Ideas, insights and inspirations.

In a recent article, the National Association of Manufacturers reported on manufacturing statistics. Emphasized were the merits of pursuing a career in the industry. Some highlights of the post included: There are currently 12.3 million manufacturing workers in the United … Continue reading

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Mark Twain is rumored to have said: “The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.”1 We believe the same holds for the U.S. manufacturing sector. Pundits would have us believe that manufacturing is dead in America, but we beg to … Continue reading

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One of our clients, a small manufacturing company located in southwestern PA came to us with a problem of not getting enough calls for growing their business. Our initial response to their request was to help them with their website … Continue reading

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I bet I can explain all the talk about the Internet of things (IoT) and the phrase “smarter planet” in a few short paragraphs. Thirty years ago, I co-oped at GE. Our goal was to improve the efficiency of a fluorescent … Continue reading

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Holding two opposing ideas in the brain at the same time is hard, but that’s what is required daily from all marketers, specially higher education marketers. Here are the forces that you have to be thinking about in 2014: Do … Continue reading

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No region in the world understands the countervailing forces of hope and despair related to the manufacturing economy more viscerally than Southwestern Pennsylvania. As a young adult, I witnessed first-hand the cataclysmic fall of Big Steel when the region added … Continue reading

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Not long ago, Abu wrote about how social media is being adopted by big name manufacturers. The GE and John Deere examples he shared show that some manufacturers are doing an amazing job with their digital marketing efforts. Data from … Continue reading

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When choices proliferate, branding ascends. The Internet has created a truly global marketplace. More national competitors and more international competition from Europe, India, China and Brazil are acting as a forcing function for the adoption of branding by B2B Manufacturers. … Continue reading

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Scarcity and fear are perhaps the greatest motivators for change. Most manufacturers, like other organizations, change their behaviors drastically only when facing the prospects of recession. Every recession has motivated manufacturers to adopt new marketing tactics. Even though search engines … Continue reading

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Manufacturers are adopting SEO in large numbers. Recall that SEO is the art and science of getting your website ranked on Google, Yahoo and Bing for the keywords that matter to you the most. Since it accounts for almost half … Continue reading

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