Global Brand, Local Execution: How AI and Automation Can Change Marketing for ManufacturersGlobal Brand, Local Execution: How AI and Automation Can Change Marketing for Manufacturers

Global Brand, Local Execution: How AI and Automation Can Change Marketing for Manufacturers 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 are you doing, sir? 

Carman Pirie: I’m doing great. How are you doing? 

Jeff White: I’m doing good. 

Carman Pirie: Nice. 

Jeff White: Yeah, I think today’s gonna be a great show. 

Carman Pirie: I think so too.

Jeff White: Yeah. We’ve been talking to lots of folks but this first episode we’ve recorded in a little while, if it’s a little rusty, that’s why. 

Carman Pirie: Ah, so he’s falling on the sword already. If our guest isn’t good, it’s Jeff’s fault. That’s what we want.

Jeff White: I don’t think I’m worried about the guest at all.

Carman Pirie: No, I know. Oh, look the pressure’s off though, Olivier, just so you know.  Let’s introduce our guest, Jeff.

Jeff White: Yeah, for sure. So joining us today is Olivier Bousette. Olivier is the marketing manager at Rittal Limited Canada. Welcome to The Kula Ring. 

Olivier Bousette: Thank you. And thank you for having me here.

Carman Pirie: Olivier, I wanna know all about Rittal Canada and how you ended up there and what you do there.

Let’s start with a bit of an introduction to the firm. What do you guys do at Rittal Canada? 

Olivier Bousette: So that’s a great question and thank you for that opening. So Rittal is an enclosure manufacturer. So we specialize in industrial and IT enclosures. And so to most people, what does that mean? It’s basically the box that you put the stuff in.

You’ll see us everywhere, but you won’t recognize that. I always say Rittal’s the tires of a car. You know the car brand, but you won’t know the tires themselves. So we are part a component of a complete solution. So Rittal specializes globally in enclosure manufacturing, such as in, you’ll see at Hydro Quebec or electrical companies, large enclosures.

You’ll see us in food and beverages in pharmaceutical companies that do production lines. And so Rittal has a presence around the world. And I joined years ago in a sales role and I started off in industrial sales. And I came out of a university, joined up and then moved up the ranks, ended up in IT sales.

When we did data centers we specialized and you can Google us and say Google data centers and you’ll see our enclosures there. And I ended up, one day they asked me to take over marketing ’cause I have a marketing background and we are up to date, present time. 

Jeff White: It’s an interesting product because if you are installing those, there’s not necessarily gonna be a lot of Rittal branding on that.

So people aren’t necessarily going to recognize that as a distinct product, eh?  

Olivier Bousette: No. It’s actually really funny. So you’ll see, and one of the things is that Rittal, you tend to find the boxes. It’s almost like finding Waldo, I’ll look at TikTok videos and I’ll see something that’s unique that, you never think of. For example, when you’re looking at shipping container yards. The person who operates the boom that picks up the containers off the ship and loads ’em onto flatbeds for the longshoreman to haul away that boom is controlled by a company’s drives that are basically ABB, which is the company that produces those.

All those boxes inside are Rittal boxes. So we get to go to places that most people never think of because if there are any issues or any designing work that we need to do on the outside of the box, we’ll be included in that. So we get to see a lot of stuff in the backend that most people will never see.

Factory floors, government installations, all those things because we’re in sort of the background. But you’re right, most people will never, they’ll walk by them and never notice them. But as a Ritaller, we kind of joke, we take photos of wherever we find our boxes around the world. 

Jeff White: I can actually look out my window.

If I look far enough to the right, I can see the shipping containers and the yard down. There are probably some Rittal boxes inside. 

Olivier Bousette: a hundred percent inside the cranes, you’ll find Rittal boxes or sometimes competitors, but mostly Rittal when it’s at one of our, bigger global ones.

Carman Pirie: I gotta say, this is a little bit off program, but it’s a bit of a shame that the Rittal brand is often hidden because I find that the brand has a really gorgeous aesthetic. There’s a really unique aesthetic across the group of companies. I’d encourage listeners to go check out the Rittal website. I just, I don’t know. It has a nice feel to it. 

Olivier Bousette: It’s a unique product. It’s actually the history of the company it’s a family-owned business. It’s been around for decades and it’s situated in Germany and basically the entire town kind of works for Rittal and it’s very common there. We have offices and manufacturing around the world, so it’s interesting to get to meet all the other people from all the other subsidiaries and manufacturing sites and get to hear their perspectives of what they think Rittal is in that country.

