Navigating the Boundaries of AI: Exploring Innovation in Manufacturing MarketingNavigating the Boundaries of AI: Exploring Innovation in Manufacturing Marketing

Navigating the Boundaries of AI: Exploring Innovation in Manufacturing Marketing 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 are you doing, sir? 

Carman Pirie: I’m happy to be here. How are you doing?

Jeff White: I’m doing great. Yeah.

Carman Pirie: Nice. Look, today’s topic, everybody knows that probably the biggest topic of conversation in marketing these days. One might even say the world these days is AI and we have touched on it a bit in the podcast, but I’m excited for today’s show to just look at how a brand is experimenting with it, using it in multiple ways, what their experiences are. I like that today’s guest is just being very experimental with how they’re thinking about it and being very open to that. So very cool. 

Jeff White: The learning I think is the opportunities are exceptional because it’s changing every day. Any other marketing technology, even, though I’ve been through some interesting things in the last decade and a half technology-wise in marketing, this is an altogether different level.

Carman Pirie: Yeah, it’s another sea change. And, there are all kinds of people out there that think they’ve already written the book on how AI is going to change marketing 10 years from now, and the simple fact is it’s still kind of, in its infancy. It will continue to evolve in dramatic ways that we don’t expect. And it’s only through the experimentation of marketers like today’s guests, that we’re going to actually find out which dogs will hunt and which ones won’t. 

Jeff White: Yeah, it’s a lot for our guests to live into, like to put people on the spot. That’s what we do. So joining us today is Jarid Hockert. Jarid is the director of marketing at InCompass. Welcome to The Kula Ring, Jarid. 

Jarid Hockert: Yeah. Thanks for having me. 

Carman Pirie: Jarid, let’s start by finding out who InCompass is. Can you tell us a bit about the company and kind of what y’all do? 

Jarid Hockert: Yeah, so InCompass is a manufacturing holding company. We have lines and sanding equipment for metal workers and woodworkers. We have machine tools, we have the Bridgeport line and kind of everything in between as far as manufacturing goes. 

Jeff White: So you’re supporting a number of key brands from within that holding company, not working for one specifically? 

Jarid Hockert: Yeah, correct. So we have I think we’re at 12 different brands right now under this InCompass umbrella.

Carman Pirie: Wow. And how big is the marketing organization supporting 12 brands? 

Jarid Hockert: I have four people. 

Jeff White: Including yourself? 

Jarid Hockert: Including myself. 

Jeff White: So that’s that’s a lot to deal with. I’d love to hear a bit more about you, Jarid, and how you landed there and what your background is. 

Jarid Hockert: Yeah, so I actually have a background in finance. I graduated with a finance degree from a local private college here in Minnesota. And I found out that I hated it. It was very mundane. It was full of spreadsheets as you would expect. And the company that I was at was a different manufacturing company and they didn’t have any marketing at all. So in my free time, I put together a marketing plan and never looked back. They gave me an opportunity and I’ve just grown from there. 

Jeff White: That’s really exciting. 

Carman Pirie: Very cool. I must say I took a bit of a finance concentration during my business degree as well. There are a couple of reformed finance people who turned marketers on the podcast.

Jarid Hockert: The one good thing is it gives you an analytical mindset, right? So you’re able to take numbers and prove your ROI really effectively with all of that. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah, it’s good to be able to speak numbers, even if it’s not something you do day to day. You’re quite right, yeah. 

Jeff White: Especially when your co-host has been to design school. Not so much on the business side of things. 

Carman Pirie: Jarid I want to start to peel back what you’re doing at InCompass with respect to your experimentation with AI. I guess start walking us through that. What was your first, the first thing that you experimented with? The first time that InCompass ever experienced an AI in marketing, what was it?

