Finding Your Superpower: Simplicity and Clarity in Complex MarketsFinding Your Superpower: Simplicity and Clarity in Complex Markets

Finding Your Superpower: Simplicity and Clarity in Complex Markets Transcript:

Announcer: You’re listening to The Kula Ring, a podcast made for manufacturing marketers. Here are Carman Pirie and Jeff White.  

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: Man, we’re in the middle of a heat wave here in Halifax, Nova Scotia in the middle of July as we’re recording this. Yeah, almost smack in the middle of July, and I never complain about heat. So I’m a really happy person these days, you know.

Jeff White:  I think it kind of depends on where you’re from. So to us, you know, 28 degrees Celsius or about 80 or so Fahrenheit, I think is quite hot, but you know, there’s, there’s plenty of tourists around who barely find that… You know, they’re wearing a sweater. 

Carman Pirie: Yes, exactly. There was a few, there were a few tourists, I think that arrived here in Halifax that were interviewed on the news. So when people arrive from Kansas, it’s still significant enough that we interviewed them on the news. Um, but they were they were finding it rather cool and refreshing here in the middle of our heat wave. So yeah, you know, it’s all a matter of perspective, but it’s not just the heat that has me excited, Jeff. I think today’s conversation is going to be pretty cool.

Jeff White: I think it’s gonna be great. Yeah, I’m looking forward to diving into it. So why don’t we get started? So joining us today is Allison Myers. Allison is the Director of Marketing Communications at Fives Logistics, Intralogistics. Fives’s Intralogistics. Did I get that right, Allison? 

Allison Myers: It is Fives Intralogistics Corp. 

Jeff White: There we go. All right. To the uninitiated, the name is spelled five. So it was very, it was kind of throwing me for a loop there and you, you straightened us out when we last spoke. So I’m glad to hear that. 

Carman Pirie: Well, not straight enough, apparently, because you just messed it up again. 

Allison Myers: I’ve got, I apparently have some work to do. Yes, it is a French name, so the S is silent and it, it. Basically is a province, a location that was a long time ago in Fives. It is a, over 200-year-old engineering company that has done awesome things like putting hydraulics in the Eiffel Tower. As you know, the Paris Olympics are getting ready to start and that’s, that’s really cool. You know, you can the Eiffel Tower with the hydraulics so many, so many years ago, which is really a neat thing for Fives to have a claim to. And we’ve moved into many different things since then. And one of those is intralogistics and I am the marketing communications director at Fives Intralogistics Corp. And that’s what we focus on is basically helping move your stuff inside of buildings. It’s that simple. So conveyor systems, sortation systems that help move and sort things to make sure that they get to your location. So very important. 

Carman Pirie: Really cool. Allison, thank you for that introduction to Fives. That’s a really cool bit of background. And how did you end up there? What about you? 

Allison Myers: Sure, sure. So I have about 25 years of experience in marketing, product management, communications, and sales. I’ve done a little bit of everything. Mostly worked in the B2B industry. That’s my passion. That’s what I’ve loved and worked for many manufacturing companies that have produced stretch offering equipment to plaques and awards to all kinds of things. Basically, anything that you can think about that would be manufactured or produced, I’ve tried to work around and work in and with that, and I just think that those kinds of products, and when you design and develop, trying to help find a need and a niche and a gap that most people don’t think about. I think that’s fun. So that’s kind of my background. Done a lot of product management where help divine design and development by working with really smart engineers. I am not an engineering mind. I am a marketing sales mind. And I always find that they’re so fascinating. You can come to them with a problem and say, Hey, I went to this customer location. I see this gap. They have this need. How can we fill it? Let’s think of some ideas. And they design and develop and I watch them create this in front of my eyes. And then I’m able to take that to the market and help the customers, you know, do better, you know, be more efficient, improve their productivity, help the lives of the people that are working there. That’s, that’s the fun stuff. And then I’m just really passionate, of course, about branding. You’re going to always permanently see me in our Fives purple which is the colour of our company. We were like, Hey, do you just like purple? No, it’s actually, our logo colour. So there are some branding aspects that I’m very passionate about, in marketing. And, like I said, I’ve been doing this for a while. 

