Marketing With Purpose: Turning Culture Into Competitive AdvantageMarketing With Purpose: Turning Culture Into Competitive Advantage

Marketing With Purpose: Turning Culture Into Competitive Advantage 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. Carmen, how are you doing, sir?

Carman Pirie: I am delighted to be here, Jeff. I don’t think I’ve ever been more excited to record a podcast.

Jeff White: It is probably our final recording for the 2025 season.

Carman Pirie: Yeah.

Jeff White: So that’s exciting for sure.

Carman Pirie: But, although people will probably be listening to this in 2026. So I guess I hope everyone’s having a happy New Year then.

Jeff White: And things are kicking off well in 2026. And you did your planning in Q4 2025. So you’re starting out in a good place.

Carman Pirie: But we don’t need to dwell on that today. We have a wonderful guest joining us.

Jeff White: We do. Absolutely. And it’s an interesting topic too,

Carman Pirie: I think it’s an incredibly interesting topic.

Jeff White: Yeah, no, you’re absolutely right. What are we talking about?

Carman Pirie:  I thought that was your part.

Jeff White: I think what we’re going with is this notion of marketing with purpose. And to get there, you really need to have a deep, thorough understanding of the organization you’re working with.

Carman Pirie: Yeah. And the culture you’re working with, and what you’re actually bringing forth. And I love the way that today’s guest kind of thinks and talks about it. So I’m excited to share that with everyone.

Jeff White: Absolutely. So joining us today is Alice DiSanto. Alice is the VP of Marketing at Autonomous Solutions Incorporated. Welcome to The Kula Ring, Alice.

Alice DiSanto: Thank you so much, gentlemen.

Carman Pirie: Alice, that’s how you know it was the first time being on the show. You referred to us as gentlemen, but thank you so much for joining us. It is a pleasure to have you. And I’d love to start by just telling our listeners a bit about you and a bit about your background, and then we’ll learn about how you ended up at Autonomous Solutions as well.

Alice DiSanto: Thank you. Okay, so I have a history that’s pretty diverse in marketing experience. It runs the gamut of senior leadership in a lot of different sales and marketing roles for three multinational technology manufacturers, but it also goes into healthcare and a few other worthy gigs in between. Life takes you places. But when I was preparing for this day, I was thinking without necessarily counting those preteen babysitting things, I feel like I’ve been working all my life. Hustling either at paid gigs or with volunteerism, which really fills me. My tech center career, which I’m currently in with Autonomous Solutions Incorporated, actually started back with Toyota Motor Sales. I was there for nearly a decade, and I actually really loved it. It’s a great place to grow up. Motherhood and relocations with my husband’s job took me away from Toyota and opened up other professional opportunities. And then I finally all roads leading back to technology in 2014 and very specifically into the space of robotics and automation.

And like you mentioned. Now I’m VP of Autonomous Solutions, and we’re actually over 25 years now as the global leader for what we call agnostic industrial off-road vehicle automation. And that’s really under the genius of our CEO, Mel Tory, who right outta college got the attention of John Deere and they asked him to join them on a project, which you’ll hear him talk about. It actually has taken 23 years to come to market, ’cause robotics and automation are a huge slow burn and a lot of adoption issues associated with that. Quite frankly, now we are, like I said, the leader in super giant robots that do really cool things all by themselves in fleets for things like construction, agriculture, logistics, you name it. Really fun stuff.

Jeff White: There’s some incredibly amazing video on the website of these machines in action, and it’s hard to imagine that they’re autonomous.

Alice DiSanto: I know. And the real thing of it is, that it actually makes the work environment safer for everybody. It’s getting people’s minds around the fact that they don’t wanna be doing what we, we say over and over again, the dirty, dull, and dangerous jobs. So Mel himself grew up on a farm in Canada, and his dad actually kept him outta school because they had a family farm. And so his job, in order to keep the family going, was to drive around the fields in circles, over and over again. And as a kid, he thought there’s gotta be a better way. And so this is what his mind went to. So as a kid with no education, he was able to bring it this far, It’s a super cool story.

