Benefits please

So I'm trying to sell a machine without just presenting a dry set of specifications that are superficially indistinguishable from everyone else's. I want to stand out in the market. I want people to have a clear idea about my product that makes it different.

You can get there with features: "We have the most RPM." The problem, of course, is that this territory is too easy for others to move into. Every machine builder is getting its core components from the same few global suppliers, which means you almost never have an actual technological advantage. You might make design tweaks that allow you to make a claim of technological superiority, but, if you are successful, it is easy for others to make the same tweaks and quickly say "Me, too."

The machine builder's real strength is in his design creativity and his ability to understand manufacturing problems and make equipment that pulls together a million variables to present the best solution to those problems. It is almost impossible to quantify those elements by simply naming the features. You can say you are all about providing solutions, but what does that mean, exactly? That your machine is infinitely customizable? Now you are a special machine builder and not a brand name machine tool manufacturer. Different businesses, very different price points, and your customer knows it. What you want to say is that you have come up with a superior solution to a general category of manufacturing challenges. That solution is contained in the features of the machine, but is greater than the sum of its parts. If an engineer reads all your specs, goes into a sensory deprivation tank and meditates on the interplay of your design elements, he may arrive at a place where he can agree that your design is the most elegant and functional. But what are the chances he's going to do that?

The solution is to talk about the benefits of your design directly. Machinery manufacturers try to do this, of course, but here is where their courage fails them. Because they are engineers themselves, they hate vagueness. They fear that unless they back up their benefit claims with a raft of technical data, no one will believe them. This is true, to a point. The technical data has to be there, somewhere. Preferably in a box on the back page of the brochure. What you need to understand is, the brochure (or ad, or trade show sign) is never going to accomplish the whole selling process itself. It is there to create demand. It is there to build your brand. These are capital equipment purchases. At some point, the engineers are going to get a complete specification for your machine and spend hours poring over every detail. The marketing communication is there to get you to that point, not to take them past it. You have to have the courage to say "My product is the best," without going into an immediate song and dance about why.

The next area of great fear for machinery builders is making specific claims about the actual production capabilities of their equipment. There are good reasons for this. Just because you build a great machine does not mean the customer will use it properly, and just because he doesn't use it properly doesn't mean he won't sue you if it doesn't do what you said it would. U.S. machinery marketers have to be exceedingly careful in this area because everything is so litigious there. And Canadian distributors tend to rely on marketing communications material prepared for the U.S. market. But here in Canada, lawsuits are almost never worth the time and expense. Going to court over over competing, subjective interpretations of productivity claims in a machinery ad is just about always going to cost the end user more than he gets awarded, and he stands a good chance of losing outright. Of course, he can tell his friends you suck, and you will probably have to try to make him happy somehow, but if your message is getting your machinery out there and most people are using it properly and obtaining the benefits you claim, he will quickly become a voice in the wilderness. Canadian machinery distributors often miss this opportunity to be more aggressive in their claims than their U.S. counterparts. What if the ad headline said, "The SUX 2000 will make 45,000 widgits per shift." (Where 45,000 is, obviously, a high number the competition can't beat.) How could any engineer making widgits deny this message? What vector does he have for ignoring or discounting it outright? If he has any budget for equipment, doesn't he have to at least engage you in conversation?

Another overlooked way to talk about benefits is to go to secondary or tertiary benefits. Why does the company want faster equipment? To save time and make more money, of course. How about, "This machine will save you time no matter what production method you are using now"? Time saving messages are not uncommon, but they are often buried under a pile of blather about the marvelous technological features. But why not go even farther? What could your company do with more time and money? What could you do? How about a guy on a boat with beautiful women on it sailing past his competitor who is sweating over a broken machine? Cheesy, I know, but you get my point. You want your customer to have a specific feeling about your product. If you can become the product that might give him the life he wants, you are in the driver's seat.

Internet marketing

When I was at the magazines, I'd often accompany our sales guys as they worked the floor at trade shows. We'd meet up with marketing directors from the various suppliers exhibiting and go into our song and dance about the magazine and its audience and its circulation. Eventually the discussion would wind around to our sales guy asking about the customer's plan for marketing in the upcoming period. Answers varied, but one thing I heard all the time was, "We are really only interested in online right now." I used to shove my hand in my pocket to prevent it from spontaneously darting out and smacking the supposed marketing expert in the forehead.

Marketing is the process of creating demand for your product. It means reaching out to people who haven't heard about it, or don't have all the information about it, or have the wrong impression about it, and giving them messages that will cause them to want it. It is different from sales, in that sales is about fulfilling demand. In its pure form, sales is only concerned with negotiating the transaction. Sales only happens once the customer has contacted you and expressed an interest in your product. Marketing is concerned with finding the customers and getting them to that point.