Jarid Hockert: It was chatGPT and it was, six, seven, eight months ago, something like that. And the reason we started doing it, we noted, my lack of employees for the size company we have, we just don’t have time to do everything in marketing operations with four people between 11 different brands. We knew of ChatGPT and different AI tools and knew that we had to utilize these effectively to make our lives more efficient. Giving us the tools to be able to pound out a ton of different work for all these different brands quickly. And that’s one of the things that I’ve seen the most beneficial with AI is it’ll give you the bones and structure of everything that you would need as far as content creation for these different brands. With 11 brands across, manufacturing. It’s impossible to know the ins and outs of each market, of each product specifically. Of different applications that you find out in the field. Using ChatGPT or different AI tools, you’re able to identify, different market spaces, and different sectors within the market, giving you, again, bones, but also a path towards a strategy, whether that’s content or, we’re looking at influencer marketing right now.

What does that strategy look like? Influencer marketing is certainly new to my sector of manufacturing. And I think it’s new to manufacturing as a whole. What would a plan look like? What do they do, what’s their hourly rates? If they have X amount of followers what could we, do with $20,000 or a hundred thousand dollars?

With somebody with a hundred thousand followers on social media, you can punch in these prompts and it can give you a pretty solid plan to start. And then you just tweak it with the knowledge that you have that’s specific to the direction you want to go. And it’s really beneficial or I found it to be beneficial.

Carman Pirie: I’ve got a bunch of follow-up questions to that probably, and I can try to be like a cantankerous old marketer and try to pretend that the machines aren’t going to ever be able to keep up with us or what have you. But beyond that, I think my first question is,  have you put anything in place to where you’re checking the, um, you’re checking the information you’re receiving to ensure that you’re dealing with a level of accuracy here?

Jarid Hockert: Yeah, I think there has to be. And again, ChatGPT or any AI tool will never be perfect. You’re going to have to supplement your thoughts, and your knowledge of what’s taking place, and input some of these I don’t know these factors into the prompt box to make sure that ultimately what you’re getting spit out is accurate. There are always checks and balances. There’s always a way to go in and verify through the web. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah. I was also curious, I guess you’re talking about using AI for more, I appreciate that getting an influencer strategy or whatever, you might be able to start getting the bones of that in place when you talk about the different industries and different brands and the differing industry dynamics, et cetera.

I just, my mind was left spinning to wonder, yeah, I wonder how accurate the information we’re getting out of ChatGPT is when we start applying into those very small niche markets. 

Jarid Hockert: Yeah. And you’re right. It’s not perfect. If you wanted to run some sort of competitor analysis and market X. Would every competitor that they spit out be accurate and what do we view to be as competitors with accurate information? Probably not, but stuff like that is expected of a marketing team and certainly at InCompass to not have to use AI for stuff like that. For the most part, we’re using it for content generation. We talked about strategy earlier. If we’re looking at just competitors has been really what I found them to be the least accurate on competitor information in different industrial sectors. 

Jeff White: Is it just that the companies don’t necessarily exist or aren’t what they say they are or what kind of errors are you seeing in that information?

Jarid Hockert: So ChatGPT specifically takes information from their websites or somewhere on the web, whether that be a forum or somebody has written about company X somewhere. If they have a couple of keywords on a specific page, ChatGPT will identify them as a competitor and put that into the output of the prompts. So you really have to be careful about making sure you’re, it’s a communication, right? It’s a conversation between you and this AI tool to make sure that what it’s putting out benefits you as a marketer in the right way. You can’t take it at face value. It’s almost never a hundred percent accurate right away.

Jeff White: That critical thinking component I have to imagine is extremely valuable in being able to interface with these tools and get real legitimate information out. 

Jarid Hockert: Yeah, absolutely. The critical thinking piece is a big part. You obviously have to have that base level. At the very least, foundational knowledge about your industry, your company, and the content or conversation you want to have outputted to you. You need AI to work with you and for you, not to replace you. 