Carman Pirie: That’s incredibly cool. I love Canadian content on The Kula Ring, and I’ve gotta say, I’m never going to have another opportunity to mention this weird little part of my past.

So I’m going to bring it up now. I grew up in the potato belt of New Brunswick, which is also the Bible Belt of New Brunswick. So take that for what it is, but one of the weirdest things about growing up in that part of New Brunswick is our school went in a month earlier than everybody else in Canada because they took us out of school for a month so that we could all harvest potatoes in the fall. So we had this odd potato break where every elementary and middle school kid and high school kid were literally pulled outta school and redeployed to the farmers around the area.

Jeff White: That explains so much.

Carman Pirie: It sounds as though the founder of your firm and I may have a few things in common, and one is looking around, saying there’s gotta be a better way to do this than just taking kids outta school to pick potatoes. That’s fascinating. Alice, when we talk about what kind of really interests you and what you’re trying to bring to life here at Autonomous Solutions, I get the impression that’s all started with some pretty deep listening.

Alice DiSanto: Yeah, it did. So I have actually known ASI for 10 years. But I didn’t really know ASI didn’t have a full sense of what the true culture was, and I knew things before they brought me on, like their slogan, which is the people-building robot company. But you know what that means? And so when I was talking to Mel, the CEO, earlier in the year, when he was asking me to join the team, and he was describing ASI as a place that people wanna work, even if you don’t have to. And again, it sounds like a really great tagline. But what does that mean? As I went through the job options that I had ahead of me in the early part of the year, ASI’s authentic culture, those words started to come to life through the interviewing process. So at each level of the organization, I started to meet people who were just living those words. I couldn’t believe that you actually could like, have these really genuine people in all facets of that particular business, really exuding purposeful work, leading into their robotics, whatever contribution they’re making from the sales department to the engineering department, to the finance center. And so that actually, that culture and the people around that culture were deciding factors for me to join the team. And yeah, that was the catalyst. And so then in the case of ASI, that culture really drew me in. But then I had to seek out more, like I said, to do my listening first exercise, which I always do before I start any gig. To get a little bit more into that, I go in and I typically do a mini SWOT analysis with the stakeholders. And in the case of ASI, I was given permission to talk to 40 different individuals at all different levels. And we went over, what are the highs, what are the lows, what are the expectations? And the topics that we touched on were what’s working for product and what’s not, what’s working for culture and what’s not, and where have we been, what we’ve been doing from a commercialization standpoint with sales and marketing?

Jeff White: Were you involving folks not in the marketing function to help you conduct the interviews as well, or was it entirely on your side from a marketing lens that revealed these opportunities and challenges across the org, a bunch of different institutions?

Alice DiSanto: Yeah, it was, and actually always has been at the last few gigs that I’ve been at, just me asking the questions by myself in a confidential way. I have had the opportunity to go into organizations with a new job cart. So in the last few roles, it’s not been to fill a position that already existed; it is to fulfill a position that’s being created. ASI, in this case, had never really had a formalized marketing department. They had a bunch of specialists that service different areas of the business, like the mining industry, the automotive industry, but nobody was really doing anything that was overarching. So I go in, and I just ask that I speak to people confidentially. So that I can discern, everything but the kitchen sink that’s being thrown at me as the marketer to prioritize because people, I mean, by the time a new job card gets added, there’s usually this pent-up demand in so many different areas of the business that, ugh, if we only had this job, what would it be doing?

You want to go in and do your best work, but you also wanna be highly effective in those first 100 days. So just me in the room, and then when I bring the results back to leadership, it’s all done in that confidential way. Big picture, not letting anybody know who said what.

Jeff White: Man, you’ve already painted a wonderful picture of the leader of ASI as someone who’s obviously very forward-looking and future-looking, but it takes a lot to trust somebody new to come in, create an entirely new role, and then do a bunch of research in secret and bring that back to you.

