The Kula Ring

With data consumption rates doubling every year, and regulations becoming an industry trend, the data center industry needs to increase its reporting of power consumption. How can companies square their offerings with the global reality, and evolve their positioning and their messaging? Sam Prudhomme is Vice President of Sales and Marketing, Mission Critical Environments for Senneca Holdings, a company with a sub-division called Subzero Engineering that creates products that reduce the carbon footprint of data centers. Sam talks to Carman and Jeff about harmonizing campaign messaging around corporate responsibility and sustainability in order to help customers see the financial benefit of offsetting carbon emissions.

Building trust on an e-commerce platform is about more than just posting pictures and prices. How can manufacturers digitize the $4-billion per year used aerospace parts industry while ensuring transparency? In this episode of The Kula Ring, Lisa Butters, General Manager for GoDirect Trade at Honeywell, talks to Jeff and Carman about how blockchain technology is key to winning over sellers to use the GoDirect Trade marketplace, how they’re drawing on the intuitive design of B2C platforms, and why a legacy manufacturer like Honeywell is driving this innovation.

Any time a manufacturer acquires new assets, the brand evolves along with their customer base. How do you manage your communications strategy to keep pace with mergers and acquisitions? Cathy Dodd, Vice President of Marketing for PolyOne, talks to Jeff and Carman on The Kula Ring about how PolyOne created a campaign called “Challenge Accepted” to bring clarity to their brand messaging across a broad range of industries using customer feedback, buyer persona work, and through consolidating their website to better serve as a solutions-driver for their customers.

Emotional marketing campaigns are compelling, but where do they fit into a B2B manufacturer’s content strategy? Luke Schoenbeck, Marketing Director at Mark VII Equipment, created a year-long campaign showcasing car wash equipment factory workers and the team atmosphere at the company. He talks to Jeff and Carman on The Kula Ring podcast about how a focus on people (versus products or services) dramatically impacted engagement rates and conversions, and how Mark VII Equipment will approach its “people” campaign next year.

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.

With a small centralized marketing team tasked with digital transformation, step one for Jon Sujecki, Director of eCommerce and Digital Marketing at Enerpac, was to evaluate the company’s websites. On The Kula Ring, Jon discusses with Jeff and Carman the challenges and benefits of consolidating their tech stack, including sacrificing flexibility to be able to do more for less.

In this episode of The Kula Ring, Ellsworth Adhesives Marketing & Digital Experience Manager Jas Kaur talks about how her background in design thinking has helped her lead her organization toward a more human-centric approach to B2B. Her “business to everything” philosophy is guiding a tightly integrated marketing and digital team’s efforts in making their customers’ buying process fast, efficient, and intuitive.

In this episode of The Kula Ring, manufacturing content veteran David Holliday, Director of Product Marketing at ProMach and founder at LabelingNews.com, shares his experience creating successful, problem-solving B2B content. Among his top tips: own your platform, build your personal brand, think long-term, and don’t try too hard to rank—be a problem-solver instead.

In this episode of The Kula Ring, Courtney Sperlich—Marketing Director at The Duha Group, an international manufacturer of colour marketing tools—discusses her organization’s challenges in scaling and interpreting marketing content for global and local customers. Colour has universal impact, but its appeal can vary dramatically between geographical regions. Courtney talks with Jeff and Carman about her 16-year career at The Duha Group and how they approach digital transformation, content distribution, and marketing their expertise to a diverse range of buyers.

In this episode of The Kula Ring, Market Intelligence Analyst Jason Cappiello describes how Kanthal (and its parent company, Sandvik) approaches hiring and developing skilled talent—including marketers with technical backgrounds—for a complex B2B business. He discusses his own journey, which took him from an engineering degree to a sales role to his current manufacturing marketing position.