THE BRAND SCAN PROCESS FOR

As is our standard practice, the Brand Scan Team conducted the initial phase of due diligence with minimal burden on the client, Humtown Products. 

We did online research to familiarize our team with the foundry industry and the core OEM categories the industry serves.

 Over the course of two remotely conducted 30-minute Leadership Interviews with Humtown’s CEO and Humtown’s Director of Sales we explored: 

-Humtown’s past sales and marketing efforts and levels of success

-Key competitors in both the traditional and 3D printing core and mold production spaces

-Key customer acquisition targets and segments 

-Trade industry organization relationships and opportunities

A key insight gained during this time was that foundries and the OEMs they serve often still consider 3D printing – also known as Additive Manufacturing- to only be applicable for prototyping rather than volume commercial production.  However, Humtown ‘s advanced capabilities in additive manufacturing can deliver – in many though not yet all instances – high quality, cost-efficient and rapid commercial production.  

Moreover, Humtown’s unique hybrid manufacturing capabilities – the ability to produce cores and molds conventionally and/or through 3D printing – is unique in the marketplace. 

Driven by the disciplines of Behavioral Economics and Brand Positioning, the Brand Scan’s innovative focus group is different from anything in the market. 

The focus group meeting was conducted via zoom with some team members participating together at Humtown’s HQ Conference Room while others joined remotely from other locations.

The Focus Group represents the greatest investment of client time in the process.   But in 2 hours and 45 minutes, the Brand Scan Process Facilitators helped Humtown’s leadership and customer-facing team members  discover and align around the competitive advantages–expressed as brand attributes and customer benefits–that would ultimately drive Humtown’s sales, protect their value-add profit margins and increase market share.

The focus group session began where Humtown’s prospects begin their buying journey — by considering all the valued company attributes available from a core and mold manufacturer in the foundry industry. 

Aided by our proprietary attribute database, our Lead Facilitator helped Humtown generate approximately 90 attributes that the perfect company in the foundry industry would offer – accomplished in precisely 30 minutes.

Narrowing of choice is the next step in how prospects make their buying decisions.  

Humtown’s team understood that their prospects simply don’t equally value all the attributes they had generated. Many attributes are standard in the industry.  Other attributes may be more unique but are perceived as only adding nominal value and don’t drive buying decisions. 

Aided by our facilitators, the Humtown Team began quickly cutting –  just as their prospects do – the list they had generated by at least half.

In each industry, certain attributes and certain categories of attributes tend to be more valued than others.  Using our proprietary Table of Branding Attributes we aided Humtown’s team by sorting the attributes they had chosen into Master Attribute Categories.  

By showing Humtown’s team their narrowed attributes grouped into their Master Categories, they were able to assess, clarify and further narrow the attributes most valuable to prospects in their industry. This step also aided Humtown by assuring they were not missing or overvaluing a particular category of attributes.

This step of the Humtown focus group mimicked how their prospects quickly narrow and prioritize what they value in a company.  According to Behavioral Economics, prospects use “fast thinking” – rules of thumb, gut instincts and other short-cuts – to simplify complex buying decisions.  In order to narrow the list of attributes, we utilize a group process that engages “fast thinking” to mimic the way people quickly narrow and prioritize what they value when making a purchase.

Just like prospects, Humtown team participants advocated for attributes based on the perceived strength of the customer benefits they offered. Healthy debate, followed by alignment around the attributes ultimately selected, paved the way for moving to the next step of ranking in precise order what matters most to Humtown’s prospects.

 Our innovative voting process helped Humtown rank – in order – the Top 10 Industry Drivers of customer choice.  These were the industry attributes prospects most highly valued. 

As the team listened to feedback from other departments, a holistic understanding of their customer’s product journey emerged. This top 10 list of industry attributes is the playing field on which Humtown competes for customers, and where competitive advantages are ultimately defined.

The Humtown Team next moved from analyzing their industry to assessing their own brand in the context of their competitive landscape.  They did this just like their prospects – through comparison.  Humtown’s team compared their performance in each of the Top 10 attributes to five of their key competitors.  We steered their team through a candid assessment of how they stacked up. 

One might incorrectly assume that organizational or individual bias results in our clients artificially overestimating themselves versus their competitors.  In practice this is not the case, and our facilitators at times have to guard against overly negative self-assessment.  The analytical precision and discipline of the Brand Scan Process – aided by the collective wisdom of your team and their desire to obtain an accurate branding benchmark – results in an objective analysis of the marketplace.

You will note that the names of Humtown’s competitors have been removed as well as specific rankings. Nonetheless, you can see how this aspect of the process aligns with the Brand Positioning maxim that “It doesn’t matter what anyone thinks of your brand. It only matters what they think of your brand relative to your competitors.” 