Jeff White: You mentioned your sales and marketing and IT sales background, but what brought you to Rittal 15 years ago? 

Olivier Bousette: It’s actually a, I’m not even sure how I got into it but it is basically, it started off from a perspective of outta school going into sales for an agency that was running, that was selling part of Rittal.

And then I ended up, when Rittal opened up in 1995 they started to have their own office here and the agency basically was absorbed by them. And I ended up in 1997 really working for them. And that started my career down the path of sales along with them. And then we continue up to the present day where I’ve joined the whole company and then ended up in this current role.

But it was like a haphazard thing of trying to find work. And then sales is the easiest thing to get into when you first get out of university. 

Jeff White: Assuming you have the personality. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah. Maybe the easiest thing to get into, not the easiest thing to do. 

Olivier Bousette: Definitely not. It’s not my favourite thing to do.

It’s but it’s funny, every day we touch sales and every day we’re selling something and it taught me a lot. In terms of a marketing perspective to understand the sales role. If you’re only coming in from the marketing aspect, you struggle to understand the salespeople. So when you’re able to understand both sides, you have an easier time communicating your message to them.

Carman Pirie: Well, Olivier, I wanna start to dive into this passion of yours around leveraging automation and kinda getting more with less with small smaller teams. And I think it’s a thing that most manufacturers can really identify with, where everybody’s being asked to do more with less. Not a lot of folks are eager to add headcount or even add partner count in today’s economy. And it’s an interesting time to have this conversation because, of course, automation options for small teams are proliferating as well. So I’m really interested in diving into this with you. What would you say is the biggest untapped potential that those smaller teams have that you see when you start working with them or identifying these problems, and what is the thing that you think they miss the most? 

Olivier Bousette: That’s a really interesting question. I think most people, if you don’t… what you don’t know, you don’t know.

There’s a big disconnect between looking at marketing from the perspective of simply just doing the job of marketing and then looking at applications and platforms that can help support that particular task. So if we look at social media, we think of platforms like Blaze AI that allow you to create filler posts, simplify your social media, and then.

Reducing your time spent on that. A lot of smaller firms and smaller companies, and even when you’re looking at smaller teams within larger companies, the message has to be specific to your local market, right? So if you have to spend a ton of time looking at social media and creating posts to capture people’s attention a lot of it is in certain key, certainly in the aspect’s more technical.

Versus other consumer products, which are gonna be a lot more fluff and just about images. For Rittal, it’s not as easy. So when I look at smaller teams that have a unique product or a proposition, it’s very difficult for them just to say I’m going to build a whole repertoire of social media content and pump it out.

It’s a lot easier when using automation. To create the first phase, let it run under the background, be fillers, and then let yourself as a team concentrate on the higher end. The sort of like the more the long-form content, the bigger form content if we want. And I feel it’s really something that’s important for people to look at as automation because when you’re a small team, you also have a lot of churn in teams, right? People come and go and they leave. So you end up with a problem that if you’re trying to build something and your team changes over time, nothing happens overnight in marketing as we know. So allowing automation to run in the background while you’re concentrating on the key aspects of your marketing program is really helpful.

And I honestly believe a lot of companies are kinda leaving them on the side because they’re not sure how to do it. They don’t understand the platforms or how to really manipulate the platforms to their advantage. 

Carman Pirie: And you really touch on something that I think a lot of people do tend to gloss over with smaller teams as well, they do have more churn, there’s more turnover, harder to get brand continuity over time than in a larger organization could obviously have a little bit more rigour.

And they do tend to have more staying power in a lot of those roles. That’s a really, I hadn’t really thought about that from a smaller team perspective, but that does change things. 

Olivier Bousette: Yeah. You’re seeing a lot more, it’s even in large teams, you’ll see a global marketing team, so you’ll have a very large central HQ marketing team and they have their message, but if their message is really not aimed globally, but more locally based out of where they’re from. When that message is pushed down to smaller teams, they have to try and replicate that for their market. And if you have a lot of junior people or you have movement, it makes it very difficult to continually have to update that team to make sure they understand the message because it’s not something you could just say, okay here’s our branding, here’s our logo, here’s our colours palette. Go ahead and do something. You have to really get them to understand where you’re coming from and where the message is coming from. And I see this a lot for companies that are starting to go global. So if your market is only Canada, that’s pretty easy. If your market’s Canada or, the US, it’s not so bad. But if your market is starting to grow to Latin America, South Africa, or Asia or Europe, that message has to change drastically.

