Scott Case on Navigating Transportation Marketing & Supply Chain Insights

And today on the show I have Scott Case , who is the founder and chief story officer at Position Global and really excited to have you here today , and we're going to talk about a lot of things that are going on in the world and affecting the market , and so normally I don't do disclaimers when we are on the move , but I feel like , because we're diving into

that , I do want to give a little bit of one today , and the reason why is because to me , it doesn't matter where you fall politically .

It is really important to follow what is going on in the world , and especially at the fast pace it is moving right now , and understand how things can affect our businesses and the supply chain overall , and today we're going to discuss some of those things to be on the lookout for .

I will say this episode will debut on Wednesday , february 12th , but we are recording on Friday February 7th , so you know things might happen in the next four days as well .

But it's important , especially for sales and marketers , to follow these trends , know how to follow them and also be able to relay information to your partners and your customers , to showcase your ability to stay ahead of the trends and be able to actually relay what is going on and how it could affect your teams and your customers .

So , with that , welcome to the show , scott , excited to have you here . How are you today ?

So can you give us some background on yourself ?

They kept trying to get him to relocate to a number of those cities and then it ultimately culminated with them offering him a position in Tokyo . I was young , my sister was just born and they didn't want to make the move . So he actually started a customs brokerage and freight forwarding company here in Chicago .

As a kid I would go with him because he did work for one of the major Japanese auto manufacturers who brought EPA test cars in that would fly into Chicago and then be driven to a lab in Ann Arbor , michigan , for EPA testing .

So I remember being sent to the airport with him to do overtime clearances on Saturday night when Flying Tigers would bring these things in . So I would go with them . I'm eight or nine years old at the time . I would get a cup of hot chocolate in one of those little poker cups that has the whole cup on the bottom .

I'd watch them doing the weights and balances for the aircraft on really big desk tablets of paper . So , in other words , what pallets go where to make sure the aircraft is properly balanced , fuel loads ? And then they'd say hey , kid , do you wanna go out to the flight line ?

So , as a young kid , getting to go out and sniff Jet A and stand inside of a 747 all by yourself was a pretty cool thing actually . Fast forward to college . I nearly went into customs law . That unfortunately didn't materialize , but after graduating , I went into customs law .

That unfortunately didn't materialize , but after graduating I went into the family business . I became a licensed customs broker , served for a number of years on the National Custom Brokers and Forwarders Association's board of directors , was their air freight chair for about seven years and then , in the early 2010s , decided to start Position Global .

And the thing that drove that for me was that , while I had done everything operationally import , export , break , bulk , domestic I looked around at companies the small to medium-sized companies and I said you know what ? They have to be able to compete against larger , either national or multinational companies that have these marketing departments .

I was fortunate to be able to write . I'm fortunate to have a sense of design . Professional social media , as it was , was just very nascent back then . So I started the business actually as a white label content shop with an eye to being able to help these companies not just talk to shippers about the important things that were going on .

But a lot of these companies also relied on an agent partner in another city in the United States or in another country around the world . And if they were in an independent forwarder network , as a lot of probably your audiences , they understand having to compete for the attention of those other global partners .

So how could I help them stand out from other people doing business in their market , and a lot of that's about marketing .

So it really was understanding the differences between marketing wholesale to agent partners and vendors and marketing retail to the shippers and the cargo owners , how the issues were essentially the same , but what you needed to say to those different companies was just slightly varied , and we've been fortunate enough in our 12th , almost 13th year now to be able to

become a full service agency that does everything that you would ask of an agency for forwarders as well as , in some cases , for shippers too .

He missed last year in New Orleans , but he's been to the past couple ones and he just loves all of that , so he would think that was really cool . So I'm going to remember to tell him that later .

But just hearing how you developed and how you came into taking on Position Global and really being there for your clients and helping them develop that content is really awesome here , and part of what you guys do is really follow those trends , making what's going on digestible so that they are able to let their customers know .

So , as a starting point to this , I really was curious if you had some tips for being able to follow the news , especially moments like this where there is a lot of movement and noise happening . Like how do you actually decipher what is going on ?

You have to realize that there's a couple of different facets or a couple of different areas in which this news falls into buckets . You're going to have the regulatory change bucket what are the agencies doing here within the US ? What are other customs agencies doing around the world ?

