Stop Competing, Start Creating: Why Category Creators Must Redefine the Problem (and Not Just the Solution)Stop Competing, Start Creating: Why Category Creators Must Redefine the Problem (and Not Just the Solution)

Stop Competing, Start Creating: Why Category Creators Must Redefine the Problem (and Not Just the Solution) 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 well and I am very much looking forward to this show today, Jeff. 

Jeff White: Yeah. This is a topic we have never covered in the past, I don’t think.

Carman Pirie: Yeah, it’s just interesting I think because people… not everybody kinda steps back from the organization that they’re seeking to market and think about truly the place that it plays within its category, within the space, and what that means for the playbook that they have available to them.

That may not have been available to others, or it may be a different nuance. So what I think about today’s guest is just that starting point has really been a guiding component to his work. So I’m looking forward to getting into this.

Jeff White: I am as well. So joining us today is Florian Neugue. Florian is the Regional Marketing Manager for North America at A-Safe. Welcome to The Kula Ring, Florian. 

Florian Neugue: Thank you very much for having me today. 

Carman Pirie: Florian, thank you for joining us. A-Safe, I wonder if you could start by introducing our listeners to who is A-Safe? What do y’all do? 

Florian Neugue: Yeah, definitely. A-Safe is a safety solution manufacturer. It’s a UK company. So the company is based in Yorkshire actually, and we’re manufacturing safety solutions for large companies, mainly guardrails or step guards or any kind of solution to protect the environment of the facility as such. 

Carman Pirie: Really cool. So like a lot of you can picture fall catch guardrails and things of that sort as being part of this. 

Florian Neugue: Yeah, absolutely. And the main applications that we see today in facilities that we work with is actually the safety of their employees, right?

Because of management operations. I would like to increase the production, right? And so they ask their employees to either use forklifts or any type of vehicle to go a bit faster to use the space even more so, products and inventory are a bit everywhere in the facility, for example.

And so you need to protect the inventory. But of course, and most importantly, the people working around it, because when you have a forklift that is driving like six to 10 miles per hour, it gets very dangerous. And it’s not only, like a matter of really a safety issue, but it’s a lot of incidents and injuries. You can break a leg or something like that and it happens every single day in the US.

Jeff White: It’s almost like the importance of bike lanes. Huh?

Florian Neugue: Exactly. 

Jeff White: Yeah. 

Florian Neugue: And you need to protect both, right? You need to protect the car and the pedestrian. So it’s really important that we make a step to invent new products that can both protect the safety of the pedestrians, but also make sure that the vehicles, their assets are protected as well, pretty much. 

Carman Pirie: Oh my goodness, Florian you need to know that here in our small little humble city of Halifax, the bike lane debate rages on, and Jeff basically doesn’t like to do anything more than he likes to ride bikes. So it’s very much a top of the agenda around here, but I don’t know what the agenda is, I don’t know how you managed to work it in. That was…

Jeff White: Masterful. That’s the word. 

Carman Pirie: Quite. That’s exactly what I was searching for, Jeff. Thank you for bringing it in. 

Jeff White: Yeah, no, you’re welcome. 

Carman Pirie: That was a masterful way of getting to the right word as well. We started this by chatting about how you tend to think about A-Safe in that safety space, in the category of safety, in the position that it plays.

Let’s talk about that because, you guys have a unique or you have a unique starting point at the helm of A-Safe North American marketing. 

Florian Neugue: Yeah, I agree. And I believe that, we have to go back a little in the early two thousands where the safety solutions for companies, for the manufacturing industry and in general, industrial companies were mostly steel. You could find some cement bollards, for example, or some kind of wall to protect the assets or make lanes between the vehicles and the pedestrians. So what happened at that time is that the founder of A-Safe realized that there was a problem. Forklifts and heavy vehicles were hitting those walls, those steel barriers, those concrete bollards, for example, all the time. And so what ends up happening is that they need to replace, repair and change the barriers all the time. And so that’s a cost, right? And so they came up with a solution that would actually come back to place. So what we call today, flex and return safety solution is actually polymer safety barriers. And that’s a sort of plastic where you have a lot of different elements, obviously because it’s engineered at the molecular level, so you have a lot of those solutions on the market today. But back then it was like a real innovation because companies would buy a product that was a bit more expensive on the first buy, but then long term it would save companies a lot of money on repairs, maintenance and things like this. 

