just riding the wave, which is ultimately what I’d, I’d be hoping for them.

Uh, I was there for a little while, and I was searching for something more. There’s a lot of creativity in that type of marketing, specifically like brand awareness marketing. But I found that to have a good balance and understanding between the creative process is to also have some backing in the technical.

And so right around that time, I started doing fractional work. I was working with a few different craft beer companies, still creative, but there was still a little more tech development. It was broadening the scope of responsibility, whether it be website development or like my background’s in photography, so it was some commercial photography, all the way to a point where I got a call from this company that makes big 3D printers, and they said, “Hey, we, we need a little bit of work done. We have a big event that we’re investing money into, and we wanted some marketing content for it.” And I said, “All right. That sounds great.” And I came in, and I met with them, and we basically went over the technology, and my brain expanded because I’m like, “Yes, this is the technical thing that I needed.”

And some technical marketing aspects could come up in this. And by the end of the conversation, the gentleman, who is now my boss and vice president said, “Do you like strategy?” And I go, “I love it.” And he goes, “Well, let’s keep talking.” And after the event was done, we ended up just doing some more work on the SEO front and content strategy.

And at the, at a certain crossroads a job offer was put in front of me, and I said, “I’ll just jump in.”

Carman Pirie: I think there’s some really interesting learning there for people around, if you’re not, if you’re not inclined to geek out a little bit, then chances are manufacturing, industrial, like the more technical side of what we do, like probably isn’t for you. I feel like it requires somebody that’s a little that is naturally curious and likes getting a little bit geeked out about the technical side of what it is they sell

Benjamin Toomey: I think that I think that’s largely additive as a whole. You know, this is an emergent technology. It’s been around, I think the first patent was in the ’80s. Uh, but it really started gaining com- commercial adoption in the late 2000s. And it’s largely fueled by curious people. And I think that curiosity isn’t just in the engineering department, it’s also in strategy, sales, leadership, utilizing the tools and marrying them at to one another to try and get the best outcome.

Jeff White: And who are the kinds of companies that would be the best fit for JuggerBot?

Benjamin Toomey: I guess I’ll backtrack a little bit and say that 3D printing as a whole, especially we noted about 10 to 15 years ago, early historically 10 to 15 years ago it was sold as like a one-size-fits-all, an all-product approach. And so you’d normally say, “Oh, yeah, we could print that,” you know?

But as time’s gone on and there’s been some hits to the industry and there’s been more maturity and stronger comebacks as time has gone along, you start to find out that there are really specific applications that are geared to you. We could say that we have, we serve maritime or we serve aerospace and defense, and it’s great to hit those broad points.

It’s really strong for SEO. But ultimately we see common bonds between these different industries, whether it be low-hanging fruit like tooling, so oven tooling, autoclave, thermoforming molds end-use structures and parts using a variety of materials. So when people ask “Who do we serve?” We serve a number of different industries across research, academia and such, but really the technology itself and what we lend ourselves to are large parts using commercial off-the-shelf materials, whether it be reinforced with glass or carbon, all the way to your exotic materials like we’ve even processed materials that have tungsten reinforcement, wood flour or fly ash just, and then getting the most out of that mechanical performance for it.

Carman Pirie: Ben, you have a great gift of making someone want to lean in more and learn more about what it you’re doing.

Benjamin Toomey: The importance is just distilling the information so that everyone can understand, you

Jeff White: So how, how do you go about doing that? Because obviously you’ve become very knowledgeable about the space, and, I’m sure that there are a multitude of massively intelligent engineers and other folks within the company that are probably able support you in that. But how have you built up this knowledge in order to be able to market a product this complex to that many different types of people?

Benjamin Toomey: I’m not a polymer scientist or a mechanical engineer, machinist. No. You know, like, but I have the opportunity to be surrounded by leaders in research in all different fields, throughout the actual manufacturing process. It’s not about having the most knowledge. I think that one of the tar- like the hardest lessons I’ve had to learn, especially with getting into this industry, is that it is an easy and likely pitfall to try and hide your ignorance as a marketer.

What I mean by that is there have been many times that I’ve been in meetings or even just pe- speaking to people at events, and 30% of the words that they’re saying to me, I just don’t understand, you know? And it’s easy to go along with it and just try and pull it together to your best.

But at the same time, what are you going to learn by trying to become be the smartest guy in the room? Admitting and having hubris to your knowledge of the technology, it’s not necessarily about having the most knowledge in that sense. It’s about understanding a common language, and that’s what we try to have here at JuggerBot.

So, you know, we could be talking about something that is highly complex, but we can relate it back to something that’s very human in a way.