Jeff White: And for those of you, we don’t record the video with this podcast, but every time we’ve spoken to Allison, she has shown up in the brand colour of Fives, which is, Carman and I only just wear black t-shirts. So it’s not, we’re not really connecting with the Kula colours at all. Perhaps we…

Carman Pirie: They don’t make another colour. I mean, once they start making another colour of T-shirt, I’ll start buying them. 

Allison Myers: There you go. There you go. I mean, but at least you’re branded in your nice black T-shirts, right? That’s a look. That’s the look that you have for your podcast. 

Carman Pirie: Oh yeah, that yeah, middle-aged white guys in black t-shirts are really rare. Ah, we’re terrible. Okay, Allison, I think we got a little bit of a glimpse of your superpower as you introduced the company. You talk about what intralogistics is. We move stuff inside of buildings. That’s what we do. And that’s a really great way of simplifying what is, I think, probably a fairly complex offering of a mixture of products and services, you know, probably logistics software and platforms and everything else that y’all are doing. Does that really mirror how you think about branding in some way? Is that it’s about finding the simple articulation of the challenges of these complex offerings and B2B. Is that kind of generally how you’ve thought about it? 

Allison Myers: Absolutely. I think we’ve spoken before and really the big focus is how do you connect to customers? How do you connect to what you’re trying to offer and what they need And, how do you do that in the simplest, easiest ways? There’s a lot of noise out there and you can use all kinds of language and you can use your company language and industry language. But at the end of the day, when you want to boil it down, how do you tell someone about it in its simplest form? And if you can’t do that. Then I would challenge you to do that. And you were, we were talking about my marketing background and I’ve worn a million hats. I’ve done everything. I work for a lot of smaller, more family-owned. I work for a bigger corporation. And then of course Fives is, is bigger as well. But I’ve worked for a lot of smaller family-owned companies as well. And a lot of privately held, you have to wear a ton of hats. So you have to wake up one morning in your PR and the next morning you’re doing product management and the next morning you are going to a trade show and putting on an event and then you’re trying to create some kind of social media calendar or platform. So you’re, you’re wearing, you know, you may be writing a video script and shooting it in the afternoon and then tomorrow you’re, you’re on a plane going to a trade show. So there are a lot of things, especially in B2B marketers have to wear a lot of hats. 

But I think what we have to do is find out what are we really, really good at. Like, what is your superpower as a B2B marketer? What is your superpower as a marketer? And it took me some time to develop this. And I had a really great mentor when I was younger and he would push me and he’d be like, what are you really good at? What are you really great at? No, like you can’t be great at everything because what that allows you to do is hone in on those skills to develop them and be better at them. But even more importantly than that, what it allows you to do is build a team around you, the things that you can’t do as well, right? Cause you may, you may be a small, mighty team. You might need to hire someone who’s good at the other things. Cause there are a lot of hats you have to wear. So when you’re looking at marketing, if you don’t hire. Say an advertising firm or an outside third-party company, and you want to do this in-house. You’ve got to realize what you’re really good at. 

And so my superpower is, is really taking the complex and making it simple. How do you boil it down and make it really simple? And this mentor used to say to me all the time, talk to me like you were in elementary school. No, take it all the way back to elementary school. You’re in grade school. How would you explain this to someone that’s there? You know, in kindergarten. It’s five years old. However, whatever age that is younger that you know that you can’t use those industry terms or you can’t use, we love to just throw out random words and speak and make up stuff. And we like to make up a lot of business talk. And sometimes that really doesn’t even mean anything to anybody. So how do you make that be impactful to someone they know right away? Hey, they can solve my problem. Here’s what exactly they do. And I worked really hard at doing that is just really try to take that and in ways that I love it. 

I mean, I have co-workers and colleagues that will come in and say, Hey, I’m trying to figure this out. Do you have a few minutes? And I’m like, sure, explain it to me. Okay. And I just keep asking a lot of questions and taking in data points. And then when they’re done, I’m like, let me tell it back to you. Is this what you’re trying to say to me? And they’ll be like, yeah. And I’m like, okay, let’s name it this, or let’s call it that. Or, you know, these are, you know, this is the program that you’re trying. To create, here’s how you should talk about it. It’s not something that I came up with. I think that inherently I have some bent to that, but I do think it can be taught to yourself. You have to work at it and say, okay, I think this is my superpower and I’m going to keep working at it. And I think everybody can find their superpower.