So obviously it started in the UK, right? So manufacturers around there, industrials from there were small companies, so the costs were not that much. But as A-Safe continued to grow, it became larger and larger incidents or problems, and so they needed solutions for that because. They had a lot of costs associated with the repair and maintenance of those barriers. And so the founders of A-Safe engineered the first polymer safety solution that would flex and return and pretty much be able to be used in the long term and save those costs. And so for me, in the US managing the marketing for the US, for Canada, for Mexico, it’s really important for the people to understand where we come from. And that’s why we look at A-Safe as the category king, right? That means that we didn’t invent another solution within a category, because usually that’s the case. You have a category and every single competitor is in that category, but they didn’t invent that category, and that’s very important. A-Safe saw a problem and actually answered with a different solution.

So that is really important to understand for the US market, for the Canadian market and Mexican market. So that’s why we’re going back in history and explaining that to the market with education and things like this to make sure that people understand that A-Safe exists because there was a problem. There’s still a problem and there’s a solution for it. 

Jeff White: Often what happens when you are a category creator like that, obviously this issue has been solved for A-Safe and you’ve created the category and now I assume there’s probably also a number of competitors in it, but often when you’re the one creating that category. There’s a real issue with awareness. People aren’t necessarily looking for something better than a steel barrier. They’re used to dealing with that and replacing them and, not necessarily considering that there could be an alternative to it. What do you think about as a category creator, the notion of getting people to understand that there is an alternative solution out there? 

Florian Neugue: Yeah, and that’s a great question because that’s exactly where the category design actually comes to place because of course you have a lot of companies coming up with solutions that are answering problems, and so they’re educating on that problem. And trying to solve that problem with their own solution. What companies are actually missing sometimes, is that a category design creator is redesigning how the buyer thinks about the problem. And I think that’s really important here. The problem is not that the steel barrier, for example, in my case with A-Safe, is the steel barrier is breaking. That’s not the problem. The problem is that they’re losing a lot of money on the repair, on the maintenance, and in the long run they have to be careful about those costs because it becomes exponential. And the second thing is that, for example, a steel barrier is not safe for people.

A steel barrier when it gets smashed. It is just exploding in a lot of different, little pieces. So you have to be careful about that. So the solution that you thought was good for you, because that was the only one you didn’t have any other idea of a solution, is actually the wrong one. So that’s why category creators need to focus on redesigning the problem, making sure that people actually understand the problem and how to solve it with an innovative solution. If I take, for example, another category design creator that everyone knows about, like Uber, right? We had taxis and taxis; it took a long time to get, if you are in a big city you could holler at a taxi and never get one.

I’m not going to talk about the service of taxis. I don’t know how it is in your city, but at least in Paris, I mean it’s French people driving. It’s not good, right? Grumpy people, et cetera, et cetera. And Uber understood that really well and came up with this idea of the 21st century with an application where you could order an Uber at any place at any time, and you have a car available for you. With a great service, at least at the beginning. Remember we had bottles of water and candies and that was a great time.

Jeff White: I remember. 

Florian Neugue: Yeah, that was a great time. So that was back then, right? But that’s how they redesigned the problem by saying, it’s not like just a question of supply and demand. It’s a question of service and living with your time. Modernize the taxi category completely. And so that’s pretty much how it happened. And I can say another example actually with John Deere for example. Like you think of John Deere as a heavy equipment manufacturer pretty much. But what they actually created is like a precision agriculture platform. Where you can manage a big group of agriculture machines. And they put that on apps. You have analytics behind all that. And that’s really important. 

Carman Pirie: It all speaks to me to the example of that we’ve used is considerably less sexier than the ones you mentioned because I was thinking of it more like Sensodyne toothpaste which is because people have had, there’s already a category of play there for toothpaste clearly, but they invented a new one around sensitive toothpaste for sensitive teeth. And as a result allowed them that kind of subcategory in that case kind of category invention. Allowed them to gain mind share, and otherwise, they would’ve been competing directly in the category against like Crest and Colgate, and would’ve never succeeded. As I’m thinking about A-Safe and the notion of category design, and you’re bringing up this idea that it means that you need to reframe the problem and let people know and become aware of different solutions.

All I could think of in my mind is that means that we’re moving back a little bit in the customer journey. We’re maybe taking people that are ready to buy a barrier or solution, searching for a steel barrier, and we’re almost pushing them back from that decision phase to say, hold on a second. We need to change your level of problem awareness. We need to change your level of solution awareness. All of that seems to lean a bit away from the sale. So in your world of category design and being the category king, does it mean you have to be more patient? 

Florian Neugue: You are absolutely right. That’s the word, right? You have to be patient. And when I came into this position at A-Safe I told my management that I didn’t want my performance to be seen as a one year performance. I don’t want my management to look at the numbers pretty much per quarter, per month, per year. It’s like, how many leads did you bring?

