Marketing Sustainability and Full Circle Service in B2B Manufacturing: The Growth of a Pallet BrandMarketing Sustainability and Full Circle Service in B2B Manufacturing: The Growth of a Pallet Brand

Marketing Sustainability and Full Circle Service in B2B Manufacturing: The Growth of a Pallet Brand Transcript:

Jeff White: Welcome to the Kula Ring, a podcast for manufacturing marketers, brought to you by Kula Partners. My name is Jeff White and joining me today is Carman Pirie. Carman, how are you doing, sir? 

Carman Pirie: Yeah, I’m really happy to be here. It’s a Jeff, anytime we record on a Friday, it feels like we’re staring down the barrel of the finish line, so it’s nice.

Jeff White: Yeah. And honestly, these recordings are probably one of the best things we do all week, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It’s nice to… 

Carman Pirie: Now everybody listening is like, they have really boring lives. If this is the best thing to happen. All right. 

Jeff White: Yeah, but it is. It’s excellent. But I’m really interested in our topic today because every once in a while you have an opportunity to change the trajectory of how you bring your offering to market and think about it in a different way. And we’ve seen it with a few folks, but I don’t know that we’ve necessarily ever discussed it as a topic on the show. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah, and often I think there’s a thing that happens when folks discover that new way, or what they think is maybe a better mousetrap or a better business model, right? Isn’t always the way the market’s used to buying that thing, or that collection of things. So it presents a whole host of interesting marketing challenges as a result.

Jeff White: And opportunities, too, because often you’re choosing to do this as a competitive measure, or.

Carman Pirie:  Indeed, yeah, of course, and so the challenge for the marketer is how do I, what would I see to be a competitive differentiation, but it’s also maybe not how the marketer is used to buying this. How do I bring that to life? 

Jeff White: Yeah, so anyway that’s enough kind of beating around the bush. We should just get into it. So, joining us today is Fuad Hasanovic, Fuad is the marketing communications manager at Kamps Incorporated. Welcome to The Kula Ring, Fuad. 

Fuad Hasanovic: Thank you. Happy to be here. Thank you for having me on. 

Carman Pirie: Fuad, It’s awesome to have you on the show, thank you for joining us and I know our listeners are sitting there thinking Kamps, What is Kamps? But it’s Kamps Pallets, right? So let us know a little bit more about it, what you all are up to. 

Fuad Hasanovic: Yeah, Kamp’s Pallets has been around since 1973. So it was started by Bernie Kamps, hence the name. He started the company essentially identifying a need in the marketplace for used pallets. He literally started going to landfills, finding pallets that were basically brand new that companies would just throw away. Because, it came into their grocery stores, wherever you may be at the end point of a supply chain, you have no use for them anymore, so you throw them out.

So he literally started doing that, some needed to be repaired, some could just literally take and resell back and started, re-entering them into the supply chain in 50 years, over 50 years now we’re here. We can consider ourselves the largest new pallet manufacturer and pallet recycler combined in the country, we got here through just a sheer focus on customer service and putting our customers first in anything that we do. And being innovative in the sense of looking at new ways to serve our customers, whether it’s through various programs, total pallet management solutions is one so that is where we provide actual pallet repair, the whole nine yards at the warehouse of a customer instead of them having to send pallets out, to our facility, then we return them. And that’s where we are right now. We consider ourselves the comprehensive platform. If you use pallets in any sort of way, whatever you are, wherever you are in the supply chain, Kamps can definitely benefit your supply chain and help you out.

Jeff White: Man. I don’t mean this disparagingly at all, but it is a hidden industry, it’s kind of part of a packaging supply chain. Almost, but it’s one that consumers certainly would never even consider. But you know a lot of manufacturers wouldn’t even necessarily consider it either unless they need them. But, I don’t want to get too far into that without delving a bit into your background. How did you end up at Kamps?