There’s a level of trust there. I’d almost love to be in the interview with you and be a fly on the wall to see how you tell, spin that. Not spin, that’s the wrong word, but tell that story of what you’re going to do.

Alice DiSanto: Yes. I said we knew each other for 10 years, and I actually would, I would go back and say that the first time that we were together and had to have a hard conversation. It was just in a situation where it was a bit adversarial, and we both stayed very professional about it and walked away with mutual respect. So I think there was a really big fast track to building that trust in those early years.

And that just carried through to, I actually went to another job where ASI was part of the ecosystem, so we could dance around each other and get dependency from a business perspective. With our mutual interactive technologies. So when the company started to grow, ’cause the company has grown well with everything that’s being demanded of AI and automation these days, the company’s actually grown threefold in just over a year. They need to bring people in that they have this high level of trust with, because culture can be undermined, and really that’s at the heart of, you know what I’m talking about with marketing with purpose.

Carman Pirie: I wanna get into this marketing with purpose conversation a little deeper. And it’s interesting to me how when you were talking about your early exposure to the company and in the early interviews, you said in a way like you were a bit surprised, or I think delighted. I think it was a good surprise that, wow, people are saying these things, and it sounds good, but it’s actually true.

I think that’s a level of skepticism that an awful lot of people have when they start hearing about this notion of purpose-driven marketing. They, in some ways, I think it lead the more cynical among us to think that the purpose is in some way just being invented to serve the marketing. But, I have to think that level of skepticism probably helps you carve this out and ensure that there’s a level of authenticity with it.

Alice DiSanto: Yeah, I got burned early on with the first job that I had coming outta college. I was looking to be a stockbroker. Even though I had my marketing degree, that was really when Wall Street was all the rage and everybody was driving fancy cars and young and slick, and the stock market crashed and I was with a company that was really just made outta cards and to be there, repping a company that just has no substance to it just really rubbed me the wrong way. And I came up with a mission statement for myself, a professional mission statement, which said, I not only wanna be doing good work over the course of my career, but I wanna be doing good works. And so I learned early on to only work for the companies that had quality products and services that I could really get my teeth into.

And maybe, your listeners on the podcast can relate to that strongly. It’s a heavy lift on a personal and professional level when something is gnawing on at your gut, as a marketer that I might be, again, repping the wrong thing. And if you’ve got that little voice or happening in your head or in your gut, move on. If you really want to be authentic around this notion of marketing with purpose, ’cause you’re not gonna be able to get any type of lift if all of those little voices are going off, it just won’t happen. It’s not real.

Carman Pirie: That’s great advice. So let’s talk about what you mean when you say marketing with purpose. What does that mean to you, and how do you bring it to life?

Alice DiSanto: It really means that, you wanna be able to identify, I’m just gonna use ASI as an example, you want to be able to focus on what the company, in this case, ASI, what do they really mean by being a people-building robot company? You want to be able to explore how marketing can humanize tech and elevate with employees’ stories. So that it becomes less scary. And you wanna be able to then take those stories and turn them into purposeful messaging that’s gonna actually elevate your brand and build the trust to attract the right talent that you need.

Jeff White: Can you gimme an example of how that’s been brought to life, or a channel where you’ve brought that to life, since I know that you’ve just begun building this part of it.