While the Humtown team was ranking their Top 10 Drivers, the Brand Scan team’s Brand Strategist was simultaneously entering their rankings into our proprietary Brand Leadership Algorithm.  

The results of the algorithm accomplished three  objectives in real time during the focus group:  

1.) Eliminated industry attributes where Humtown does not have sufficient competitive strength with which to develop marketing messaging or build their brand upon.  

2.) Identified the attributes in which Humtown strengths were sufficient for inclusion in their marketing messaging but were not strongly related to supporting their optimal brand positioning.  

3.) Identified Humtown’s 3 Power Drivers, the three attributes that together represent Humtown’s greatest competitive advantage and define Humtown’s ultimate brand leadership position.  Research and experience show that customers typically value the 3 Power Drivers more than the remaining 7 attributes combined.

This step prepared the way for the last step of Humtown’s focus group activity, in which the team identified the core customer benefits associated with each of the Top 3 Power Drivers.

In this last focus group activity, the Humtown team worked to translate their 3 Power Driver attributes into customer facing benefits.  

Over the past decade BrandScan has developed a proprietary database of benefit prototypes aligned to both attributes and industries.   Throughout the focus group, our Brand Strategist has been referencing this database–along with insights from your team’s discussions throughout the focus group–to generate 4 customer benefits for each of your 3 Power Drivers.  Each set of 4 benefits includes two rational benefits (in the categories of Time and Money) and 2 emotional benefits (in the categories of Gratification and Safety/Security).  The Humtown Team then ranked the benefits within each set from most to least important, then voted for one benefit overall that best communicated Humtown’s brand leadership position to customers and prospects.

It is difficult to overstate the importance of this step during the focus group. In the sales and marketing content we would later develop for Humtown, we would need to express the company’s brand in terms of the concrete and most important benefits Humtown offers customers through its products and services.

Humtown Market Leadership Position

The global leader in conventional and additive manufacturing of complex sand cores and molds

The Market Leadership Position is a concise statement that serves as the North Star by which all marketing and sales content and tactics needs to be developed and evaluated.  If the content or tactic does not reinforce this position, it is not contributing toward building the strength of Humtown’s brand and its market leadership.  

The Brand Scan’s brand strategy team conducted its review of the ranking of the attributes and customer benefits that comprised Humtown’s specific competitive advantages relative to five  of its competitors.   We also used our proprietary methodology of assigning values to various combinations of those leading attributes and benefits to identify the combination that would best work synergistically to establish a credible market leadership position for Humtown. 

To finalize our brand leadership strategy we also took into account three key factors.  

The first two factors were related to their manufacturing methodologies. Humtown is the foundry industry pioneer in proving that 3D printing is valid for commercial production of many types of sand cores and molds.  However, there remain volume production and pricing challenges for the 3D printing of some types of cores and molds.  

Thus, Humtown’s leadership positioning could not be built on 3D alone, but upon their unique hybrid manufacturing capabilities. Humtown can produce cores and models via both 3D and conventional means, sometimes simultaneously using both methods to provide optimal solutions for their clients. 

The third factor taken into consideration was that many foundries are capable of adequately producing their own cores and molds if they are not complex. 

Thus, we recognized  that Humtown’s competitive advantage is in the design and manufacture of complex cores and molds. 

All of these factors had to be taken into consideration and yet expressed through a clear and concise Market Leadership Position.  

The Market Leadership Position is an easily understood and memorable phrase that all team members at Humtown can align themselves around to better understand Humtown’s role and purpose in the marketplace. 

Brand Scan Thought Leadership: Prospects have too many choices and not enough time.  When in doubt – and they often are – prospects choose the leader or leading contender.  But, you don’t have to be the overall industry leader or contender.  Legitimate claims of brand leadership can be made for valued market segments.  Owning competitive advantages in specific attributes, geographies, market shares, product categories and innovation means leadership to prospects.

Humtown’s culture of relentless innovation is leading foundries into the Industry 4.0 era – advancing sand core and mold production through a unique hybrid model of conventional and toolingless additive manufacturing. Humtown’s dedication to providing precision engineered solutions is supported by a seamless concept-to-delivery business model and responsive customer care, leading to an unmatched reduction in scrap rate, a bottom-line measure of process and product quality in the foundry industry.

This Brand Value Proposition expresses the ingredients that comprise Humtown’s specific competitive strengths and how they combine to give Humtown the authority to own a market leadership position within the foundry industry. 

The Brand Value Proposition provides detail, but in a format that is concise enough to serve as an elevator pitch for Humtown’s sales team. 