There's going to be sort of the trade and the economic market condition buckets what's happening , employment , manufacturing , manufacturing and then there's also just going to be the market conditions bucket . What are carriers doing air , ocean , rail , truck , what are they doing ? Are there blank sailings ? Are there a lot of ship orders ?

What's happening with with the trade imbalances , surpluses and and deficits ? And knowing where to go to look for all that and to just be able to do a signal to noise , to figure out what it is , starts with really understanding what your audience needs to know . You have to realize that your customers , their job , is to do everything that they have to do .

So if you're a logistics manager , you're buying , you're planning , you're inventory managing . You're not necessarily going to get to the nitty gritty of the things that are going to matter to us , the things that , for a logistics company , are going to impact how they do their business . What do they need to talk to ?

Do they need to be just advising or making changes to their operations ? So if you can gather a really good list and a really good source , a list of sources to be able to follow that information from , it's going to make a huge difference . What does that source list include For our organization ?

We watch and read everything globally because we have to , but there's a lot . There's a number of key publications . We read the Journal of Commerce , freight Waves , ajot , splash 24-7 , g-captain , and we have subscriptions to these too .

We also subscribe to Reuters , bloomberg , the Wall Street Journal , places that really have reporting and sourcing to be able to go to and look at . For this , the thing that I will say is that , while a lot of this you may be able to use and consume internally , realize that things that you may wanna share with your customer base .

You may have a subscription to something , but they will not . So when you're thinking about what to source from , what to talk about for people or what to talk about with people and what to share .

Think about whether or not that information is paywalled , and also be attuned to the fact that you cannot just regurgitate it without running into a copyright risk those are really really good points .

And yes , you don't want to just regurgitate , you're trying to educate , and I spent the first part of my career as a journalist , so , like I getting information , I always wrote in industry too , and that's kind of where I ended up here and ended up .

It's a very like weedy course getting here to TMSA , but I do think it is important because you want to make sure that you're presenting facts and education and the information at hand and making them be able to then read more or access information that they're looking for too .

So I think those are really really great points and you're never going to be able to then read more or access information that they're looking for too .

But what you do want to do is you want to realize that there's a difference between news and editorial so the news is what that outlet that you're going to be finding that information from is going to provide you . it's going to give you the undergirdings , the underpinnings .

And don't forget as well , I neglected to mention direct sources , including governments themselves . So , whether it be a White House executive order or , in this case , willie , we're recommending people watch for it to be published in the Federal Register , first Foreign governments posting things to their own websites .

You want to make sure that you've got a place to be able to go back to and point to . But , circling back , there's news and then there's editorial . So the news is the actual story .

The editorial is you as a marketer , looking at it for your company's audience and saying how is this relevant to them , what do they need to do , what do we need to do for them and how is this going to impact them directly ? So a simple regurgitation of it is not going to win the day .

Being able to apply analysis to it and make recommendations , that's going to increase that glue that , along with a good operations team , keeps the customer a customer or gives you the opportunity to bring one in from one of your competitors .

And so , because I always wanted to move fast , I was like we got to get the story out and he's like we need to make sure it's correct and that we have all the information .

week alone , as we record two , I mean there's there's the tariff story , which I know we'll talk about a little bit later , which is which has certainly been key , but just really in the span of 12 hours , conditions changed between news breaking that the us postal service was going to stop taking packages through the mail from , from china and hong kong which are

subject to de minimis , and less than 12 hours later the post office is back from that . So marketers as well as just industry people , the consultants and finding themselves in a position that the moment something happens , everyone's running to yell at it out a megaphone and then just a blink of an eye later it could be rescinded .

So we are in sort of a very rapid response type of thing , but it's only because , at least for the moment , things are very quickly changing To your point . You've got to be able to stop , step back and say is this going to stick and why ?

So , I still wanted to make sure that , because part of it is like I wanted . As a journalist , I wanted people to know like this is something that we were following and paying attention to .

But even as a marketer , as a company , you know you want to show that you are paying attention to trends , this is something that you're able to help your customers or your prospects with , and so you also don't have to put all of the information out . If you don't have it , you can put hey , this is what's going on . This is a developing situation .

We don't know for sure how it'll play out , but this is , this is the building blocks that we're building for you and this is what we're paying attention to .