Carman Pirie: I kind of wonder about this. Well, this I’m kind of torn. I wanted to kind of talk more about this particular superpower versus just the act of finding one. So I’m going to stick with talking about this particular superpower for a moment. 

Allison Myers: Sure. 

Carman Pirie: Because I think one of the things that happens in B2B, especially, you know, an awful lot of B2B manufacturing is very engineering heavy And you know, often, these are folks that pride themselves in being able to see the complexity, being able to understand the nuance to, you know, sometimes they, you know, the fact that things aren’t simple is part of how they see their value and that they understand the complicated. And that’s who you’re selling into. How does that square against your desire to ensure a simplified marketing message rule of the day?

Allison Myers: So I don’t think, I think those are a little bit different things. So getting, having a unique value proposition creating value for the customer and having a unique offering, either in your technology solution or software, what you’re providing or creating or building for the customer isn’t different. You still do that. You still make the hard things and you take it away. And that’s what we’re doing, right? We’re building automation into a D. C. warehouse facility. That’s what we’re doing here at Fives. And that doesn’t that doesn’t change. And the amazing technology and the amazing engineering minds that come up with ways to move those products faster, better, cheaper, smarter. To help boost productivity for the customer to get things where they need to go accurately and on time, that doesn’t change. That’s still there. Just how you speak about it and how you talk about it is what you have to focus on that you hone in on. What is your customer understanding? How does your customer talk about it? What is their understanding of it? We can come up with how we talk about it all day long, but it’s really more important to understand the industry and your customer base and their problems and how they speak rather than how you want to speak to them. And also keeping it simple, makes it easy for them because you’re talking to different levels of people, especially in a B2B organization. You’re typically not selling just to one person, probably have a purchasing person. You have someone that’s over the head of their engineering. You have someone who’s over their maintenance or facilities. You could have a VP wrapped in there, even a CEO or president. So you’ve got to think about those different personas and target audiences that you’re dealing with to help convey those messages to them. So sure we can go in real deep with, with some engineering. Technical speak and how we do things to those same engineers. But when you’re talking a broad bent of just really marketing and creating value, I think they’re really looking at, Hey, how does this solve my problem? And how do I get that information quickly?

Jeff White: I think too, you know, a lot of the products that Fives manufacturers serve very different end users. I mean, you talk about you know, baggage handling versus e-commerce sorting and things like that. I mean, these are incredibly different uses of probably very similar pieces of machinery and components, but you then have to shape that message in very different ways about the benefits how it is used and how it’s sold. I mean, I have to imagine selling into, an airport for baggage handling versus, you know, someone with a very Shopify business that’s really striping it and looking to move to the next level of automation. Right. Is a really different thing. How do you approach that? 

Allison Myers: It really is getting out there and spending time. I always say this. You can’t, you can’t do marketing just sitting in your office. You have to have an outlet to where you are connecting with the industry. Baggage handling industry. So being a part of their associations, there are groups that you can join, like IABSC, and AAAE, you, become part of those associations. So in the material handling, it’s MHI, where I actually sit as a co-vice chair of the Conveyance Hortation Systems Group, CSS. So you become part of the industry. So that it is a collective. We’re doing this together. You get closer to the customer. You go see them. You go visit. I mean, early in my career, I was very fortunate to work with a man that he was, the former CEO. His son was CEO and he had a plane and we flew all over the country and spent tons of time in the backs of facilities watching people. Run machining, and machinery, watching them run stretch wrappers. It was a job before I came to Fives and that allowed me to really understand and hear what they need, right? And understand how they talk and how it’s different. And that’s how you can determine how those things are different being part of their industry groups, being part of the conversations. Being around listening to them and then physically going to visit them. And that’s what we do here at Fives, too, is we have a product management team, we have our sales team, we have our marketing team and all of us are proactive to really understand and going out in the field and visiting more than just saying, Hey, come here, let’s, let’s get on a call. It’s going to see and hear and connect and then you’re able to take that data and as a marketer, you should be able to collect that information. And then create campaigns, literature, website pages, webinars, all of the digital assets and, and the collaterals that come along in marketing, then tailor them to those industries. 