And your team has to understand where your product or your service sits within that market. Automation allows you to, in my opinion, create a whole bunch of filler posts that are universal. Then allows you to concentrate with your team to keep up to date, to that message directly to that market.

If you try to do everything yourself in-house, it’s impossible. Like you’re just gonna get, you’re gonna get flooded with too much and it’s just over overwhelming for a lot of teams, and most marketing teams are small, you’re not gonna find unless you’re very lucky to be in a large team, most marketing teams are gonna be between three to 10 people kind of thing.

Jeff White: How do you… It’s a really interesting idea of this notion of, having global standards that get executed at a local level. And, you’re right, in a lot of cases people are handed a brand guidelines document and maybe some, information about tone for how things are to be written, and then they’re left to their own devices.

How do you help your team succeed? When there’s that level of nuance in the communication that’s required, how do you ensure that people have all the information they need in order to succeed at that local level? 

Olivier Bousette: Yeah, that’s something that’s really difficult. I find it’s one of those situations when you look at your marketing and your marketing plan, and you say, okay, I’m gonna put a marketing plan.

I’m gonna, hear everybody, here’s a marketing plan. Here’s a document. Here’s how we’re gonna proceed. Here’s a timeline. Here’s your calendar and all this stuff. It’s wonderful, except it’s overwhelming for the individual who has to manage each department because they’re gonna have a million questions.

They may be very creative in one aspect, but very weak in other aspects. So in my role, it’s very difficult to navigate that information locally. But not only that, you’re also taking, let’s say a global perspective, you have to take something that comes in from a different country with a different idea of what’s important.

So the focus on the European market might be completely different in a nuance for the Canadian market, with the American market or Latin America market. So you have to take it from your experience, and this is what I think. It’s really important to understand both the sales side and the marketing side.

You need to understand where the focus is because that’s part of the conversation when you’re looking at the individual aspects of marketing. But taking that document if you want, from HQ and saying, okay, I’m gonna rewrite it for the Canadian market, that’s actually really complicated because your vision might not be what their vision is and your market might not sit the same way.

So products and images and the focus are not the same. So you really need to have an understanding of where that product or that service is gonna sit within your market and then look at their document and say, okay, this part works for us. The rest of it’s useless, but it takes a lot to go to your team and constantly…

So I would say I spend a lot of time in meetings. Just going over and pivoting when we see something is not working. A lot of testing. 

Carman Pirie: Olivier, you paint a bit of a picture there, it sounds as though, if we have some direction being set from HQ, we certainly need to look to the regions in their local knowledge in order to impart that level of nuance to it.

Is there, I guess it seems to me that there’s a lot of opportunity for conflict there. Do you feel that the secret is in the corporate having a bit of a lighter hand or how do you navigate that? Because when you say, oh this part works great in the Canadian market, but 80% of this is crap. That can’t be great for the person who was a part of creating that 80%. So I’m just wondering how you’ve balanced that kind of region knows best versus headquarters knows best. 

Olivier Bousette: Yeah, that’s a great question. There’s a right way of doing it, and there’s the most common way of doing it, I don’t say it’s wrong, it’s just the most common, which is push down, right?

So if you’re not having a conversation with your regional, that means you’re not having a monthly meeting with all your regional locations, the marketing heads, and having a real sit down and conversation. Then you’re just simply pushing down what you’ve been told. And certainly, from a product standpoint, the product manager will be the deciding vote of where they see the product sitting in that market.

But if they only understand their market or they’re looking at it from a regional aspect where they are situated, that could be a problematic point for a marketing person because we have to decipher what that person’s envisionment was. Do you go back and spend 10 hours explaining to them that would be pointless?

No, you don’t. You absorb what you can and you run with it. I personally would rather see corporate, I mean it’s headquarters, make the decisions and pass down exactly all the content and then you’re tweaking it. This would simplify life because then your message is universal. But if you don’t have a corporate that’s strong enough in their marketing that can really be able to do that, they have to rely on the region.

And there becomes a bit of a gray zone because you end up with, let’s say, certainly here, in my experience, the US may take a different aspect because their market’s slightly different or they have a very large presence in a market that we don’t in Canada, and so you’ll end up with their focus being completely different than yours.