So you may be a freight broker , you may be a freight broker , you may be a freight forwarder and you may not own assets . Well , you know what ? If you need to know what's happening in the trucking space , your trucking partner who's regulated by FMCSA , by DOT , is really living those regulations . It could be a great source for you .

The same way , if something changes overseas , if you hear about oh my gosh , this port is constrained , there is a closure here , there's not cargo moving through , it's monsoon season , containers or airframe aren't getting through . You know what . Reach out to your partner in that country , in that market , and go hey , this is what I'm reading .

Are you seeing and experiencing this ? And now you've actually got sort of your own firsthand network of sources that are reputable , that are firsthand , that you can use in the communication that you're making to your audience .

What are some other kind of best practices companies can have to transparently communicate with customers and prospects about these trends , challenges , opportunities , things that are happening with customers and prospects ?

We've certainly discovered just over the past week and then even precedingly , that there's things that could just sort of like be said and then there's things where there's actually action taken . So you want to wait for things to be published in the Federal Register from from a transparency point of view .

Like you said , with the disclaimer at the top of this , this is not meant to be political . Things are moving very quickly and decisions are being made that will impact people's business . I mean just to . I feel like it's going to be sort of the trigger to call back to you .

But , like this week , we really thought that that 25 percent duty was coming from Canada and Mexico to very close , very reliable allies and trade partners in the United States and have been slightly accelerated with the Monday announcement is the fact that importers who are used to having to have a certain amount of working capital now needed to say , oh my gosh , I

have an extra seven and a half , 12 , and it had it gone through on Monday , an extra 25% in cost . You've built a business model where you assume that you're going to need capital for the cost of the goods , the cost of your transportation and the other things you didn't plan to all of a sudden have to find an additional .

If you ordered $10,000 worth of tomatoes , you didn't ask yourself where am I going to come up with another $2,500 in duty on those tomatoes that are coming in ? And how am I going to go to my customer and say , hey , guess what ? I'm going to have to increase my price to you by X , even though we may have a contract , we may have an agreement .

And then on top of that , from a customs point of view , there's what's called bond sufficiency and your custom broker clients , or your custom broker audience , will know this where they had to go to importers who had to get larger bonds essentially larger insurance policies for their duty exposure with customs , and the higher that those bond amounts got , the surety

companies were requesting collateral or financial instruments . So now you have an additional demand for the goods that you have to bring in .

You have an additional capital that you would have to set aside to be able to make sure that you covered all this , and these are all things that , when you woke up , on whatever day it was , you weren't planning to have to deal with .

The question becomes if it becomes too expensive to come into the US and consumers don't want to buy it , are there opportunities for shippers to say , redirect those goods to a third country ? Hey , maybe you didn't think about selling into Latin America , but now's an opportunity to think about and to avail yourself of that .

You're going to want to watch as well to see whether or not there are any changes to the regulatory regimes in which you operate , either at a state or a federal level . For instance , in California , the California Air Resources Board withdrew the waiver that they had before the EPA that was mandating a certain percentage of cleaner , non-emissions generating trucks .

So is that going to change the calculus for people who want to do that ? There's been talk at the federal level about DEI initiatives , which is certainly something that is very important to the TMSA . What is that going to mean for your company from an employment law ?

Moving outside of that and I'm sure that could be a topic that comes up this summer at the conference as well , but just really sort of being aware of what's going to impact you from customs with regulations . It could be with TSA , it could be FMCSA , hours of service changes .

We could see investments that have been made or promised through the infrastructure act that was passed under the Biden administration .

There's a lot of plans out there at city and state levels to do bridge projects , to do highway projects , things that could really reduce the wear and tear on vehicles that are going through it or open up new lanes of transportation . If those dollars go away , do those projects go away ?

And does now all of a sudden that means sort of changes for fleet refreshes because of , again , wear and tear on vehicles . It's a really sort of multifaceted thing that we're all just really in the early days of trying to ascertain what's going to happen .

There's just a lot going on , and I like that you brought up the local and state level too , because there's a lot going on at the federal level , but there's still trends to be paying attention to .

What happens to dollars that may have been allocated by the FAA or the federal government for that , if there are costs that go up there already were .