So tailor them to material handling. In an aspect of e-commerce, right? So we have a lot of e-commerce. We have we have a lot of customers and parcel and postal tailored to those industries, tailor it to baggage handling. And I think that information coming from the customer understanding being a part of the conversation out in the industry groups, going to visit them, going to see them really helps bring not only authenticity to the whole piece, but it also helps you just really find the right people that you’re, that you match up with, right? So that’s what we’re trying to do. Need and want and solution all together. How, how can we match those up to find the right people that we can help? 

Carman Pirie: It’s a really funny thing. I think we’ve been doing this show for over five years now. It’s been a while and, and, you know, and I’ve been in marketing probably for way longer than that, I’d prefer not to talk about the total number of years. And you know, when you talk to marketers who are good at what they do almost inevitably a core piece of advice, if you talk to them long enough, will be to go out and talk to some customers. And. It can be so easy, frankly, it can be really easy to roll your eyes at that advice. Oh yeah, okay, here we go. Here’s another marketer talking about talking to customers, like, like there’s nothing new under the sun there. It’s like, okay, well maybe there isn’t anything new. But I really think people need to hear the advice of that and not just think past it. Like it’s, because it, what I was hearing there, Allison, as you were talking about that was I’m like, you know, yeah, there’s some methodology there, there’s data collection, there’s a lot that’s happening. But it sounded to me that what was really happening is that you, You’ve spent a lot of years informing your gut instinct as you’ve been around these places, you’ve heard them speak, you’ve had conversations with them. It’s not about having a playbook to say, say this word, not that word. You know, it’s a deeper understanding, isn’t it?

Allison Myers: 100%. It’s, that you become part of the team, you become partners. Right? So you can have this adversarial sales/marketing versus the customer. We’re across this table and we’re in this negotiation and you’re just trying to sell me something. Or we can become partners and we’re sitting on the same side of the table. We’re working together to try to find a solution together. And, I think that is a shift that’s happened since I’ve been in marketing, right? It is going from pushing things out to customers to more inbound, that you’re, you’re creating this community, if you will, this collaboration, that you’re together doing this. And it is so different than that, just pushing out messages and trying to just, it’s a little bit, it’s changed. It has changed. It changed from doing that to Being helpful and how can I be helpful to you rather than how can I just, you know, shove some cool technology your way and say some cool buzzwords and hope, hope, hope that you watch my video or hope that you open the email. It is, we are creating a relationship that we have that we’re going to nurture and we’re going to develop and hopefully over the course of time will become a very mutually beneficial relationship where we all win. 

Carman Pirie: But I don’t want people to think that it’s all that because it certainly sounds as though you’ve done some pretty interesting things to stand out and to get the brand noticed at a, well, just to get noticed, they get to really drive that level of brand awareness in the B2B space.

Jeff White: You can’t get into those conversations unless they know who you are. 

Allison Myers: Right, right. Or how to say your name right. 

Carman Pirie: Indeed, so let’s talk about that. What are some of the more interesting brand-building initiatives that you’ve undertaken? 

Allison Myers: Really with brand building, some of it really just comes with how you stand out in the crowd? And maybe not an area that seems as sexy as others, right? So material handling, conveyor systems moving some products in the building, we’re super passionate about it but others may have never heard of it. Hopefully, most of our customers have and they have. But how do you stand out? And we’ve done some fun things. You know, you kind of have to take a look at not just, you know, and I talked about superpowers before, but what do you have in your playbook that you’re good at? But what do you have in your playbook that is just inherent to your company? What is in your brand? What do you have? And with Fives, we have a really unique colour and it’s called Fives purple and it’s somewhere between a fuchsia and a berry and a pink and a purple and it stands out and I love that. So I try to use that as much as possible when we go to trade shows when we’re using our marketing elements, cause we stand out, like you look at a bunch of companies. Many of them have blue colours, red, green, yellow, and orange, but you don’t see a whole lot of Fives purple, bright, bright fuchsia purpley colour. So we try to use that as much as possible because we stand out with that alone, but you can’t just do that. You got to do some fun things to kind of pump it out. 