Fuad Hasanovic: So, prior to Kamps, I was working at a food ingredient supplier as a marketing director. And I was just really too be quite transparent with you. My dad was actually a plant manager at Kamps for 25 years. So I’ve always heard about how awesome the company was from a cultural standpoint, value standpoint. I was raised on pallets really, and I always thought it was silly cause he was obsessed with, he still is obsessed with pallets to this day. And so again the company was always around in my vicinity growing up. So then I went to undergrad at Davenport University, went to grad school for strategic management, got into actually owning my own marketing agency for a little while as well. Got into the food ingredient space and then was really looking to get out of that culture. And then Kamps just happened to literally have a position for a marketing individual to head up the marketing department. So I applied, got through the interviews, and it was really interesting because that was January of 2020, right before COVID, supply chains, the madness with all of that, Kamps growing exponentially. So it was a really exciting time to join. That’s been my life ever since. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah, and I love that idea of dad being obsessed with pallets. I do because it’s just that’s just, first off, it’s a very dad thing to be obsessed with. But beyond that, it’s also, so much of the world of manufacturing and industrial is that. It’s really fascinating stuff that everybody else ignores. I feel like I can’t get too far past it, but before I tell you my story about the first time I was really introduced to pallets, which is I worked for a potato farmer, and we had to basically, my job was loading transport trailers full of bags of potatoes. And we would have to put the bags of potatoes on our shoulders and walk them up this kind of long ramp into the back of a tractor trailer. And fill the pallets. You would think why wouldn’t you fill the pallets on the floor and use a forklift or something to get them up into the tractor trailer? And I’ve learned that the answer was that the farmer couldn’t afford the forklift. So we were the forklift, right? But human forklift. Yeah, so we measured our progress by how many pallets we got through in an hour, you know, if we’re stocking it with 50 pound bags of potatoes or 110 pound bags of potatoes. So, nevertheless, pallets are firmly lodged in my head as a way of measuring progress, more pallets are better 

Fuad Hasanovic: Honestly, I feel like the economy could probably have an index, a pallet index. That’s true actually, I bet. It’s how much product do you move? It’s yeah, it’s very important. 

Jeff White: As a kid, we used to steal them to build ramps. 

Fuad Hasanovic: Hopefully not from us.

Carman Pirie: See that’s the difference. That’s the difference between rural and urban kids, Jeff.

Jeff White: Yeah, we needed stuff to jump our bikes off of and it was readily available lumber so… 

Carman Pirie: Fuad, you mentioned this notion of the total pallet solution. I think you call it. So I think that’s really knocking on the door of what we’re going to be talking about here. This notion of a more comprehensive offering. So my understanding of that. It’s like a combination of both new pallet supply, used pallet repair and management. 

Fuad Hasanovic: Absolutely. Absolutely. Yes, it is actually it’s really, when we looked at the life cycle of a pallet, we finally realized, Hey, we’re at this position now, and that’s why we frame it. in the marketplace as CPLS, which is Comprehensive Pallet Life Cycle Services. We said, hey, we now are experts in every life cycle of the pallet. And that’s exactly what it is. It’s, we’ve also looked at our customers and said, okay, a lot of our customers can benefit from this because, say you are a manufacturer that is purchasing pallets and you’re shipping your product on a pallet to Somewhere else downstream, in your supply chain or the end point at a retailer.

You purchase that pallet, it’s a cost, it’s a price you pay, and then you never see those pallets again. But, that is your, that’s your property. That is your asset. How can we help you retrieve it now, bring it back into that, that circular economy model and get it back to your location so then you can reuse that same palette again instead of and pay a small, smaller repair fee or, retrieval fee instead of going out and buying a new pallet again and working with multiple companies to there’s a lot of inefficiencies that, that can come with that, especially if you’re a large supply chain that maybe has, 100 locations, 200 locations that are utilizing pallets that has to work with all these smaller individual companies or a mixture or whatever that may be. We have a huge, extensive partner network as well that we rely on heavily to achieve this model. And we do all of the heavy lifting in terms of organizing, setting the standards, for your supply chain.

Carman Pirie: Is this priced as like a pallet as a service kind of model, basically? Is it a different pricing model than how the rest of the industry works, or just buying pallets? 

Fuad Hasanovic: Yeah. Yeah, it is. It definitely is. And it’s all, again we’re very. So at the end of the day, we will sit down, analyze our customer supply chain, analyze their needs, and pricing needs are included into that. So it’s what, what will work best for you? How can we achieve that? And out of that, you will get some unique, pricing structures and models. Absolutely. 