Carman Pirie: I want to drill down on that content creation use case that you mentioned. And, you hear people say this a lot about content creation. So it’s a good first draft tool to get the bones sorted and then we tweak from there. How extensive is the tweaking? Tweak can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people, Jarid.

Jarid Hockert: If you were to ask me this question three months ago, it would be very extensive tweaking, right? It would spit out information or give you information that’s inaccurate or it needs to be rewritten. It’s very clear that a bot had written the content. It’s become more conversational over time. It’s become smarter. It’s using more resources of its own through the internet to help give you the content that you would want. So the bones for the most part. Are becoming better and better every day and it’s just going to keep getting better and more conversational and start to sound more human which is scary if you think about it. Because it is going to replace some people out in the world. But The tweaks are becoming less and less I will say that. 

Jeff White: I was wondering when you were answering that question if you were going to say that the tools getting better or that you were getting better, I suppose it’s probably a combination of both. 

Jarid Hockert: It’s a combination of both they’re updating that it seems weekly and you know We’ve talked about ChatGPT quite a bit But there are tools like HubSpot and different marketing automation It tools or platforms that you would use, they can develop landing pages with some real baseline information in 10 seconds. You can use an Adobe Suite tool and remove the background of a photo that you took that would have been taken somebody an hour prior, it’s getting really good. 

Jeff White: Yeah, that part’s super impressive to me. I started using Photoshop in version 2. 0 in 1994. So it was, removing backgrounds was our stock in trade and it took days.

Jarid Hockert: I, that’s how I started. My career is removing backgrounds from photo manufacturing. It’s interesting. The two companies that I’ve worked with, I’ve started the marketing department for both of them. And the first thing I did was develop content. It is taking pictures, removing background, writing blogs, and writing social media posts. And all of that with the use of AI is becoming so much quicker. One person could do the job of two with ChatGPT or a different AI tool. It’s crazy. 

Carman Pirie: That one-to-two ratio you just mentioned kind of begs, it’s knocking on the door of answering the question I was just about to ask you, have you done done any kind of quantification of the savings or efficiency to date as you’ve looked at it?

Jarid Hockert: I use the two to one or the one to two there’s no data behind that. I just pulled that out of nowhere. The answer is no, I haven’t done that, that cost savings or anything like that. And honestly, I don’t want to, if that makes sense. I don’t want to, justify getting rid of people that I have or justify that we could be doing more work, for every eight hours in a day with the likes of AI, could we pound out 16 hours of work? I don’t know. 

Jeff White: It probably also over time means you do different work, it’s supporting you in different ways. It’s not necessarily a doubling of output. It’s working smarter, not harder, I guess. Are you leveraging, you know, one of the biggest concerns especially around technical content and things like that, often one of the biggest concerns is that the tools don’t necessarily know that sort of specialized information. Are you leveraging any of your own data, like uploading first-party data and what sort of tools are you using to do that? 

Jarid Hockert: I try not to use first-party data. In the call we had a couple of weeks ago, you asked me, where do you draw that line? And, I don’t want my first-party data being inputted into the likes of AI. Call me, an elder millennial, if you will. I don’t trust the computer just yet, but I know that you’re able to write a, in theory, you could take. All your customer base, upload that into ChatGPT, identify, what environments are working well, and what environments we win 80 percent of the time. What environments do we lose 80 percent of the time? And you could really come up with a really strong strategy. Based on that information it’s not something that I feel comfortable going down yet because, quite frankly I don’t need to, I have enough of that information in my head and on paper here.

Carman Pirie: I’m curious, it seems like the content creation side of things is something that you’re six, eight months into and, Using it to help bolster strategy has been part of that journey as well. And you’ve certainly gotten some more efficiencies and things like removing the backgrounds from photos as an example.

As you look at the use cases that are emerging now, and you’re thinking ahead to what you might be doing in six months or years time with the tool, anything jumping out to you where you’re like, I can see it evolving good enough to do X by this time. 