So a couple of years ago at a trade show, what we did was we took. Some Air Force Ones, which are cool shoes, right? Trade shows you’re going to see in your feet all day. So the team was really excited about this. We took them, so Air Force Ones and we painted them, we got them hand-painted and screen printed with the Fives logo and the Fives purple colour. And the whole staff so I got him for everyone from our executive team to everyone that was going to be working the show. So it was about 50 pairs of shoes were created and we took the show by storm if you will. So this was an amazing event and it was with MHI and we went to this trade show and we just wore these shoes and it was incredible It was great. And here’s what’s great about it. Is that it drew other companies in. Nike even came, and took a picture of our shoes. People were stopping us. Hey, those are cool shoes. Let me take a picture of them. Oh, you work for that company. I saw those other people and they have a life of their own. So they live not just in the event space itself. So it did draw people into our booth, which absolutely you want to do. But it’s also a walking advertisement for our company because you can say, Hey, what’s Fives? What is that? Or where’d you get those shoes? Well, let me tell you about our company. Let me tell you about what we do. So there are ways that you can stand out that aren’t putting billboards in Times Square or taking out a TV advertisement because that’s not where our customers are, but you know, our customers are, they’re wearing tennis shoes and they’re at trade shows and they’re walking around cities and they’re in facilities and we even have customers now asking for us to send them and we’re, and we’re doing that now. So now they’re wearing our shoes out in their own facilities and it was a fun thing to do. It was, it stood out and it helped us stand out in the crowd. 

Carman Pirie: It’s a wonderful excuse for people to start talking to you at a trade show. 

Allison Myers: It’s great. It worked so well. It worked beyond my wildest dreams.

Carman Pirie: That’s a beautifully simple little idea. You know, it’s, it’s one of those things that you can, I feel like you can make that snowball as a marketer and then just watch it get thrown in countless different ways after that. Like all of the different conversations that are sparked, all of the connections that are made as a result. That’s really, really cool. 

Allison Myers: And what was fun about it is the very next year I had almost every marketing manager in our industry, material handling, reach out to me. Where did you get the shoes? We need shoes for our team. My boss told me to call you. Can we do this? And now almost all of the booths, everybody’s wearing branded shoes. Branded, some kind of branded tennis shoe to trade shows. So it’s fun. It’s fun to be a trailblazer if you will. 

Jeff White: Man, you started something. Are you familiar with the origin story of the Air Jordan shoes? 

Allison Myers: I am. I actually, I, I have read some books on it and, recently saw a fictional movie on it.

Jeff White: It’s pretty interesting. I mean, to realize that all you have to do is pay a 5,000 fine in order to have completely different shoes on your best athlete, you know, in order to get them seen. 

Allison Myers: Hey, but it worked. How well did it work? Because here we are all these years later and that is the pinnacle of success, especially if you’re an athlete, is to have a shoe with your name on it to have Air Jordans to, you know, Air Force Ones. It’s, it’s, it’s a big deal. 

Jeff White: And you’re part of that story, Allison. Yeah. Another use of the shoe is to kind of move things forward. 

Carman Pirie: It’s an interesting one because I feel like those marketers that are calling you up in the following years and asking where they can get their shoes customized. I’m like, do you guys really hear what you’re doing? I mean, that’s, that’s a bit of the problem of looking at your competitors and then trying to say, look at the tactics that they’re doing. This is a challenge marketers have continuously as they look at their competition, they don’t know, they see a collection of tactics, and they don’t know truly which ones are working and which ones aren’t, they just have their impressions of it. And then they copy what those competitors are doing. Meanwhile, we have Allison here who’s leading the pack. And then as ever, other people are looking at copying the shoe, she can come up with another idea. 

Allison Myers: Well, and some of these people are also my friends, so we’re not just. 

Carman Pirie: Okay. Well then those people who are listening to the podcast, we would just invite you to share the podcast. We weren’t talking about you. 

