Robin: Hello and welcome to this edition of Brandonomics, an inside look at top brands and their marketing strategies. I’m Robin Tooms, VP of Strategy at Savage Brands and my guest again is Joel Tarver, Senior Manager of Digital Marketing at Baker Hughes. So Joel, welcome back to Brandonomics.

Joel: I’m like a bad penny, I keep turning up, you can’t get rid of me.

Robin: Well I’m glad you’re here.

Joel: Thank you.

Robin: Let’s share a little bit. So I see you kind of being a compatriot here, you’re helping us change the way the oil and gas industry is really approaching the visual strategies as well as was the branding strategy and it’s time for a change. And maybe it’s a little slow coming and maybe it’s not, but I want to hear from you of why do you think that that change is important and what are you seeing as your role as a digital marketer kind of affecting that change?

Joel: Well I think at our core it’s about storytelling and it’s about passion and then coming from a background of, for lack of a better word creativity, I manage developers at the same time so I don’t like to say that there’s traditional creatives and that they’re not because they’re actually very creative, just one’s more with math. And what I’ve been trying to look at is to lead through design and to show that you can differentiate from design; that you can look at things that have been traditionally engineering driven. A good example is Microsoft, okay. Microsoft was classically an engineering company but you know what, they started leading with design. And you can say that Windows 8 was a flop or not but if you go back historically and look at that is where flat design was brought to the mainstream. That was one where actually Apple followed Microsoft in that case. So I think that engineering companies can see that they can differentiate with design and that it is important that it matters and that tied in with a strong message you’ve got some pretty powerful magic there.

Robin: And I appreciate that because really it is so important to push that creative, no matter what industry that you’re in.

Joel: Absolutely.

Robin: Obviously I can be real for a second, especially as we think about challenging budget years; how do you help make that happen? How do you be creative even when you don’t have a super big budget?

Joel: Well that’s the whole impetus of what you have in that what’s so important that I think companies forget sometimes is that you’re not paying for this, you’re paying for this. And that’s what you’re getting through the creative, so how can I find the best solution given within these constraints. And in some cases what we had to do is that if we weren’t going to buy stock imagery – because one, we’re just trying to look at different ways to reinterpret things, tell the story a little differently and put our spin on it to bring in this tech organic look – is that I don’t just want an image of a rig at sunset, okay. That might be appropriate in some cases, but if I can do something that makes that rig dynamic; if I can do something that makes it like wow and I do a double take then that’s what we’re looking for. And if I can have my team create those images then we own these. We own the rights to it all so it’s not something that we licensed and then we can repurpose it. We can repurpose it for art work in a training facility, we can repurpose it for a magazine cover, we can use it in a calendar, we can use it in a brochure, we can use it on a website and we can even take it from animation. So what we find is to kind of build once and deploy the middle.

Robin: Well I appreciate you being a champion for that thinking and you’re right, it is more about the thinking, not just all the different materials where it’s being used; appreciate that.

Joel: Yes, exactly.

Robin: Well this has been another edition of Brandonomics, an inside look at top brands and their marketing strategies.