Some of the bigger challenges that many manufacturers face are commodity selling, employee recruitment and employee retention. Many other industries face these challenges, but seem to not have as much difficulty. It’s worth taking a look at what industries like technology are doing to help stop commodity selling and improve recruitment and employee retention.
Our President, Paul Kiesche was recently a guest on The Industrial Talk Podcast with Scott MacKenzie and they discussed this exact topic.
One major overlooked strategy for these challenges is branding and marketing. Branding is often seen as a nice-to-have, a pretty picture, and some think branding is just for the purpose of sales. That’s far from the truth. Certainly, branding is important for sales, but it can make a big impact on helping perception and it can help move you away from commodity selling and also help make your manufacturing company attractive to new employees.
Branding can help you differentiate you business and help improve the perception of your products or services. This can help separate your manufacturing business from your competitors.
What impression does your current branding convey?
• Small, mid-sized or large?
• Local, regional, national or international?
• Cheap or high-quality?
• Affordable or expensive?
• Professional or amateurish?
• Fun or boring?
• Fresh vs. Outdated
• Trustworthy or risky?
Branding for manufacturing can help position your company and can help focus in on your niche markets. It’s important to understand your buyers and speak directly to their pain points and challenges. Then do it in their language.
If you don’t differentiate your manufacturing business it all starts coming down to price and that’s where the commodity selling occurs.
In regards to employee recruitment and retention for manufacturers, branding and marketing can help make your industrial company a more attractive and exciting place to work. It shows that you are not stuck in the past or failing. You’re staying with the times and they get to be part of that journey. It also helps them see their future and career path instead of a dead end.
As a branding and marketing agency for manufacturing, we gone through this many times and found it to be successful. And as a branding and marketing agency for technology companies as well, we’ve seen and executed so many strategies that work incredible that manufacturing just hasn’t been aware of or adopted yet.
We get into so much more in the podcast. You can listen in here.