Carman Pirie: I kind of wonder about the a bit of the reverse direction of that question, because part of what Jeff was asking there is how did you get in sync with the technical nature of the industry and become more knowledgeable about about the offering. So in reverse, I’d be curious about all those incredibly smart technical people that you encountered as you, uh, came to Juggerbot. How did they approach marketing? What was their thought about the marketing function? How did those highly technical people view what, the, the world that you were living in?

Benjamin Toomey: I think that this isn’t what we have here in Juggerbot, but in the greater AM industry, you can use the word snide. But there is a, a view that marketing is somewhat of a necessary evil in a way, and I know that’s somewhat hyperbolic in terms of language, but I can think to a time I heard an engineer say that marketing in AM is equivalent to chicken cooked medium rare.

You know, it’s just not fully baked. There’s an issue within that, but I think that it’s important to kinda diagnose where that comes from. And and being emergent in general, especially be early on in the tech development and adoption, you really wanna sell the dream because you need people to buy in and you need funding.

And so it’s easy to kinda oversell, and within that comes its own distinct problems. And that view is carried over time, and there’s also a pressure from leadership and from sales from a lot of corporations where, you know, you– they wanna commercialize or go to market with a new product.

But really there’s a lot of data that needs to be tracked first. There’s a lot of de-risking and that needs to happen with either a specific system or a, a workflow itself to develop a, a truly unique and good product. So I guess I kinda half-baked your answer there a little bit.

Jeff White: It was medium rare.

Benjamin Toomey: Yeah, medium rare.

There you go, there you go. I guess to follow up on that a little bit is we largely, root ourselves in data, and so understanding what can go hand in hand. We were working on a printer that, uh, was for a client that produces, material that can off-gas specific fumes that aren’t good, VOC, heavily VOC dependent.

And so we go through and say “Okay, this is the risk aversion plan. This is how we mitigate any sort of risk within the product itself,” and that can be through targeted deposition– I mean, targeted fume extraction at the head or total area turnover. But have– You can say all those things, but once you have those metrics in place to say “This is really the, the accurate level of the things that we are removing,” we are steadfast in terms of, like, how we deploy information so that it can be accurate so that there’s a degree of credibility with everything that we put out there.

Carman Pirie: Interesting thing to ponder. Or, been thinking about it since you said it, about the, the kind of the hype that drove… That, that was required to drive the adoption, but it carries the, there’s the kind of the shadow side of it. Completely silly tangent I suppose, but the thing that’s just coming up, all I can think of is the AI hype right now,

Benjamin Toomey: We think about the future, we talk about AI, but I mean, think about the first injection molding system that was put out there. Like, injection molding was first patented in the 1870s. Can you imagine trying to sell that entire process to a company? That … I think I even looked it up at one point.

I think full a- like adoption started happening in the ’40s, for injection molding, and it was slightly overseas and then also here in the States for industrialization. So the same thing can be applied somewhat to new technology. There’s always gonna be hype, but I think that kind of curtailing it back and understanding how the technology grows and sometimes consolidates is a part of that life cycle.

Carman Pirie: Be an interesting life cycle of the map to look at, okay, when does marketing shift from from hype to now you have to prove it, and then is there a, I don’t know, is

Jeff White: A next step? Balancing next phase or something? Yeah.

At least, you know, unlike the 1800s where you might get branded as a heretic for inventing something like that compared to now, people are actually open to the new technologies and pursuing these things with with interest and, trying to learn how they can work.

But that that notion you mentioned to us in, in one of our earlier conversations that it’s really easy to feel like an alien, when you’re en- encountering these types of, of things and having to learn about them. Do you find that, the folks that you’re marketing to maybe have a similar sort of sense on that front?

Or, or are they more well-informed about what they’re looking for and are, at this point are looking for something that fits their specific needs, but are not necessarily just looking to have their minds blown by something net new and interesting?

Benjamin Toomey: Yeah. I mean, well, I thought the technology was alien itself when I first saw it. It looked like cake icing, making something that I couldn’t tell would either become a trash can or something for Toyota. People in our industry in general, I’d guarantee, I don’t wanna speak for all of them, but I can somewhat understand how a lot of them would feel alien in a way.

You’re trying to sell a manufacturing process in general. A couple of our north stars are for AM, especially large format, are part consolidation, manpower hours lowered, and then ultimately cost, you know? And so when you’re trying to sell that to someone, it’s making them basically rethink their entire process.

And so going into those conversations or even conceptualizing the t- the technology as a whole can make them feel like an alien. But I think what we need to understand a lot of the time is that 3D printing is not a replacement for legacy or traditional manufacturing, but rather it is an extension upon it.