But you, a lot of the followers follow both the US and Canada and sometimes even Mexico. The message is difficult to align, but I honestly believe that should be something that a head office should take notice but doesn’t always, so I’ve noticed it on both sides. So my preference is that HQ would take a heavier hand.

But my experience is that most of the time they don’t. And it ends up being the local marketing person who has to decipher, realign and rebuild it from scratch and just take it from there. 

Carman Pirie: I think it’s fascinating that somebody speaking from one of the regions of the company is advocating for the HQ to have a heavier hand.

That’s not always the case. So it’s that probably speaks well of your HQ. And it does seem to me to be right with danger though, the more you rely on the regions because the talent can vary so much from one region to the other. And to your point. An awful lot of those markets are people in those markets are being exposed to multiple channels from the same company, Mexico, the US and Canada are great examples, if you’re an American prospect, you could be seeing social media feeds from all three entities, et cetera.

Olivier Bousette: Yeah. It is something that has to be taken into account. When you’re building up your social media, it’s something that we do, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that each of the offices will agree to that. So they may have their own vision and they may, they’re gonna direct their team the way they want to.

I try to bring all the offices together regionally for us. Mexico, the US, as well as some other smaller subsidiaries that match our markets such as Australia and Japan. And invite them to have every few months a meeting to review what we’re doing, what we’re planning to do, and see if it fits and if they want to take our content.

One thing I’ve noticed is that. Our content’s actually really good and I’m not patting myself on the back only, but I will. So they actually copy a lot of our content and it’s because we really focused on our followers. We try to see who they are, where they’re coming from, and where we want to direct them.

We wanna avoid having people follow us, just to follow us because they’re looking to sell something to us, but rather for us to make sure that people following us want education. They want something from us that they can share within their channels or use themselves for their job. And that’s something I think that anybody in marketing needs to consider.

That they need to look at. What’s my goal with my plan and what’s my goal with my audience, not just conversion to leads to sales. We, marketing always know that you’re gonna get a hundred leads. Okay, one or two becomes customers, but we have 10,000 followers for that a hundred leads a situation.

So in marketing, we look at it from the follower’s perspective. What do we wanna educate them? Where do we wanna lead them, and where do we wanna leave them so that they feel that they’re getting something from it? And we wanna make sure that if we do something, we’re hopeful that the other subsidiaries also follow.

Because if they match our aesthetics, our designs, and our sort of language. To our audience, then their audience will most likely look at ours because we’re very similar in markets. So that’s what you hope for. It doesn’t always happen. I’ve noticed things, for example, in holidays, how do you go and deal with holidays that are regional what do you celebrate and how do you celebrate these?

These are things that are very complicated when you’re trying to when you’re a global company versus a local company. But it’s definitely, that you try to get as much of the message as possible. Out there to say, this is what we’re doing. Hopefully, if you have a better idea or you know something different, let us know.

And most times though, people follow through and I think that’s important and it shows that we are, we’re on the right track. 

Jeff White: Man I really like the idea of understanding full well that a good chunk of your follower base is going to be people who are trying to sell to you. It does.

It just, we’ve often talked about the idea of chasing follower counts, being a bit of a vanity metric and certainly not meaning anything, but recognizing that a good chunk of those people are actually following you for the opposite reason. And not just, that they’re not gonna be influenced in that way and they’re going to use those things to try and get in touch with you.

That’s a pretty smart bit of, intelligence to consider when you’re looking at those overall kind of metrics. 

Olivier Bousette: I think it’s important for individuals to understand that because if you’re looking at marketing and when I first started, we just assumed the same thing, right?

How many followers are you gonna get? When you’re in Rittal and you have such a small market in the sense of who you’re really trying to attract. And then you start seeing a large group of followers. You have to ask yourself, who are they? Where are they following? Why are they following us here? What is the goal?

And it’s true, some of them are trying to look at selling things to Rittal, but they’re also looking to see who engages with our brand because they could be selling services or products to that same. And that’s part of marketing, right? So you’re not only just trying to push your brand, there’s gonna be people who are piggybacking on it.

So recognizing that to make sure that you’re able to break them away from your content, to drive the people that are interested in your content, for reasons to either ultimately purchase your product is really important, but that becomes this. It’s part of the game, right? It’s part of understanding the difference between what’s filler content and what is the educational content that’s really gonna drive leads and ultimately sales.

