A new perspective on industrial leadership…

We meet often with industrial leadership teams to help them with their brand identity development as a first step toward more effective marketing. These are engineering, manufacturing and sales professionals who are inclined to modernize their branding and marketing, just as they have modernized their manufacturing operations. They want to identify and remove the “constraints” within these activities, so that they can become true centers of competence in the organization.

Now we’re talking. Bring it on.

However, when it comes to branding and marketing, the constraint for any industrial leadership team is one of perspective. All around the table, each leader will tell you that their products and services are the best. The CEO is also at the table and, suspecting otherwise, suggests the group should take an honest look at how well the organization is communicating, both internally and to customers.

All will nod at the wisdom of this.

And then someone will ask, but how much does a new website cost? And someone else will ask, how much time will brand identity development take away from our work? And sales may suggest, can’t we just quickly retool our old site and use the money for bonus incentives? 

And then in the worst of scenarios, a process quality control manager will assume the task of vendor managing the branding process so as to minimize its intrusion on the leadership team. And now we’re NOT talking.

Therein lies the overwhelming constraint to industrial branding and marketing – an internally focused perspective that impedes an open, honest, collective endeavor to bring forward the company’s more profitable brand identity. Until this constraint is alleviated, a company simply cannot achieve its greater potential in the marketplace.

The constraint of an internal perspective is pervasive among manufacturing companies that have done well enough by staying internally focused on production and selling what is on their product line cards. The internally focused viewpoint that “our people are the best and our products are the best” has worked well enough to get the company this far, so why change?

Why change? CEOs who expect more from their organizations know the answer to this question. An internally focused perspective keeps a good company from contemplating true innovation and genuine customer relationship development. And during leadership discussions around such change, an internally focused perspective does not find urgency in managing down the cost of a new website. Rather, the team joins in the effort to identify and communicate ways the company can solve customer problems and costs.

CEOs know they need this change. It starts from a different perspective.

jb

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