The Kula Ring

Building a storytelling program takes time and patience for an organization to understand their purpose and brand. In today’s episode we welcome back Kristin Fallon, Vice President of Brand and Digital Marketing at GE Healthcare. Kristin walks us through the planning process behind a captivating and long-term storytelling program and her experience working in the healthcare industry during COVID. She provides details on how manufacturers can create their own storytelling program with marketing and strategy tools including templates and a storytelling wrangler.

Growing your marketing team means new strategies and most often, new skills. Mike Zimm, VP of Marketing at Kris-Tech Wire talks about his experience working on both agency and in-house sides of marketing by examining their key differences. He explores how to think through the process of choosing which marketing support will be beneficial to your organization's goals and teams long-term. Explore the top questions and qualities Mike Zimm recommends you ask your team internally before you partner with a marketing agency.

Marketing is critical for your customers to understand the value of choosing your product. In this week’s episode, Syndi Sim, VP of Marketing and Business Development at Diamon-Fusion International, Inc., discusses how she supports her customers with marketing agency services and end-user support to help their customers thrive. Learn the importance of customer marketing, product education, and customer monitoring and engagement to help transform your customer relationships.

As online education becomes the norm and companies like Google no longer require a degree as a job prerequisite, what will educating the manufacturing workforce look like beyond 2020? In this episode of The Kula Ring, Mike Nager, Business Development Manager for the Festo Didactic Solution Center, talks about the role of niche technical education in providing hands-on training for manufacturing technologies and how Festo Didactic is adapting its strategy into the digital space after the pandemic.

How can manufacturers with various product portfolios gained from mergers and acquisitions ensure their products are discoverable both on their website and third party domains? In this episode of The Kula Ring, Cynthia Kellam, Global Head of Digital & Enterprise Customer Experience at TE Connectivity, shares how customer experience research led her team to standardize product data in order to improve organic searchability.

How can manufacturers better serve customers of various sizes? In this episode of The Kula Ring, Melanie Virreira, Director of Global Commercial Enablement at Ball Corporation, talks about how her team created a digital self-service portal for multiple customer segments. She shares lessons learned from mapping customer journeys on the self-service portal, and how her team integrated the portal with sales.

Before diving headfirst into a website redesign project, what are the moving parts a B2B marketer or other internal stakeholders should consider? Christina Wegner, Vice President of Marketing for The Vollrath Company, joins Jeff and Carman on The Kula Ring to talk about building the right foundation for your manufacturing company’s website redesign. She talks about developing a “listen-first” approach by assembling a stakeholder team early on in order to identify redesign objectives from feedback across departments.

In this episode of The Kula Ring, Jeff and Carman talk with Tina Hart, Vice President of Marketing, Labels and Packaging Materials North America at Avery Dennison Corporation about finding value for marketing initiatives in a conservative, sales-driven manufacturing company.

John Eklund, Vice President of Marketing at ProMach, joins Jeff and Carman on The Kula Ring to discuss his playbook for integrating multiple companies into their house of brands after they are acquired. From collateral updates and cross-selling to websites and a centralized tech stack, learn how ProMach brings their acquired companies into the fold.

Creating a brand made for loyal customers requires passion and high standards to drive continued success. Klein Tools has been manufacturing tools made for trades people for over 165 years. In today’s episode, we sat down with Greg Palese, Vice President of Marketing at Klein Tools, to discuss how they continue to grow engaged customer relationships. By speaking directly with end users, Klein Tools is able to deepen relationships and increase sales. Even more, Greg discusses how they focus on solving end user problems by visiting job sites to see first-hand how Klein Tools can help their customers.