That’s marketing right there. And I think that’s the problem, right? When you have a category creating a solution in front of you, you should think about the long run. And so what I said is we need to look at three to five years. And the reason why is if you focus on demand capture right away, surely you’re gonna have more leads and more sales, more revenue. The first two to three years. So you’re gonna have a great growth and it’s gonna be a big growth. But if you want success in the long term, five years, six years and more, you need to take the time, be patient and actually create the messaging set the base for long-term strategy.

And so that’s why I said that I want my success to be bigger in five years than it is in one year. And so I think that’s really important to think about those things right from the start and say, let’s take a step back as you mentioned, and actually, make sure that we do the right thing so that in three to four years or so, the growth continues to grow and doesn’t decline. ‘Cause when you look at a software company, and you look at the metrics for those markets. The maturity metrics for those solutions, software solutions, it’s always the same, right? It’s solution creation, like market creation, market validation, market expansion, and then you have decline.

All companies go through that, right? And so when I started at A-Safe I thought that these maturity metrics couldn’t work for the manufacturing world and specifically for the safety industry because the metrics at least A-Safe wouldn’t fit for those metrics, right? So I created another metric. A maturity metric to make sure that we know where we are in the market and where we want to go. So it starts with a problem that is not recognized. You have a market like this in North America, which is Canada, they have no idea that their problem is their problem pretty much. 

Carman Pirie: Which problem are we talking about in Canada? We have a lot of problems here, Florian. 

Florian Neugue: Exactly. Like, they don’t realize that repairing and replacing barriers or safety solutions or that their pedestrians are in danger is a problem. They don’t really realize that yet. And so that’s where they are. And after that you have a problem recognized.

People do recognize that there is a problem or the cost for repairing maintenance asset incidents or they have to replace an entire production line or a conveyor is very expensive. So they recognize that problem, and that’s the second stage of the maturity market. The third stage is actually solution awareness. They understand that there is a solution for it, but that they’re not sure what it really is. And the third and the fourth stage is the category validation. That means that they understand that there is a solution. It’s actually that category of solution that is going to actually solve their problem. And the last stage is actually category leadership, where they understand the category and they recognize the leader of that category. And that’s pretty much where we want to be in five years, six years time. We wanna be there pretty much, and we’re not there yet.

And the last thing I wanted to add to these metrics is actually another stage that you can add at the end of it. In my space, specifically in the safety industry, are the standards. So the last stage is standardization. That means that OSHA recognizes that category. As the only solution, there are regulations and policies to make sure that manufacturers’ industries are using that solution. If you go to any facility today, you need a hard hat and you need shoes, like hard shoes. You have a lot of regulations for those whole hats and shoes and stuff like that. Those guys went through all those stages and at the end it’s the standard. So that’s pretty much where we are and where we want to be.

Jeff White: As a guy who was almost run over by a giant, one ton rolling roll of newsprint in a newsprint mill once because there are no barriers anywhere and they just roll freely across the factory floor, but they weigh a ton. I can see the use for these things, but I wanna touch on your standards. ‘Cause I think it’s a particularly interesting one. Do you think that there’s an opportunity to accelerate adoption and solution awareness through lobbying and for these kinds of standards in parallel to the category creation earlier stages of category creation can that actually help to accelerate that? Or is it, is there a point where it’s too early? 

Florian Neugue: That’s a good question. I believe that there is a stage where it’s too early. Where you need to first educate the market on the problem, the solution before going into, like lobbying about this should be the standard because you’re gonna protect people that way and you’re gonna save some cost on machinery and protection and everything you can think of. So one way to do that, because when we use the word lobbying, it’s…

Jeff White: Sorry, it’s a dirty word. I understand, but…

Florian Neugue: Exactly. There is a meaning behind it. So the way we usually do that is by using independent testing, and that is really important in our industry, having independent testing, like ANSI testing institutes like this, MHI or others. Have their own group of people, engineers write the testing and write the standards and certify those testings. And so those usually become standards and that is, it’s a long way. I can tell you this because it started almost 10 years ago, for example, for barrier-like guardrail testing. It’s still not done right. We, A-Safe as a company, just got tested and certified by ANSI, but it takes a very long time. And so I think that this is the way to get to those. Like OSHA standards, pretty much is independent testing. 