I mean the project was already being talked about pre-COVID and now that we're actually getting to the break ground and start to source things , if we're looking at steel and aluminum tariffs going up , if we're looking for additional costs going up now , what kind of cost overruns Do you have to scale the project back ?

I mean there are real world considerations that come around the decisions that are being made to people that will impact them every day .

The joke I use with people is that we're logistics adjacent , all of the necessary awareness and knowledge . None of the exposure to my shipment is late , my shipment is detained , customs impounded my shipment . So we've sort of settled into beats , if you will , internally .

So I have somebody who's got a significant amount of B2B marketing experience , so he'll watch the things that are brand-related , marketing trends-related . I have somebody else who's got a significant amount of B2B marketing experience , so he'll watch the things that are brand related , marketing trends related .

I have somebody else who's an analytics specialist who will watch and see what's happening with Google analytics , seo , how's AI going to impact that ? I watch logistics I have to sort of watch it all as the head of the company but I will trend towards logistics and trying to get more into the marketing stuff .

Having been a logistics operator and a newfound marketer , it's kind of fun to sort of figure all that out , and then my managing editor just watches and keeps an eye on everything . So we're having to be multifaceted , and it's not just by mode , it's by country , it's by topic , it's by regulation .

So , yeah , we sort of have different specialties and beats and , with me still being a licensed customs broker , I'll personally stick my nose into a lot of the important regulatory related things , because I've got a place to speak from about that .

How do you kind of create the content that they're looking for ?

How many times do you see or hear from people I will never forget and I love it as a brand . But God , why am I suddenly World Market ? I don't know why I blanked on that , but it's like for a while it was like I wouldn't just get email correspondence every day from World Market , It'd be like twice a day .

So they tell me about the pfefferness in the morning and all of a sudden there's a flash sale on ornaments and I'm like I don't need to hear from you twice a day . I know what you have , I know Christmas is coming , I know what to get , what I need . Please stop .

This is not inciting me to come in , Because , again , I think that what happens is you sort of become ear blind or audience blind or nose blind to things .

I think that you have to sort of judiciously figure out the best way to do this , and we as marketers , we talk about segmentation . I mean the engagement comes with the things that are most relevant to people .

And if you know who your audience is and either within your customer or within your prospects , and you take a look at the news and you sift it into the appropriate buckets and you're making sure that you're hitting people with the general stuff that they have to know about , sort of where it's at right now , but then also hitting them frequently enough with things

that are relevant and personal and resonates to them in their department and what they're doing that are relevant and personal and resonates to them in their department and what they're doing , then I think it sort of keeps that engagement thing there . I mean , we we always were we all do the same for a living . We've all heard it .

You're on on the other end of the phone or the end of the other end of the email . My other broker said this , my other forwarder said that and it's like you just you just make that sort of exasperated noise so like , could I have said something faster ? It's no-transcript , but I think that some folks are okay if you just cut , copy paste and regurgitate .

But , like I said earlier in our interview , there's the news and there's the editorial . Somebody else may be on that lawyer's list , somebody else may be on that media outlet's list . What does it mean to them ?

Don't just give them the awareness , give them an action item that they need to be aware of it , that they might need to prepare for , and I think that's where the value add comes in in what we're doing .

God , we may need to cut this , but it has become so segmented that you have to really be in a lot of different places .

I mean , if you were to go back and look at somebody's LinkedIn or social media feed and you just looked at that company's and you go back like three , four or five weeks and you see the same story appear like four or five or six times , you may feel like it's overkill doing that , but you have to realize that the audiences come and go so fast .

I mean the the . The line that I like to use is it's not unlike fishing . So you're off in a cab and you say I'm going to go fishing . You grab the beverage of your choice , you wander down to the river or the lake , you throw something in , you fish for 15 or 20 minutes , you look and you go . My drink is empty .

If you're fishing , you brought a cooler . If you're like me , you forget about that and you just go up to get another one . But by the time you come back down to that river , there's been tens or hundreds of thousands of gallons of water that have moved through and you might get a new cluster full of fish . The same thing happens right now .

People are pulled in so many different directions to try and ingest and see and what they're exposed to that you almost you don't almost . You have to be in different places multiple times with the same message . But don't worry about it looking like you're repeating the message .

Just realize that that audience is going to be there when they're there , not always , necessarily when you want them to be there .