Carman Pirie: Olivier, I appreciate the notion of leveraging automation, particularly for the filler content that you mentioned. I’m wondering where else in the marketing mix you’re advising small teams to leverage automation to be able to extract more value out of their efforts. 

Olivier Bousette: Oh, this is the easiest one.

Having a chatbot on your website. So if you go to a lot of websites, I’m amazed that not everybody has a chatbot. It’s complicated. A lot of companies shy away from it. They all, have a lot of reasons, but it’s something that I feel is super important. When we look at most people today, they will communicate quickly to a chatbot to understand the basics of what they’re looking for, to help them, guide them to the right…

Certainly, if you have multiple products, if you’re a single-product company, it’s pretty easy. You could buy online well. You could just maybe avoid it. But even then, I think it’s super important. I look at all companies that are very much online. They use chatbots and a lot of smaller companies don’t, and I feel that’s number one, just communicating.

If I were to say that’s probably the way most companies can 2x their results, 3x them is by answering the phone, and being able to be communicated by your customers or even potential customers. The influence and the champions, they’re people that are looking to build the products. For example, a lot of our products, because they’re built up in the design of an engineering company.

If we’re not answering the engineers, are they gonna put our products? They’re gonna spec our products? No, they’re gonna spec somebody who does answer their questions. And it’s really important to be able to reach out to those people and say, Hey, we can answer your questions. And so automation and marketing are also part of that.

It’s understanding how quickly we can answer the most basic questions for your potential customers, your leads, those interested, the champions, and the influencers, answer those questions as soon as possible. So yeah, automation, just answering the phone would be one of the biggest things. 

Carman Pirie: I’ve seen this so much. I’ve seen manufacturers who are, you ask them what the single most important thing that they need to deliver better results next month. And they’ll say more leads. And then you can literally look in the CRM in the last week and see a hundred leads that didn’t receive a phone call back.

Who are actually all properly qualified and a hundred percent. And so frankly, so much of the chatbot conversation sometimes it sounds a little bit like religion, so people just believe in the chatbot and therefore you ought to have chatbots. So I was encouraged when you took it down the road of no, you’re using this technology because it’s frankly a way of answering the phone and otherwise there are just leads going stale.

They’re trying to engage with you and you’re ignoring them. 

Jeff White: And to your other point, salespeople who are trying to sell you things are not going to use your chatbot like ever. It’s not geared for them. So they’re not gonna find that useful. They’ll find other ways to reach out to you, but the people who are actually interested are going to engage with that tool.

Olivier Bousette: 100%. You need to give ’em a channel. You need basically a way for them to communicate with you and it, in terms of automation, when I look at all the simplifications, we could do by using simple platforms, such, like I said, your chatbots, your filler post just the terms of speed of getting information to the person who’s asking for it, it can make a difference between a successful sale down the road versus them going to your competitor who was able to answer that question.

And in terms of marketing, what’s really important, it’s not just driving a message out there, obviously the branding and all that, but it’s also to make sure that there’s a way for them to get back to, there has to be a pathway. I find a lot of people are looking at marketing licks as they’re pushing out only, but part of marketing is that point where it touches sales and marketing, which is the lead back into you to be able to answer those questions.

And smart companies are able to capitalize on that and they leverage that. So the chatbot’s quick answers and links on your social media to be able to drive people directly to where they need to go is super important.

Carman Pirie: You mentioned in, in a couple of these examples, we’re talking about implementing what are fundamentally out-of-the-box tools that you can, getting a chatbot onto your website or automating social media post creation.

I guess does that, does most of your advice for smaller teams hinge on leveraging preexisting tools or to what extent are you also looking at a more, say, customized advice about different maybe approaches of using chat GPT or other AI tools to improve their workflow? Have you spent much time there or are you thinking mostly about just tool adoption at this stage that can get some easy wins?

Olivier Bousette: Yeah, that’s a really good question because. In my opinion, if you’re looking at a smaller firm, the quicker you can get out there and automate a lot of the services that you’re gonna be using and automate part of your process, you can concentrate. It’s really important. But is it perfect? No, because they’re out of the box.

They’re like off-the-shelf basic solutions. AI and starting to integrate that it’s a bigger complex, so that becomes a bigger deal for a marketing department that you need more resources to be able to take that on. And it’s very complicated because it doesn’t mean it will fall under marketing.