Carman Pirie: It encourages me to hear you articulate that it can, there can be a time when it’s too early to focus on that because I found that it’s a mistake that people sometimes make as they believe that they’re designing and inventing a category as they think first things first is, I need to get the regulation through. I need to get everybody or there’s already a regulation at play and they have the only thing that helps you fit that regulation, but they may be working in a market that doesn’t enforce the darn regulation. So it’s irrelevant. But they, in some ways, feel if we can make it a rule and we’re the only ones to help people live up to the rule, then, we’re gonna profit.

So it… they almost seem like they get stuck at that regulatory, to use Jeff’s term, the lobbying phase or whatever, and they maybe don’t do the formative work necessary. So I think that’s really good, really strong advice, Florian. 

Florian Neugue: There are some risks on the other hand of choosing a category design strategy over just the demand generation strategy or a demand capture strategy to be completely honest, obviously, because if you overeducate the market, then you choose to undersell, pretty much. And so that’s really important to have a little bit of both. And when I look at the division of the efforts for my marketing team. It’s about 65% on category design. And the rest is on demand capture because we still need to deliver, obviously we’re working for a company, we are part of the revenue team. We’re taking care of the top of the funnel. So we need to deliver, but at the same time, we wanna make sure that the message is the right one and we need to focus on this and put 65 percent effort on. Like educating the market with redefining the problem. 

Carman Pirie: I want to ask how you measure the extent to which the market is educated. ’cause it can understand how you’d measure your activities going into it. Obviously the inputs are easy to see, but I guess how do you look at the market and get some signal back that says, yeah, we’re starting to see that we’re having an impact. They’re coming our way or they’re seeing the problem on our way. 

Florian Neugue: It’s difficult, it’s really difficult because you do not have numbers in front of you to say the market is educated enough. But, in the long run, I would say it’s per quarter. We run, like feedback surveys, things like this to understand if the awareness is a bit higher compared to the previous quarter, and we’re looking at little signals. For example a big company recently completely switched from steel barriers to polymer safety solutions. Meaning that at a corporate level, they said to all their sites, they have 455 sites nationwide in the US. So you can imagine what kind of company that is? They said from a corporate and HQ level, for every steel barrier that breaks, we will replace it with a safety solution. So that’s one company, but that’s a big signal for us to say, okay, we’re moving through and we need to keep moving forward through these maturity metrics that I talked about earlier.

And those signals we’re trying to get from the sales team. We’re asking at trade shows and things like this. So that’s pretty much all we can do. That’s pretty much all we can do. So we’re focusing our efforts and making sure that people read and see what we have to say. If it’s well done we shouldn’t really look for results. We should believe that it worked and just keep moving forward. 

Jeff White: I like that notion, Florian, I’m realizing that as we started the show, we didn’t necessarily ask you how you ended up at A-Safe, but I’m interested to know in the context of as we close down this episode. Was it the notion of working for an organization that was looking to create a category, the thing that drew you to A-Safe? Or had you done this previously in your career and, this is your favorite kind of marketing to build? What kind of brought you to A-Safe and what are you looking forward to next? 

Florian Neugue: Yeah, so previously to A-Safe I have around eight to 10 years of experience in consulting marketing. That means that I had teams of marketers, digital marketing teams, working for a lot of different clients at the same time. So that’s what my background is, delivering as much as possible in a very short amount of time. So it’s either changing, like the strategy of a marketing team or launching new products.

And when I was launching new products for industrials and manufacturing companies specifically in aerospace defense. You have to, of course, create a new go-to-market strategy. But a lot of those times you can actually use those category design cheat codes because that’s how it works. If your company is, let’s say, Boeing and you have a new solution for something like airplane software or something like this, you look at it and you believe that this could change the market. This is very innovative and it’s answering a problem. So I would say that to all the companies out there that are looking at launching new products to look through the eyes of category design to do so because you can do it. It’s not only just a company that can use those strategies. It can be used for launching a new product. So that’s pretty much my background. And so when I learned about A-Safe being in the US and launching a marketing department, there was no marketing department at all before, and I knew they were a category king and they invented this category. I was very excited because I’ve read that book Play Bigger by Al Ramadan and three other founders of the Silicon Valley talking about category designs. And how their strategy as consultants that they used over the years have worked for every single company, including the one I used as a big example.

It was very exciting and I just wanted to try. Let’s be honest. I think it’s fun. There’s everything to do. So that’s just challenging. And I think that’s what we are looking for in this job. So looking at the future that’s pretty much exactly the same thing I’m looking at. We need time to continue to move through the funnel and make sure that all markets that we take care of are understanding what we do. And that’s pretty much my role in the future. 

Carman Pirie: Florian, it’s been a delight to have you on the show. Thank you for joining us today.

Florian Neugue: Thank you very much for having me. It was a pleasure.