I think the longest interview we've ever done is 40 minutes , because I don't think that people are going to sit here , even though they can come back to it .

But , like knowing how to play that game can help too , because you want to reach people where they are and when they're there , but in the best format for that .

We've seen a lot of clients who have had a good evergreen strategy and a good breaking news strategy have to tilt it one way or the other . Really , strategy and a good breaking news strategy have to tilt it one way or the other , really just based on where things are at .

So you may have a content or a drip strategy plan for somebody and the plan it may take you someplace else . So you're going to have to be flexible enough to interrupt that drip plan , to interrupt that campaign plan that you have for somebody , and be able to interject that thing and add that value and then pick it back up again as well .

I , I am actually reaching out and you can build that in , because then in those emails you're reminding yourself okay , have like a real human touch point with this person . And then you can be like what is going on today and how can I address them and talk to them ? Or like making sure that you're connecting in a different space .

Or if you're going like next week , I'm prepping to get to manifest and so are you going to be seeing those people there and how can you engage ?

And so I think it's important to even if you're busy and you rely on your automations and all of that to build in your process you , of course , need to pivot , need to be able to pivot , but you can also build some of that stuff stuff in to nudge you to do it nudge you to do it .

break glass to just stop things . Just cold turkey . Sometimes things happen in the world that you may have that campaign schedule to go and it's just not going to ring right based on what's happened either nearby or in the world , and just be ready to say to yourself you know what , we have to stop this thing . I don't want to have to .

I don't want , I don't want somebody to come to my door and go how come this didn't go out ? You have to be able to and I say this all the time read the room . You have to be able to read the room and know when you should probably just pause it and let the world reset and then pick it back up again .

You're not supposed to be letting them out into the wild . They are interning to learn and to grow . Professional development is important .

Two , they are the social media is part of your voice , like part of your brand , and so if you're just letting somebody who doesn't really know your brand or know that much about what's going on be the voice of that , you're missing a lot , and then you'll run into a lot more of those situations where you're like , oh , I even have that .

So at TMSA we have a lot of volunteers that help with our marketing and I go in and I check and I say , like the big role is somebody else has to look at it .

Everyone's like a professional marketer here , and I still say that there has to be a second pair of eyes in every single thing that we put out , and there's some things that I'm like and they have to .

That has to be my eyes before it goes , and just knowing you know the balance of that is really important and because you have to know what's going on and what's getting sent out .

The trick that I think and circling back to the disclaimer that you gave at the top of this thing is , while you may want to tiptoe and not touch a third rail , politically , you also shouldn't be afraid to call something out when it is patently bad , either for you or for your industry or for your customers .

So I mean , if there's something that's going to adversely impact it I think we see a lot of sort of like the both sides-ism is a good way to phrase it we want to make sure to say you know what ? If this is going to cause somebody a lot of heartburn , be honest with them about it . Don't necessarily sugarcoat it .

Because I think , then , to what you said about being honest or being disingenuous to somebody . If something's going to happen that's going to impact their bottom line , be straightforward about it and also remind people that they're empowered to do this . A lot of times we think about activism at an individual level .

There is an opportunity to be active as a business level . If you do business in a city , in a state , in a country and something's going to impact , you say something about it , weigh in on it . I mean , prior to the changeover administrations , the Biden administration put forth two proposals on de minimis just to close the loophole and do some things .

They publish it for the notice of comment . So the whole idea is that , whether you're a person or you're a business , you can tell the government what you think about what they want to do , and those comments are received and they're adjudicated .

You may get what you want , you may not get what you want , but the point is that you have an opportunity to use your voice to let somebody know I'm an advocate for this , I'm not an advocate for this , and why ? Don't be afraid to do that or take a stand on it .

Yes , and knowing those rules , and I think a lot of times we forget and I've seen a lot of business owners been like , oh , I don't want my team to be on social media at all , but it's like that's their private lives .

You can't always control that , but if you give training and engagement on what's appropriate to say , what's not , and so then they have some training .

Sometimes we just don't train our teams at all and then we're shocked at what can happen , and so I think those things are really important but making sure that , if you are taking a stand as a company or saying one thing or the other , that everyone at the company knows and understands and that we're relaying that , because it's not always about just relaying to

your partners or your customers . Making sure your team is involved in that and knows what's going on as well is incredibly important .

border , if you're a trucker and you don't have those loads to carry , that's , that's a problem for you and your livelihood .