When it comes to sales, the internet is a fantastic tool. Once a customer knows he wants your product, there is no easier or cheaper way to meet his demand than to have him browse your website, get your pricing (without any ability to haggle), place his order and pay to have you ship it to him. From a sales perspective, a good website beats everything about a physical store except for the instant gratification element, which is actually pretty important. In my opinion, the only reason there are still physical stores selling things that could be shipped is because people do not want to wait to receive something they have paid for. I guess some people enjoy the activity of browsing in a store, so there is that element as well.

As a marketing tool, the internet is far less effective. The central problem is the self-directed nature of the user's experience. In old media, the user tuned into a channel and received whatever was being broadcast. He got the commercial you bought whether he wanted it or not and you automatically had at least some part of his attention. In terms of creating demand, this was genius. You could count on thousands of viewers seeing your message every time you ran it, whether they had ever heard of your company or not. All you had to do was attach your message to a source of content that had your desired audience's attention. Some of these same principles are at work on the internet; there are sites with content that attract users who could serve as a potential audience for your message. But internet users are much more focused on consuming only the content they want. There are sharp limitations on how much of a web page can be used for advertising without alienating users, and I think even that advertising is usually ignored as users focus in on finding just the content they want. TV viewers, radio listeners and print readers accept that their content consumption will be completely interrupted for short periods by an advertising message, and most of them don't mind. But interruptions to the flow of content on the internet are viewed as a highly irritating barriers to the use of the medium itself. As a wise man once said, "People often pick up a magazine to look at the ads. No one ever went to a website for the same reason."

So there's the issue. The internet is narrowcasting instead of broadcasting. Even within your target market group, many of the people you need to reach are not where your message is. You can't create demand unless you have eyes looking at your message, and the eyes on the internet are spread out over too many places. On a TV or radio channel, or in a magazine, the content is spread out over a period of time or a number of pages for people to take in sequentially. Audience participation can be measured in terms of time spent, during which time it receives whatever messages the broadcaster wants to give it. Internet participation is measured in terms of hits; people go straight to the content they want, then go somewhere else. A person consuming media the old way will see your message whether they are aware of you or not, which gives you a chance to create demand where there was none, or very little. A person consuming content on the internet will only see your message if he is purposefully looking for it, which means he already has demand for your product. In order for the internet to work for you, the demand has to be created somewhere else, leaving the internet to play its strongest role as a fulfiller of demand.

Beat 'em with marketing

One of the biggest threats industrial suppliers perceive is the flood of products arriving on our shores from China, Taiwan, India, Brazil and various other places with low labour rates and enough technological know-how to make a product North American manufacturers will accept. These imports have been arriving here for a long time now, since the early '90s at least, but many suppliers still seem to be at a loss as to how to compete against them. Quite often, they have simply ceded the low end of the market to the cheap imports and shifted to selling more expensive, higher quality lines.

Analogy time. Just about anyone would agree that McDonald's makes a crappy food product. And it is not really that cheap; you can get a better meal in a Mom-and-Pop diner for less. But McDonald's is everywhere and it's easy. You can do drive-through and you always know exactly what you are going to get. The company keeps itself in front of you all the time with a constant drone of brand messaging. To put it quite simply, McDonald's has demonstrated that you can acheive margins at the lower end of the market with a strong, long-term advertising and promotions strategy.

Industrial suppliers, on the other hand, panic the minute someone beats their price. And well they should, because they have not laid the groundwork to claim there is anything better about them or their products that would justify a higher price. Chinese imports often have a lot of weaknesses. Even if the product is OK, there is often little or no local support if it breaks or you need help using it. I don't want to say the documentation is weak, but you would probably learn more about how to maintain your Chinese product from reading a bubblegum wrapper. China has come along way on the quality and support it offers with its industrial equipment and supplies, but at the same the prices are — you guessed it — rising. Many Chinese manufacturers are outsourcing work these days to even lower-cost countries such as Viet Nam. There is ample fodder here for a marketing campaign aimed at neutralizing the effect of the Chinese price advantage. Manufacturers are willing to spend more on products, but they have to know why they are doing so. They must be shown, convincingly, that the Canadian distributor has a product that is better and better in ways they need it to be better. If that case is not there to be made, time to start looking for another product to sell.

If North American suppliers have weak marketing strategies, Chinese marketing in North America is even worse. It is often impossible to get even basic, necessary information about the product from the company, even with direct contact. The language barrier is a problem, as are the low margins themselves which don't allow Chinese suppliers room for a marketing budget. Also, from what I have read and observed, Chinese businessmen tend to place great stock in networking and personal contacts. This makes them less likely to think an impersonal message in a magazine or brochure is going to be effective. This leaves North American suppliers an avenue of attack they can use to protect their margins and prices: superior marketing. Too bad most won't use it.