We deal a lot with convergent manufacturing, so it’s putting different parts of the actual manufacturing process together. So the additive side to milling something down to spec and then validating it. You could stress relieve it, you could anneal it, and then move it into an oven.

Like, all of these things, like they, they work together really.

Carman Pirie: I would love to know more about how you feel like an alien in the world of 3D printing and beyond.

Benjamin Toomey: Well, I mean, I don’t think it… I guess when I first came in, I felt like an alien. I guess I’ll have a, I have a timeline. So we’ll take us back to four years ago. I was in Chicago at my first major trade show. I was young and younger than I am now. I’m 31. And I was feeling really spunky.

I was feeling good about the work that we were doing, and I was, like, so excited to go to this show because I’ve fully entered the industry. I get to talk to some of these leaders that I view as a golden standard for marketing and in AM. Part of the duties is to be in the booth, and you talk to people about your technology and the benefits of it.

And I found myself thwarted a lot of the time. I felt inadequate or inept. But in that moment, and you could boil it down to an in- like something being, feeling inferior or just out of place. I recognize that like it’s just a different perspective. And so what I did was, is after that event, I basically took a note of every single conversation that I had our application for all the leads we had and people who we didn’t scan.

I just mulled on a number of the questions that they asked and how would I answer that a year from now or two years from now. And so I basically dedicated myself to learning, and that can come through interpersonal communication between different leaders in our space, researchers reading white papers that, you know, other people that we coordinate with daily had, had published and gotten access to.

I’m in that moment and I feel alien, I feel out of place and what am I, like what am I doing and so I set myself up to, to kinda learn, and year over year I started to notice a difference. And we’ll flash forward to just a few months ago, we were at the same show, Rapid + TCT.

It’s North America’s largest 3D printing trade show. Just feel like I did an ad read for them. But I was there and a gentleman pulled me aside and he wanted to talk about thermoplastic materials. Looking at him, I could tell like he understood a little bit, mostly the core principles of 3D printing and additive.

And I saw that he was from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, huge institution, really highly regarded in our industry. We started talking about just like some of the core benefits of thermoplastics, and I found out he was an architecture professor. And a side note is I have a certain affinity for Frank Lloyd Wright and Prairie Home architectural style.

I’ve gone to visit a number of the homes. And I also remembered in that moment, and I used, uh, a large number of just bits of information and knowledge that I had accrued, trucking through the muck and the mud for the past number of years to really simplify the information to a place where he could understand.

And what I mean by that is the work we do here is we do a lot of work with research institutions that take spent materials like fly ash, uh, or wood flour, as I previously mentioned, that were part of the general manufacturing industry in the area. They take those materials and they use them for construction or infrastructure projects in the community.

And I thought about Frank Lloyd Wright and how he viewed the harmonization of his homes and, the environment. So he would take from the earth and use them so that they could almost become one. And I communicated that information to him, and I could just see that aha moment, “oh, you can use this technology in the same way, just in an architectural, method at a material level and a process level.”

And in that moment, I kind of had this recognition that I was no longer, an alien, but I was more or less a messenger, for how the the core benefits of the technology can be married to his field of interest.

Jeff White: So like you’re like Yoda really.

Carman Pirie: Yeah.

Benjamin Toomey: Don’t make me do my impression.

Carman Pirie: But I think on the one hand, we have the de-alienation that’s happened here. Somehow you’re feeling less alien. But what struck me in that story, Ben, is that you actually got there by being a bit more alien to the industry in a weird way, by leveraging architecture and this other interest.

And it’s like, that seems to me to be the kind of like the, the question that I had jotted down as you were talking, I was like, I’m like, do you still wanna keep some of the alien side though, as the marketer? Like, that’s part of your superpower, isn’t it? Is you’re still bringing a bit of the ability to read the outside of the jar?

Benjamin Toomey: Oh yeah, all the time. Yeah, I think what– I think at its core, the bedrock of it, and this goes back to a previous question or a comment that you made, and it’s not about necessarily the, the level of knowledge that you can display to people, and that is important. It’s not about having the most knowledge, but it’s about having a common language with one another.

It’s about being able to have this kind of outsider point of view where you can see things at a human level, all the while still understanding some of the technical benefits of it, of the technology, of, of the process itself.

It’s mostly just about like tying that kind of like different perspective into some of the core marketing processes, whether that be on the digital front in terms of copy, in terms of messaging, all the way to the visual identity of a brand.

Jeff White: There’s a lot of use of rhetorical tropes in this idea that you can leverage metaphors and other industries and other types of knowledge and relate it back to help communicate that. Humans have been doing that for thousands and thousands of years, trying to, to explain a concept by relating it to something else in that way.