It could fall under multiple different departments. AI can be tricky ’cause there could be policies around using it. There could be policies, security policies, certainly, like if your company has a lot of security rules around using any exterior services. So it’s not as simple. But it’s definitely something I would look at.

There are brilliant people out there who run a team of two, or three people that are running massive companies and they’re just these small teams of people. And I honestly believe we’re probably gonna see in the next five years, unicorn-sized companies run with one person and ChatGPT. Because if you could do it from there, you can create everybody. Virtual assistants, automatic responses, automatic posting that reacts to what works, and what doesn’t work. Metrics that, once you set them in motion, the metrics that you want to receive, if posts when hit a certain amount, you know you can concentrate on those posts and you can tell your AI to go back and concentrate on that kind of posts.

That’s the future. Right now, I think it’s still too complicated for most teams to take on. There’s just the amount of resources required to run that properly without it going crazy or giving misinformation is really also another issue. 

Carman Pirie: It’s the catch-22 that small teams find themselves in, of course, because they know that it’s a secret to being able to do more with less, but they’re also facing the crunch of having the focus and energy on it. 

Olivier Bousette: It also comes from the company side. What happens if you lose your key people? I’ve seen it firsthand. You lose key people. You’re basically shutting down a whole program because to replace that person, there’s a timeline, right? You hire the person, find them, hire them, get them up to speed. You’re looking at half a year to a year.

And it’s a costly endeavour. We’ve tried a few times, and we’ve had that happen to us, so simplification just makes it easier if you’re not sure unless the company has a bigger plan for their marketing, that they’ve really set up, that they have a goal and they’re backing you up, it’s perfect.

But if you’re not, if you’re more of a standard company that’s gonna be running marketing the way it’s happening across the board that I’ve seen, you’re better off to have smaller, faster deployments. To avoid losing that key person who shuts down that program 

Jeff White: makes a lot of sense and it’s gonna become the norm more and more.

Carman Pirie: This has been a really interesting chat, I wonder as we draw to the close here… I don’t want to, poke too much fun here because my hairline isn’t far behind yours and Jeff’s. But just all that to say, we have some good experience on the show today.

And so when I have someone of your tenure and experience, I like to ask. What’s your advice for somebody just getting into marketing today? Just starting out, what’s the piece of advice that you would give them? 

Olivier Bousette: I would definitely join meetups. I would join groups and associations in marketing and sales, and I would definitely spend time talking to people.

It’s one thing I’ve noticed that we work a lot in silos in tiny little groups and tying companies. It’s not easy always to share, but if you’re able to talk to people, one of the things I’ve learned a lot is going to meetups and talking about marketing to people and saying, okay, what works for you? What doesn’t work for you?

It doesn’t mean it’s gonna work for every company, but just understanding it might have a little part a little sliver that you could use at your own job. The other thing too, I would say is to try a lot. Venture off, do AB testing. Don’t be stuck going too far, into perfection. Just launch and see where it goes.

Marketing is something that’s flowing and changing. We know that social media marketing is like disappearing because now with AI, everything could be reproduced. People are starting to get savvy, their understanding. So where are people looking for their information? Where are they hanging around?

And being there, and present is really important. For example, Pinterest. I hope I’m saying it right. It’s something that I met somebody at Pinterest. They invited me to a seminar and I went to see it. I said, oh, this is nothing. This won’t be helpful. And then I realized, actually there’s a lot of people on Pinterest, so testing it out, yeah, taking a chance, putting some effort into it gives you a lot of experience and it’s really important for a marketing person to get as much experience as possible.

And the last thing I’ll say, I think every marketing person should take on a sales role. They should learn what it’s like selling, whether it’s at a local retail shop or on the road, or go with salespeople on the road and get experience trying to sell something. Because if you don’t understand that aspect, then you’re only promoting from one direction.

You’re not really getting to understand what the whole journey of the customer is and what role that marketing plays. That would be my advice. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah, I think that’s great advice, I think you’re right. I think, it’s easy to try to identify as the consumer of marketing messages if you’re a marketer, ’cause you also consume marketing messages, but without that sales experience, you have a really big blind spot.

So I think that’s that’s incredible advice. It’s been wonderful to have you on the show. Thank you so much for joining us. 

Olivier Bousette: Thank you. It’s been a blast being with you guys and getting to talk marketing. 

Jeff White: Thanks so much.