Jarid Hockert: I, honestly, I don’t have an answer to that question, guys. I do, but I don’t want to be disheartening for the pod. 

Jeff White: Oh, that sounds interesting. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah. Now I want you to answer the disheartening answer. 

Jarid Hockert: I think it can take away the marketing coordinator, marketing specialist level type employees, or at least reduce the amount of them that are needed. There’s still the need to prompt AI to do a baseline of the work and make these tweaks that they’ll never be on site. AI will never be a human being that can speak to somebody down the hall and get information quickly. But when it comes to the amount of work that’s expected from, a marketing department of four or six eight or 10, or however many, you’ll be able to do more with less.

Carman Pirie: Yeah. I think I hear what you’re saying and I can understand why you think that would maybe be a bit of a vibe killer on the podcast, but at the same time, I think most everybody that’s in marketing, Today would be looking ahead six months, a year from now, two years from now, five years from now.

And they’d say if it’s like anything like I’ve been experiencing lately, we’re going to be expected as marketers to do a whole lot more stuff than we had to do in the past. So having some tools to help out doesn’t hurt. 

Jarid Hockert: You’re right. More will just be expected of us. If it was expected to do eight hours of work, it’ll be, two days’ worth of work in the future with the use of AI building the bones or foundation of whatever we’re going to do.

You’re right. More will just be expected from us as marketers. 

Jeff White: I think to the, the other part of this, of course, is that it’s, it can still be difficult, especially within the manufacturing space to find, interested and qualified marketing team members anyway. Having tools like these for, the few and the proud that do work in the field to leverage may not be the worst thing.

Jarid Hockert: You’re absolutely right. I have had a very hard time finding people to join my team in the past. It’s, people don’t go to school to get into marketing within manufacturing. They go to school to be there to work for Target. And I’m using them as an example because they’re local to me here in Minnesota. It’s not sexy. It’s not a sexy industry to market in, but once you’re in manufacturing, I don’t see a world where I can get out. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah, and it’s funny too, because once you’ve been in marketing on the B2C side, you realize it’s not very sexy either. There’s nothing particularly sexy about laundry detergent or even a pair of Nikes. 

Jarid Hockert: Yeah, probably a little more creativity with some design work. You have to be a little more creative, a little more imaginative with what you’re putting out into the world. I don’t know. There’s just something about working with the lifeblood of the U. S. and the rest of the world, right?

Yeah, I can walk out in a shop and see something being turned on a lathe or something being milled or one of our machines going out the door. There’s something to that, and it’s not something that I would ever want to leave. 

Jeff White: I think there’s something in that, that, once people get an opportunity to experience it they do love it, they see the sexiness of it, in the..

Carman Pirie: They see the connectedness to real life.

Jeff White: Exactly this is making things that make the world go. 

Jarid Hockert: Yeah, there is absolutely something to that, and, it wasn’t my dream either to get into manufacturing, but again, once I was there, once I was watching, at that time we made boilers for power plants and you see them, hundreds of tubes and pipes that are being built for the boilers. It’s wow, this is really cool. People are building this out in the shop with their hands and the welders over there, welding some of these together. And you got the guy on the lathe turning something and it’s, you can see the process of something being built and then, it’s going to a customer who, maybe in a scenario now they’re building a satellite or they’re building something for, the defence industry that’s going overseas.

It’s crazy. It’s a crazy world. 

Carman Pirie: Using that, it is a crazy world, I agree, and it’s, AI, it’s a crazy world when it comes to AI, and you’ve been experimenting and doing a lot of kind of learning with the tools, and you had mentioned that you haven’t been terribly focused on putting up guardrails to date, and to be fair, with a small team, it’s a little easier to manage what’s going on and understand and monitor various pieces of the puzzle.

But that said, can you look in the crystal ball and see any, at any point where you will have to put some guardrails on or some areas where some guidance will be required in order not to misstep here? 