Alice DiSanto: Yeah, so I also just wanna take like a slight step back. So if this is resonating with people and you start a new gig, you can’t jump right into the cultural piece. You actually have to do a little housekeeping first, so going back to that diagnostic analysis that I always do. It always unveils the low-hanging fruit. And so I would recommend that before anybody dives into marketing with purpose, they just take an overall assessment of what needs to happen first. A first things first. And so in the case of ASI, we had a bunch of specialists. So I had conversations with them and the question that I ask of the staff that I’m inheriting, and actually of any staff, even that I’m hiring, what do you delight in doing? So that we can bring the people and align them with the tasks that they most enjoy. All of us know full well that we are gonna be locked into tasks that we don’t always delight in, but let’s make that the minority instead of the majority. So start there. Get a baseline of the talent, then move on to what you need to do in order to create a stage to dance on so that people can find you? Again, in the case of ASI, we didn’t have a strong website. Build a new website. We weren’t really consistent on social channels. Clean up your social channels so that people can find you. Again, all very important before you start pushing your cultural stuff out there. We didn’t have content, so then we had to start building media placements, getting speaking gigs, building videos, and acquiring testimonials. So that’s all been in place since I got there. We needed to get the staff in line. So all of these wonderful people from I really got a warm feeling from culturally. How can we galvanize this great energy around the brand? So, creating branding guidelines, templates for them to use, icons that they can access, PowerPoints that they can all share, and email signatures that all send a similar message. These were all things that have been put into place. And then, last but not least, at least for me, is to come up with some sort of operating focus for the team. And so for us, we talk about doing things with speed and excellence so that we don’t get caught up in especially as a technology company being slowmo by iterating over the creative stuff that we’re doing so that we can never get out of our own way and never get to market with the messages and be falsely chasing some sort of level of perfection that slows us down.

So, I wanna say all of that because you must do those things before you dive into the culture piece and the marketing with purpose piece.

Jeff White: That’s not an insignificant lift, what you’re talking about.

Alice DiSanto: No, but they’re quick wins, right? If you’ve been in marketing for a bit, and even if you’re starting out fresh from school, they hand you some of the basics. And so the bottom line is get those basics covered and then move into the bigger picture so that you can elevate your brand.

Carman Pirie: I’m trying to think about the right question to ask to lead us to a bit of a playbook here about how somebody looks at the culture of their organization and then find, translates that into a forward path that really gets to that level of purpose-driven marketing.

How do you, I guess, with that half question that I somewhat stumbled to get out, what do you say to that, Alice? How do you move from this culture’s pretty cool to something that other people are seeing?

Alice DiSanto: Yeah. So I would say a leader should treat culture as a strategy. Because it directly impacts your brand engagement, customer loyalty, the collaborative innovations that you do, and also the execution speed that we just touched on. When leaders intentionally design culture, just like a product or the pricing or the go-to market, they will, in turn, reduce the friction. They’re gonna attract and retain the top talent that they need, and they’re gonna create a competitive advantage that nobody else in the marketplace can copy. ‘Cause it’s authentically them, so it really needs to be there, that part of that overarching strategy.

Carman Pirie: Do you ever, doesn’t have to be your current firm, but have you seen some and trying to unpack what’s authentically there, have you ever had to paper over a few things that are authentically there?

Alice DiSanto: That’s a great question, actually. Because there can be slippage in culture. You can have somebody join a team that is greatly disruptive. And also could be not only disruptive, but in more of a public realm, like out there, potentially being asked questions, even in a position of leadership where they’re voicing to whether it’s the main customers or even your ecosystem partners, or your vendors, just a certain level of messaging.

So yeah, there is some triage that does need to be done at times in order not to let that individual or individuals bleed into the bigger picture. I hope that answers your question, without showing too much. And that’s been part of the reason that I’ve made some changes as I go; there are things that I talked about between getting away from tech and back into tech. Where there was a lot more band-aiding going on, and it’s like that gut’s going off again, and it’s time to move on.

Carman Pirie: When you’ve talked about the gut going off. I’m almost like triggered because I remember my one of my early agency days when I was assigned a casino account and I could not after about 45 minutes of a meeting, I could not sit in the meeting any longer and I was not going to market the casino, and I didn’t really care if that meant I was digging ditches, but I knew I wasn’t going to do that anymore.

Alice DiSanto: You’re gonna be like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever, just kinda like walking out of there.

Carman Pirie: Has a certain visual, doesn’t it? What has been the quirkiest part of an organization’s culture that you’ve made a bit of competitive advantage or a market advantage?