Carman Pirie: I think that’s an interesting point because when I’ve talked to other manufacturers that are, trying to bring a different style of solution to oftentimes a more comprehensive solution to the market and particularly when it’s priced differently man, it’s just it can be sometimes a hard thing to get across to folks because they’re used to buying it in a certain way and you know if they’re used to buying and looking at something as a capital expenditure as an example, then the question becomes what’s the lowest price? That’s it. That’s all. Don’t talk to me about total life cycle costs or anything of that sort. Have you encountered that, and how do you address that, in your marketing? How do you meet some of these objections head on to avoid having to deal with them in the sales conversation?

Fuad Hasanovic: Yeah. So it’s actually funny because we’re right now, the team and I are working on a blog that’s a little. The title starts out price versus cost. And I think it’s just that concept and sprinkling that throughout the marketing and educating. I, at the end of the day, I think the consumer has to come to that choice themselves. But you could definitely nudge them around, along the way. And at the end of the day, it’s just education. Whether it’s through case studies, through videos, obviously through our website, any point of communication, we have an opportunity to educate the customer, to explore that concept of price versus cost. Because at the end of the day, I think, so I don’t know which one of you mentioned in the beginning it’s, even in supply chains, pallets are some sort of a hidden gem sometimes for supply chain leaders because they can be leveraged to, to get some pretty significant cost savings and add value to your supply chain that you can’t quantify, as you mentioned, or a price on a bid sheet.

And I think that’s a big challenge for us is how do you consistently educate the customer base to think that way, because it is reprogramming. In a way of how you think to look at pallets A as an asset and B as an asset that can strategically be leveraged to add a lot of value to your supply chain. And we, as I said, it’s a kind of a comprehensive approach for us in terms of the education we put on our social media, on our videos, the content we make available to our sales team when they’re initially speaking with the customer. Two years in a row we presented this idea of the CPLS concept at PacExpo International in Chicago. So part of their the RPAs, the Reusable Packaging Associations, they have an innovation center and a platform to have educational talks. So our VP of sales presented this idea there to, again as a great platform to start. Training the industry and supply chains to think a little bit differently about their pallets and really, just look at them as a strategic tool instead of, Hey, it’s something you forget about, it’s a commodity.

Jeff White: I want to come back to a question on the notion of reuse in a moment, but before we get there. Kamps Pallets has been on a bit of an acquisition-oriented kind of mission over the last little while. Do you think you would have come to this notion of a comprehensive pallet lifecycle solution without bringing on different pallet-related organizations into the fold?

Fuad Hasanovic: I would say so. I think even previously, we’ve had what we call our national sales division that was usually utilizing a lot of our partner network to achieve this mission. I think right now, because we have a larger base of partners, even, one of the companies that we acquired, they were a new pallet broker, essentially. They had very great relationships with new pallet manufacturing facilities all over the U. S. And that added a bit, but I still think we would have come to that notion only because I truly believe that’s what the market needs. Post COVID, all these different things, how integrated supply chains are becoming, how timely you need service essentially, how centralized some of these decisions are being made now for some of these companies, it’s no longer, some still have a very decentralized approach, most don’t.

So I think Kamps, again with how customer oriented we are, we would have found a way to, to achieve that and get here, but I think having those acquisitions enabled us to do it more confidently in a way absolutely. 

Carman Pirie: I’ve got all kinds of questions on my running through my head, Jeff. I don’t know about you, but it’s. Just thinking through this idea of a good chunk of your marketing being education oriented, like price versus cost. You mentioned that blog post as an example. I’ve just got to think do you, have you thought about, do you use a different measuring stick, if you will, or do you think about success differently when you are creating a marketing tactic or asset that is designed for education versus one that’s designed to drive lead flow and performance, like a pure performance marketing kind of initiative? Do you distinguish between the two? Because in some ways, as you were describing the education path that you’re on. I’m like, yeah, but it would in some ways be easier just to serve up something the way that the market wants to buy it and tell them that it’s cheaper, which of course would be the lazy sales person thing to do. But so do you have to look at using a different yardstick to measure what success looks like in one versus the other, is the question. 

Fuad Hasanovic: Absolutely. I agree. Absolutely. And we do have, I don’t think you would have a marketing job if you still weren’t consistently delivering leads and some of these short-term results. But I think we measure it long term when it comes to the education. We measure it based on, if you were to put a KPI, search volume for some of these things that we’re starting to bring to the marketplace, right? The CPLS and so far, we obviously launched it last year. You’re not going to see a Google trend Skyrocket, but that’s what I’m anticipating and that’s what we’re using to track it. We would love, if it became a very common term in the industry and for supply chains that everyone’s searching and wants to learn more about it or is talking about it. And that’s where we look at it from a long-term standpoint. We just, again we want to reprogram some of the way some supply chain leaders think and through educating and through, through monitoring, feedback from the sales team as far as what questions are being asked are the customers prompting questions about, our CPLS services first, and if they are, that’s a great indicator that we’re doing what we, what we intended to do.