If you're part of an entry department at a customs broker that anticipates tens of thousands of transactions a month and that is cut by a double digit number , that's going to have a real world implication on the people that you're employing , the people that you as a business are trying to support and lift up and train and bring you to sort of your next level

and identify future potential senior leaders , and maybe you lose some of those people if you have to make a tough staffing decision . So these things do have real world implications , not just sort of for the consumer level things that we hear and see on social media or on local news or in other outlets but to people in their businesses as well .

I even one of my questions for you was , like , are there any pitfalls to be aware of as you're building campaigns and initiatives ? Like , I definitely think , checking in , making sure , and even like , what is the company's capacity right now and are we selling the things that we can do and are we marketing to match that ?

I think that's something that we should be checking in all the time , but especially right now . There might be parts of your business that we want to market to more versus other things , and just , is everyone aligned in that and making sure that those teams are coming together to have those conversations too ?

They're both small to medium sized businesses , which is tremendous , and I would say that for people that are doing this , always look for opportunities to learn from other people . I mean there's a weird sort of peer . I think that the term I've used once when I was on the transactional side of things was frenemy .

I mean , just don't be afraid to talk to people and ask and learn , participate I mean that was something that I found very valuable growing up professionally through the National Brokers Association Find industry things to participate in , become part of a project that delivers something larger . So it gives you exposure into doing that .

And be sure , I've been very fortunate to build out my professional network . I am 53 years old and I was having the Journal of Commerce delivered in paper to my college dorm . So I probably need an intervention and if I haven't had one yet , I'm long overdue .

But the thing that I would say is that at some point your network is what you're going to rely on in this . I mean the ability to problem solve , and we see a lot about technology automation . Oh , technology is going to do away with this . Technology is going to do away with that . At some point .

Qualified people are going to need to be able to get in , remediate problem solve and you're going to need to find somebody to help you get to the bottom of something and building out that network .

Attending events like the TMSA things , attending industry events , really helps build that network out to be able to be in that position so that when if this is something that you decided to make a lifelong career and logistics is not going away , it's just evolving at varying speeds having that network of people to rely on is going to be invaluable for you .

I love interviewing people . It's one of my favorite things . So I'm like , yes , please , let's start a podcast where we can shine a light on all of the smart people we have in tmsa , but also then I need to just sit and interview people and talk to people once a week . So big fan of that it .

He would pretend to be a public information officer for the Chicago Fire Department and the class was responsible for asking questions about the fire that had happened and he wouldn't volunteer any more than what the question was that was asked and then we had to go back and write that story .

Aside from that and just sort of the ethical things around journalism and protecting sources and getting things right , I've been very blessed that whenever I have that conversation with somebody who's in the reporting space , I feel like I can have a deeper , more meaningful and more more impactful conversation and learn from them because , while I'm not in and of their

craft , they know that , that I respect it and I and I honor it and it gives us the ability to to really to , I think , make inroads in places where other people may not .

And if you are watching today and you want to catch us next week , we will be talking to chris zapowski , and I hope I pronounce his name right , because I pronounced it wrong . Almost every time I talk about him publicly , but he will be here .

Um , he's with bennett and we are talking about all things about his career growth and his um youtube series playing with trucks , which is really fun and entertaining if you haven't watched it . But you can catch us here next week . And then I do also want to announce that we have both Elevate and TMSA Executive Summit registration open .

So if you want to go to Executive Summit , you can scan here and then I'm going to pop up Elevate down here . Get us going both places . So Executive Summit this year will be in Chicago . So Scott has talked about Chicago on and off this whole interview .

So if you want to do that , that'll be October 22nd through the 23rd , and elevate is June 8th through 10th in Austin , texas . On both of those payment links you can actually bundle if you plan on going to both and you get a

deal . So very exciting , all exciting things going on at TMSA . And oh , I didn't even mean to pop that up , but , yes , if you have not applied for any of your Trailblazer , rising Star or Purpose awards , please do . Submissions end at the end of March . And so , yeah , perfect product placement , fantastic .

But it was great to talk to you today and I appreciate you coming on the show .