For the sales team, this proposition communicates the concrete value-adds that Humtown offers to customers.  This is vital, because while Humtown offers competitive pricing  it is not and does not want to be the low cost leader.( Low cost leaders have slim profit margins. And low cost leaders are rarely if ever leaders in innovation.) 

For Humtown’s marketing team, the communication of the key attributes and benefits that matters to prospects in a coherent, declarative statement that can be memorized helps keep front and center the essence of what should be communicated in the company’s marketing and advertising content. 

Too often, creative staff – whether in-house or agency – spend too much time trying to understand what to communicate to prospective customers.  The results of the Brand Scan allow for the creative staff to instead focus their energies on how to creatively communicate the company’s competitive advantages.

(The reason why Humtown has a leadership position in the marketplace, in a narrative form.)

Shortly after the financial markets crash of 2008, Mark Lamoncha, the second-generation president of Humtown Products, was desperate to find a way to prevent the sand core and mold manufacturing business his father founded in 1959 from going into bankruptcy.  He did something he rarely if ever did: He pulled up to a convenience store and bought two lottery tickets.

Mark didn’t really believe in gambling or, for that matter, luck.  A diligent and rational business leader, as well as the owner of several industry patents, Mark had grown his father’s original small pattern shop into a 250-plus employee leader in the foundry industry. 

But, as the normal flow of business from foundries across the country slowed to a bare trickle and with staff layoffs leading to a team now of only fifty employees – for whom he doubted he could meet payroll – he thought maybe this was how God would answer his desperate prayers.

He scratched off the tickets. Both were losers. Mark went back in the store and bought a third ticket. Another loser. 

On the drive from the store to the small rural Ohio town in which he lived and worked, Mark prayed. Not for a temporary reprieve from his problems, but for a solution to his and his employees’ looming financial downfall at Humtown.

A mere nine hours later, Mark had written out the essential specifics of the Visual Earnings System, a now patented method of dramatically improving productivity by enhancing the human skills and potential of Humtown’s workforce through technological innovations. In fairly short order, this real-time process of measuring and showing team member’s their rate of productivity – doing so by a compelling gamification methodology that would send payrate’s soaring – would result in sustained increases in productivity of 250 percent. 

The VisualEarnings System significantly lowered production costs, sped up delivery of product to foundries and has led to six-hour work days for all production team members befitting the pace of their more intensive efforts.

Ultimately, Humtown pulled out of the recession. And in 2020, the sustained success of the Visual Earnings System earned Humtown the 2020 National Association of Manufacturer’s Leadership Award for Unleashing Human Potential.

But, the Visual Earnings System would not be the last groundbreaking advancement in the industry spawned by Humtown’s culture of relentless innovation. 

Foundries represent the oldest manufacturing industry on earth, dating back at least 5,000 years, with sand cores and molds dating back at least 3,000 years.

While there have of course been technical advances in process and materials, for centuries there has been no disruption or major evolution in the foundry industry. Until the recent advent of the commercialization of 3D printing of sand cores and molds, spearheaded by Humtown. For its leadership in bringing profitable production methodology via additive manufacturing to the foundry industry, Humtown won a second 2020 National Association of Manufacturing Leadership Award.

In recognition of winning both awards, Humtown was also named the National Association of Manufacturer’s 2020 Small to Medium Sized Manufacturer of the Year (inclusive of all industry categories).

A true believer in the power of relationships and organizational collaboration, Humtown cites early relationships with America Makes (the National Additive Manufacturing Innovation Institute), the University of Northern Iowa and Youngstown State University as helping to gain its foothold as an industry innovator.  

Today, that spirit of collaboration continues under the leadership of Brandon Lamoncha, the Director of Additive Manufacturing at Humtown. Under Brandon, the company is leading the industry toward a toolingless future, a revolutionary change for both foundries and the OEMs it serves.  Brandon has become noted not only for his expertise, but for his openness in collaborating with other individuals and organizations across the world to spur innovation in additive manufacturing. 

While lottery tickets and luck failed Mark Lamoncha in 2008, a lightning strike of insight followed by years of innovation, diligence and collaboration have succeeded in positioning Humtown as a global leader in the conventional and additive manufacturing of cores and molds for the ancient but evolving foundry industry.

Humtown 

Always Innovating

Problem Solver  •  Team Player  •  Trustworthy

Our brand strategy process is logical and data-driven. But, written and visual creativity are indispensable ingredients in developing marketing tactics that will drive sales and advance your brand toward market leadership. Our Brand Scan Process Creative Team develops traditional or digital media tactics of your choice, infused with the brand DNA of your revealed competitive advantages and strategic positioning. Use these tactics in the marketplace, and as examples of how your in-house team or ad agency can continue to build out creative work aligned with your brand.

Your final report is provided to you in both digital and print formats.  This is your blueprint for the path forward to establishing and growing market leadership.