A Conversation with Indium’s Rick Short about Education-Based Marketing

We’re the best, we’re number one, we’re better than them, we’ve won more awards than our competitors, we’ve all seen those ads. While this form of advertising isn’t unique, when’s the last time it caused you to buy a product based on the ad. I think we all know that answer.

There was a time when we relied heavily on print advertising to determine what products were available and from whom. The two primary methods to gain product awareness were print advertising and trade shows. While advertising and trade shows still exist, they are no longer the primary method of product awareness.

31 years ago, beginning on April 30, 1993, all of that began to change. What happened on April 30, 1993? Public access to the Internet was born.

Over the past 31 years, Internet technology propelled us into an age of self discovery. The older generation accuses the younger generation of always having their face in a screen. While that may be true, it’s not always TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, or Snapchat. People today, particularly younger people, research products, technologies, and a host of other things online. Consumers today are far more educated on the products they wish to purchase them at any time in history.

In what I find to be an exceptional irony, much of the industry responsible for building the technology behind Internet connectivity continues to advertise their products in a pre-Internet style.

You may ask, what does this have to do with reliability? Building reliable products requires a net sum of a vast amount of best practices. One of those practices is insuring the right products, procedures, specifications, designs, and so many other factors are implemented.

This goal cannot be accomplished by just reading advertisements from sellers. Frequently, engineers struggle to solve problems without a complete knowledge of the root cause of the problem. Particularly today, with so many in-house subject matter experts retiring, advertisements boasting the number of customers, time and business, and where they place in the hierarchy of competitive products do not assist the engineer and understanding the root cause of a potential problem, and certainly not the solution.

Over the past several years, several companies in our industry have begun to change their advertising strategies from transactional, to transformational. That is to say they help to connect problems to solutions, more than merely hyping products.

My guest today fully understands the value and effectiveness of what I like to call “Conscious Marketing “.

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A Candid Conversation with Industry Icon Doug Pauls

We’ve discussed the silver tsunami on the show numerous times, the unprecedented rate of which employees are retiring. When engineers and other employees retire from companies, they take with them more than a set of gold cufflinks or an engraved plaque. In many cases, they also take with them wisdom and knowledge.

Perhaps this is never more true than in the case of my guest today. And who is that? My friend and colleague Doug Pauls.

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