Jarid Hockert: Yeah, and that’s something that we had, you know talked about earlier I don’t want to give any AI tool first-party data. Anything that’s somewhat confidential to the company InCompass or one of the brands below InCompass I don’t want to give them sales data. I don’t want to give them real numbers. I don’t want to give them market share information Because once they have it They’ll have it forever. 

Jeff White: I have to wonder, is there a day coming when there will be, firewalled internal large language models that are entirely your own, you purchase, they’re not connected to any internet, they’re not sharing data, Is that the future? It seems like that could be pretty interesting. 

Jarid Hockert: Maybe, they’ll have to compete with the ChatGPTs of the world. Now, if they do that, when, ChatGPT has, years of front-end, work and developments and insight into how that works. If that makes sense, so right now you’re able to I could go in and train AI to know everything there is to know, and be an absolute expert in one of my companies. Let’s say time savers. I have an AI bot for time savers. It knows the ins and outs. I can make a chatbot that’s related to, this ChatGPT AI bot that is, a customer could type in. This is my application. This is my environment. What machine would I select for this? And it would direct them and it would be an accurate direction, right? It would, we can utilize AI to, do all these different things. And then when you ask about, is there’s going to be something that, is confidential or proprietary to one of these individual companies, they would have to compete with something that’s already out and about, and I just, I don’t see that happening maybe for the big players of the world, not for smaller companies like mine.

Jeff White: I might have a bit of a fun one here. What’s the worst answer you’ve seen from a prompt? The most incorrect thing that you just knew immediately. I can’t use this. 

Jarid Hockert: So this is one of my biggest pet peeves and you used to see it all over LinkedIn. Anytime you see 17 different emojis in some content that’s being pushed out on LinkedIn or any social media, 100 percent that was ChatGPT or some AI tool, right?

Or if you see a rocket ship in the subject line of an email that comes through to your inbox You know that’s ChatGPT and you know that hearkens back to utilizing this tool to work with you instead of for you or instead of to replace you and, that’s where people aren’t going in and doing these checks and balances, making the voice their own they’re using it to write when it can’t write, right?

It’s not a human being. It has no voice, it’s just a computer. And I used to see it all the time, fortunately, it’s frowned upon now in the marketing space, I don’t see it as much, but that’s the worst I’ve ever seen. Is the rocket ship. 

Carman Pirie: You’re right. It’s you can spot it a mile away. I was curious, you mentioned, using, and having a chatbot for various brands and you can envision customers obviously being able to interact with that, getting, solid direction, etc. I’d be curious, and I’m leading us here a bit because this is something that we’ve experimented with here at Kula a bit.

Have you experimented with persona bots for your various brands to try to get an AI version of an ideal customer that you can then use to inform your marketing? 

Jarid Hockert: I have not. Tell me more. 

Carman Pirie: It’s just that. You’re basically, as you’re working to build a chatbot, you’d be doing it through the lens of working to build a customer, right?

And the idea is that you can then begin to ask that customer what they might want to know about you. Yeah, we’ve been experimenting with a couple of different clients. It’s been it’s been interesting. So something to maybe think about as you look at using AI for content creation is not just AI to talk to our customers, but how do we use AI to represent a customer to us? Cause you know, sometimes you can, no matter how close you are to customers, there still is a bit of distance between you and them. 

Jarid Hockert: Yep, you can never have too much of that VOC and don’t worry, I took some notes. I’m going to be researching that right after this. 

Carman Pirie: I always, it’s rare, but I like when we can help one of our podcast guests because, frankly, they’re always helping us and our listeners, and Jarid, this has been just an interesting look into what it is you’re doing with AI, how you’re thinking about it. I really thank you for sharing it with us today. It’s been good to kick it around. 

Jarid Hockert: Yeah, absolutely. Really appreciate being invited onto the podcast. I think you guys do really excellent work. 

Jeff White: Thanks so much. 

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.