Alice DiSanto: The quirkiest part is that we’ve made a competitive advantage. I’m trying to think of quirky. I like the near-term things like our CEO, who I spoke about earlier, Mel Tory, he is such a wonderful storyteller.

So storytelling is a big piece of this. But he, personally, his background as a Canadian farm boy. The headquarters is in Utah, so the majority of the company is Mormon. High level of faith-based, very humble, very dry wit. And then to be established and accomplished in a very competitive, low-adoption area of technology. Still, even after two plus decades. To be able to take all of those attributes of our leader and put him in as many interviews and speaking engagements as possible is. Taking what could be perceived as quirky and just making it masterful. And I can’t take any of the credit for that. I give him more opportunities, but he’s honed his ability to work that, to have the polish to take, whether it’s the speaking, training, the deep dives into the topics, timing, to watch the audience, all of that’s been honed by him over time.

Jeff White: It’s lovely when you have somebody who’s willing to, they’re starting out with so much, but they also know that there’s a craft that they have to learn and implement and perfect in order to truly be that person who’s delivering the message and the stories in that way. So I really appreciate that, I don’t think you would necessarily call him a diamond in the rough, ’cause clearly there was much more there than that. But to be able to have that and have him really kinda latch onto the idea is quite wonderful.

Alice DiSanto: Yeah, the testimony we go back again. Who are you attracting? It is customers, but it’s also, in this case, growing company people. And that humility piece and putting yourself out there, the risk piece is very aspirational to the other people that are coming behind. And then I hit all age groups and men and women, there could be a second lifer employees who are coming to the company, there could be people who were not in tech, who are gonna be in tech, that otherwise might be really put off by the weight of the technology. Having a leader that’s like that makes all the difference in the world to really grow a team.

Carman Pirie: Alice, I’ve got this question rattling around in my brain. I’m wondering, do you think it’s possible to do really good purpose-driven marketing without a compelling leader or CEO of the organization?

Alice DiSanto: I would say it’s a very hard lift. That thing about starting at the top, it starts at the top.

It truly does. In my experience, so I know this, not just think this, that in a privately held company, it’s much easier than in a public company where you are beholden to stakeholders. I can’t even imagine the pressure that’s on an individual when they’re having to be accountable to all of those outside influences.

So that privately held piece, and then to be able to maintain being privately held and in control. And that can help or hinder. So the health of the leader is strong. It’s gonna be an asset like we’re describing if something changes dramatically… I’ve witnessed where, in a smaller company, I don’t mean me personally, I’ve seen it in other organizations, where you have a very strong leader, and that leader. In this case had a mentor who was very necessary in their lives, and that mentor passed away. And in that passing, the leader lost their footing and, in turn, the company followed suit. And so, it’s not a guarantee that an aspirational leader will always stay the course.

Carman Pirie: Yeah, I appreciate that. I do think that this type of messaging truly comes to life. Maybe it isn’t impossible if you don’t have the inspiring leader or the inspiring founder story. But it’s a damn lot harder.

Alice DiSanto: Yeah. It’s, it absolutely is. And then the person who also gives permission, as you said, that trust thing, like having me come in and ask those kinds of questions, it’s not as if something special about Alice DiSanto, that is a trust level that’s given to. All the other folks that are being hired into those leadership positions that it’s, hold on loosely, but watch closely, inspect what you expect, and make sure that those people are also holding true to the culture that you’re looking to maintain and grow.

Jeff White: And I have to think too, it really. Speaks to your desire to find places where you’ll also find personal fulfillment in evaluating these leaders and organizations before making the jump. Especially as a senior leader yourself and choosing to work with a company like this, you probably are able to look for that and see it before you make the leap. Pretty cool. Thanks so much, Alice. I really enjoyed having you on the show today.

Alice DiSanto: Yeah, I enjoyed it too.

Carman Pirie: Absolute pleasure. Thank you.

Alice DiSanto: Yeah, good way to start the year!

Carman Pirie: Yeah.