Carman Pirie: I love that because, oftentimes I’ve seen the education mandate come with, in parallel with the immediate results mandate. 

Jeff White: Strings attached. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah. I really love the way you’re thinking about it. 

Fuad Hasanovic: Thank you. Yeah. Yeah, I think It’s it’s a long game, and you have to have the vision for it I don’t think Kamps would have been around for 50 years and successful as it as it’s been if we didn’t have you know that support from leadership of having that vision playing the long game and really just setting up that sustainable practices.

Jeff White: I’m going to ask a question. And if this doesn’t make sense, Rich can edit it out. I don’t know how this is going to go, but you’re the notion you just talked about the sustainability of this and how, the offering allows you to reuse and recycle in a way the pallets are part of the total life cycle side of things. Are you at all concerned about how the notion of recycling is maybe being perceived in the current political climate? Is that playing into your thinking at all? 

Fuad Hasanovic: I don’t think so. I think there’s been a ton of political change the past 50 years, a ton. And I think Kamps has always stood on that mission as far as making the most of what we have. And lowering our waste and I think that at the end of the day, I don’t see how you can argue about that because not only is it great for the environment, but it’s also great for the bottom line, if you’re a successful business, lowering your waste, reusing products it’s also going to, you know, it’s good business practice. 

So I, I don’t think we’re too worried. I think obviously, you have to have a tempered approach. You can’t lean too far in on anything as well. And that’s how we’ve always approached it here at Kamps. It’s if we feel like we’re doing something right, we will do it and stay on our path and that’s the way we look at it.

Jeff White: That’s a great answer. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah, I think that was an interesting question, Jeff. It is something that you’ve seen people that maybe lean a little heavily on a pro-environment messaging, being maybe concerned if they think that they’re, like it’s getting caught up in the anti-woke narrative, if you will.

So yeah, I think that’s a, Fuad, that’s a great reminder that these things do not need to be mutually exclusive. You don’t need to, it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Yeah. And you can drive bottom line business results and save the planet. And you can choose which one of those we want to talk about a little bit more than the other, maybe, depending on the political climate.

But I think that’s a good reminder. And also, I think it tells people, maybe listening to the show, don’t knee-jerk around this stuff 

Fuad Hasanovic: Yeah, I think it’s just looking at the core reasons of why you’re doing what you’re doing. So if you are doing this to put out a sustainability report every year for, I don’t know, for maybe superficial reasons. Maybe you need to rethink that. But again, as I said, our company was started in the seventies by our founder with a focus on recycling and taking these pallets out and reselling them to businesses. And again, maybe that’s why. It’s easy for us because inherently what we do is good and even, building pallets. There’s research, new pallets, out there that shows, proper forest management to prevent forest fires. Sometimes you do need to cut down older trees that might, you know, or have invasions of species or whatever that may be. And those pallets, those trees, because you look at, if you look at the lumber industry in a way, Pallets are more on the lower end, right? We’re not furniture. We don’t need the best type of lumber, and we’ll take what we can get essentially to a certain point. And pallets are a great use for that lumber, that, that goes into proper forest management. So I think overall, the industry, if anyone’s interested, our association, the N-W-P-C-A has really good educational resources on why pallets are great for the environment and green packaging. I would suggest, if it piques anyone’s interest, to check out the NWPCA. 

Jeff White: I don’t know what you mean though about not being furniture grade a buddy of mine in university had an excellent coffee table made out of a pallet made out of a pallet. One of yours, I’m sure. 

Fuad Hasanovic: Yeah, no it’s still good quality, but there’s obviously, if you look at it, subjectively furniture has to have a higher standard. 

Carman Pirie: I love where we’re going here because we’re launching a new pallet index for economic success and productivity internationally. It makes total sense to me. But in all seriousness, it’s a kind of. Looking ahead here, as we’re still in the reasonably early days of 2025, what’s sitting out there for you that is either you’re seeing as a, as an exciting, net new thing that you’re anxious to be diving into, or maybe something that’s on the horizon that’s more of a concern or a challenge that you see? I’m curious if you’re looking, if we’re looking into the Fuad crystal ball, what is the first thing that’s.