I think that’s– It’s a really powerful thing that I wish more marketers would do rather than perhaps just talking about speeds and feeds, as they say.

Carman Pirie: Yeah. Double down on the marketing speak. Yeah. Yeah. Vers- rather than that, why not? Uh, uh, kind of feel as like marketers are the, they’re the connectors of different dots. Doesn’t mean that we know, like we’re smarter than the other people in the organization. I mean, you just articulated very clearly how brilliant many of the people are across your firm.

But you connect different dots than they do as a marketer, even with the, even as your level of technical knowledge at least makes you feel less alien, you know?

Benjamin Toomey: Yeah. I think at the, in the beginning, and this is I guess more of a philosophical point, but like I definitely felt my ego and as time goes on it’s easy to, especially as you gain more knowledge it’s easy to let go of that ego and understand what you don’t know in general.

But at the same time, like it’s also easy to let go of that creative or alien part of you that makes you so different. And there’s a degree of conformity there, but I think that we all actively, not just me in the marketing position, but we all internally here at JuggerBot kind of embrace to have that different perspective on things to open ourselves up to, you know, like a different way to view everything from system architecture to software and process development, to new age telemetry and AI, or just generalized machine learning, all the way to what I do here.

And that can be around content development, how we report out, even how we target new markets? Or like we see emergent parts of our technology or emergent industries where our applications fit.

Carman Pirie: Kind of a tangential question to close our time together today as we talk about the kind of nurturing divergent interests and making sure you bring a different perspective. I’m curious, as you’ve, nurtured your marketing career and grown in your career, have you… You strike me as the kind of guy that thinks consciously about this sort of thing.

How do you think about, ensuring that 10 years from now you’re still able to connect those weird external dots, you know? ’Cause I think sometimes people get sucked into the organization that they work with and they maybe don’t always nurture that external creativity

Benjamin Toomey: It’s funny it’s not even on the marketing front, but I was in a conversation with a gentleman one time, and he was an old industry vet, and I just asked him, like, how he’s viewed the change in the industry and how he’s able to translate value. And he literally took a part, he says, “You take a part, you hand it to them.”

He goes, “Engineers in general are basically larger children with more expensive toys.” Their minds are constantly expanding and seeing linkages. And I think that’s also true largely for the marketing front. There’s so much out there. I was just looking at a branding spread from General Dynamics, a defense company, from the 1960s, and it gets me to think about how like there’s continuity in some levels of branding that we just aren’t really aware of.

And 10 years from now, I might be looking at the same thing. I might be looking at graphic standards for the EPA or I might be looking at whatever is new. There are linkages between all of these different areas, and that’s not just in marketing. Like that’s in some of the baselines of it.

It’s in writing. I was just reading a book by Cormac McCarthy. Uh, it’s in art. I was looking at Joan Miro, interactions of color to architecture as we brought up. I hope to be taking my girlfriend to Fallingwater here in the next couple of months. Also in the technical side of things, like as we use leverage AI to continue learning, to open up new, tools and pathways for us to understand not only the technologies that we work with but the world around us.

Jeff White: Well, there’s so much you can learn from those people who have tried to expand the way things are done before. I’m just thinking of Cormac McCarthy’s disdain for capitalization and some punctuation, you know? Like, it

Benjamin Toomey: Oh, the run-on sentences!

Jeff White: It’s nice to be able to translate those ideas to, to things in other mediums and, and other forms of work.

Benjamin Toomey: Yeah I wholeheartedly agree, especially the Cormac McCarthy statement. I– if he didn’t have such vibrant imagery, I think I would fall asleep in the first 20 pages.

Carman Pirie: I feel like this is gonna be the, one of the few, episodes where we have an opportunity to reference, uh, Conor Oberst and how he wr- his lyric about his lyric about falling water costs you, is it,

Jeff White: It costs $20 to visit Fallingwater? Yeah.

Mama Borthwick?

Carman Pirie: Yeah, it’s the perfect house where no one lives.

Benjamin Toomey: I just think about being very melodramatic when I was in my late teens listening to “Lua,” thinking it’s the saddest song I’ve ever heard.

Jeff White: It might still be.

Benjamin Toomey: It might still be. It’s up there, but I mean, he’s, he’s done great work, you know,

Carman Pirie: My addiction to Conor Oberst lyrics is it’s one thing that I do to try to appear younger, you see.

Benjamin Toomey: See, I’m the opposite. I don’t try to appear older, I just like older lyrics.

Carman Pirie: Sir, it’s been a pleasure to have you on the show. Thank you for joining us.

Benjamin Toomey: Hey, thank you guys so much. I appreciate the opportunity.

Jeff White: Fantastic.