Allison Myers: Some of the, I mean, there is a group of, but I, you know, I do think of it as flattery of course. But it does make for what can we do next, right? So what is the next big thing? Where do you come from? Where do you move? Where do you move from there? What’s the next big idea? But I think that that is our job always I love to look back over my life and when I graduated from college with a business degree concentration in marketing in 2000. That was 24 years ago, guys. I don’t like to say it, but it was. Do you know that 24 years ago Google was only two years old? And none of the social media platforms that I play and work in today even exist. So, you constantly have to be a lifelong learner. You constantly have to figure out how to change the game, keep up with the time, and keep up with the technology that’s available. How do you connect with the customer and the channels or, what tools do they use to connect with you? And that’s just part of the game. And it’s just, that’s what it is. I mean, if it’s getting Air Force Ones for your whole team, that’s what we’re going to do. If it’s making a cool video that we can put, you know, on LinkedIn and figure out how we create newsletters there. And, you know, I know others are moving into even more, you know, we’re, we’re not into the TikTok realm or that just yet, but there are, you know, there’s constant pressure and push. But that’s the fun in it, right? So that’s where we learn. That’s where we grow you’ve got to be constantly learning and constantly figuring out how can make this work. And what is the next big thing? 

Jeff White: Well, and I love to you know that you’re looking we are in the digital age these social media platforms do exist and your stunt with the shoes actually is reaching outside of that and kind of pulling in some of those, you know, some of those tactics that, that may have been a bit more prevalent when all we had were trade shows, you know, and printed material and very basic websites. You know, I think it behooves marketers to really look beyond just the tools of the day and kind of try and pull in some different ideas from different mediums and all of that too. Yeah, that’s really interesting. 

Allison Myers: Yeah, it’s a fun bag of things we get to work with today. I mean, it’s a lot of fun. There are a lot of levers that we can pull. And what I would encourage is everyone, even if you’re in B2B, there are still a lot of levers that we can pull. And I think that in the past has been like, well, we’re just a manufacturer. We just create technologies. We don’t need to deal or look over here or do this. Yeah. There’s no, there’s no right or wrong way to do this. I think there’s some outside-of-the-box thinking that we all need to challenge ourselves to do and take a look at how we can experiment. And that’s, that’s what I really tell my team here is let’s just experiment. Let’s just see what happens. The Air Force Ones worked, right? And we’re looking at doing maybe Jordan’s next, right? So that was great. But let’s experiment with something else. Maybe there’s something else we can do. What are the next things that we can be thinking about? And I think opening yourself up and your team up in marketing to really focus on experimentation is, is where you find the most success. If you are closed, to keeping your playbook to this very strict playbook of how we’ve always done things and we need to get so many posts out a day you’ve got to look at breaking through some of that and having some creativity and some creativity time to brainstorm and experiment new ideas. 

Carman Pirie: I think that hooks onto this question a bit, is that I’m, I’m wondering how much of the success of that idea do you think that was because it is kind of pulling from something that’s more, frankly, it’s a more B2C consumer…

Allison Myers: Of course it is. Yeah. 

Carman Pirie: Culturing, right? You know, and people, how many marketers in B2B tend to think that they’re trapped in a boring land but you really kind of just connected those two dots in just an unexpected way. 

Allison Myers: Yeah, you are not trapped, and I have to remind myself that as well, right? It’s like a mantra every day, you know, you’re not trapped in this box. You can get out of the B2B box and play in the B2C world because we live in that. That’s what, we are consumers every day. So whatever ways we get emotional and how we get emotionally attached or how we like to buy or purchase, we can still translate that. In some ways, not every way, but in some small ways, we can figure out how to translate that into our B2B marketing world.

Carman Pirie: Allison, it’s been wonderful to have you on the show. Thank you so much for joining us today. It’s been a great but a great conversation. I thank you for sharing your experience with us. 

Allison Myers: Thank you so much, guys. It’s been a pleasure. I appreciate you having me. 

Jeff White: Thanks. 
Announcer: Thanks for listening to The Kula Ring with Carman Pirie and Jeff White. Don’t miss a single manufacturing marketing insight. Subscribe now at KulaPartners.com/thekularing. That’s K U L A partners dot com slash The Kula Ring.