Fuad Hasanovic: Fuad crystal ball for 2025. 

Carman Pirie: Or beyond. Crystal balls have different levels of resolution, I’ve found over the years. 

Fuad Hasanovic: I would say, for us it’s more of internal. I think the challenge will be, we touched on the acquisitions. We touched on our sales team grew. Not only did our locations grow, but so did our team members. We got awesome team members from all over, who joined our team. And I think our challenge is, how do we get everyone to grow? Talk the same way, especially about some of these new concepts. That, I think, will be the marketing team’s focus truly. Because there’s no better ambassador for what we, or ambassadors for what we’re pushing than our sales team. So I think that’s really what we’re focusing on for this year is just making sure that we’re, again, all aligned and they can talk and educate our team just as well as anybody.

Jeff White: I think that’s a really interesting point to bringing it more tactically back to that marketing and sales alignment. A lot of this educational material that you’ve been developing for your customers now becomes fantastic educational material for internal team learning as well. And as you bring on new clients or new organizations into Kamps, and new sales team members. You can use that and leverage that internally. It’s that notion of creating once and distributing many, I think that’s a really powerful thing for a lot of people to understand about the ROI of their content. 

Fuad Hasanovic: Yeah, absolutely. I would say, we frame our sales team members as pallet consultants in the industry just because that truly is what we’re doing. We’re consulting, and there’s been opportunities that we’ve said, hey, you know what, we’re not the best fit, and I think you have to be that disciplined, and I think educating. If they are consultants, education is very important. And that’s a point of emphasis for us is having the best team on the field.

Carman Pirie: Yeah, it’s thinking about it the other way to Jeff, that being so integrated with the sales organization and working so tightly with them, I think it helps the marketer keep their head out of their butt. But sometimes you can write about this stuff. You may be thinking, Oh, I have this idea for this comprehensive offering.

I’m going to give it this fancy name or what have you. And, somebody in the sales organization is we can’t talk like that. We can’t sell like that, but we can sell like this. Like we, so there’s a bit of a lens of reality that I think they help. Marketers apply to their work. Now, of course, marketers, not to say that they’re not close to customers as well and aren’t in touch, but I just think it’s a nice extra level of kind of alignment between the marketing and the market.

This is because the salespeople are, they’re, in some ways, they’re almost closer to a customer than they are to a marketer. 

Fuad Hasanovic: I would agree. Yeah, I see it’s actually funny. So I see on Instagram all the time, the funny memes where it’s like, marketing is doing this and sales is doing that, or sales is always yelling at marketing for their, they’re not getting good leads.

And obviously it, it paints a disjointed picture. And I, that’s certainly not what we have at Kamps. I don’t, they’re funny, but I can’t relate to those memes just because we’re very we’re very integrated here and we have you mentioned one example but there’ll be times too, where the sales team will come to us and we’ll say, okay, no, this doesn’t align with X, Y, Z, and we’ll give them direction. And it’s just, it’s a very fluid relationship. It’s not what I’ve seen often, to be quite honest with you. And I think it’s super unique in the way we’re structured. I think that’s what enables us to communicate effectively to our customers. 

Jeff White: Yeah. We’ve actually come back to this metaphor a few times this week, but it’s like marketing wanting to sell pre-owned vehicles and sales just wants to sell used cars. Yeah. Because that’s what people are looking for. Yeah. 

Fuad Hasanovic: Yep. 

Jeff White: Yep. 

Carman Pirie: If the point is well taken, that it can work in both directions. Sometimes it takes a marketer to see the forest for the trees, a little bit. Yeah. It’s been really lovely to have you on the show. I really enjoyed this kind of conversation about how you’re thinking about this challenge, approaching this as a market leader. I think so much of the educational approach that you’re taking, the tight integration with industry associations and things of that nature is in some ways almost a playbook for a leader in a manufacturing category. I really thank you for sharing it today. 

Fuad Hasanovic: Thank you. Yeah. Back to what we were alluding to the whole time. I think education, educating the customer, is extremely important, especially in B2B manufacturing, marketing. It’s vital. 

Jeff White: Wonderful to have your perspective on the show. Thanks so much.
Fuad Hasanovic: Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.