Hi, this is Victoria Meyer, welcome back to the chemical show where chemicals means business today. I'm bringing you the second of short episode, bringing you some nuggets of insights from day two of the chemical summit, which was held on October 8th and ninth. Day two of the summit focused on customers, relationships, and global economics. So we had a number of great speakers. In fact, the feedback that we got has been insightful, inspiring. Transformational.
So if you missed it and are feeling a little sad or a little FOMO, you know, if you're missing out, head on over to thechemicalsummit. com and get your virtual ticket. That virtual ticket will allow you to access recordings of the speakers and panelists, plus any slides or content that they shared. You'll get the chance to connect with other leaders in our exclusive Chemical Summit community.
And you are going to gain actionable insights to move your personal leadership and your business forward. So as I said, day two of the summit focused on customers, relationships, and markets. We started with Melina Palmer, who is a behavioral economist and CEO of the brainy business. She was talking about. Customer nudges and what your customers want and can't tell you. Let me just tell you, she is a dynamic and insightful speaker. So many nuggets.
I'm only going to share one or two with you today because frankly, um, the whole episode could be about that and that's not my intent, but if you want to listen in, honestly, Head on over to, um, thechemicalsummit. com to get your ticket because you don't want to miss that. We ended with economist and futurist Jason Shanker of Prestige Economics and Futurist Institute. So Jason discussed economics.
Current and future state of global economy geopolitics, what he calls the cold world, the cold war two, and what the chemical industry needs to watch for. It was Intense, intense, that's how I can really say, um, and in between we had some great speakers and panelists talking about customers journey and customer segmentation, as well as the importance of strategic business relationships.
So, you know, on stage on day two alone, we had something like, I don't know, 150 years of experience in the chemical industry collectively. Plus our expert speakers from other markets, Melina and Jason. So really powerful and impactful what was happening on stage and also the conversations and the insights and connections in the room. And that frankly is one of the things that makes the chemical summit so special and so unique. So that's that.
Um, let me talk to you right now about some of the outstanding insights of day two. So the first thing. Melina Palmer was talking about this, the importance of creating delight for your customers. Your customers want to be delighted. Um, and she brings some great examples, both of, how anticipation, and anticipation of the reward and of the great experience that you're going to have is what drives that, um, anticipation that may or may not happen when it does occur. Um, You're truly delighted.
And I'm going to integrate a little clip from Melina right here.
so, you want to think about what it is that you're incentivizing those team members to do and think about those more thoughtful questions that you can be asking internally and with customers. So, if you were to instead of saying, were you satisfied with your service? Which, meh, right? But if instead to say, were you delighted? at the bank today? Like, Oh, was I delighted? One, if you have to think about it like that, no, you weren't, but it's a very clear difference, right?
And when we look at, like if I'm working with a client and we're looking at redoing some internal processes or something and asking team members say, what would make you love this? Like I know you hate the website right now. How would you just love it? We hate these customer surveys. What would make them amazing? What are we really trying to find out here too, right?
Because again, it's a lot of like 10 pounds of sugar in the 5 pound bag that we get with those sorts of surveys, which is why we hate them. It's 8 pages long and a bunch of things that nobody cares about. It's exhausting. You're not getting good data from it anyway. So if we say, what, if we can only do one thing with this, why are we even asking anybody anything? What is it that we're trying to do?
And is there just like one thing we can ask or two that's going to help us to understand this and do that really well. And then we can move on to the next thing. Those are some opportunities to not be stuck in that status quo of what we've always done and look for the opportunities.
Then second strategic and outstanding insight that came from day two also comes from Melina and it's about the nudge and you guys have experienced this, right? So you go to a restaurant and you're looking at your menu and they have things on there that are maybe chef special. Most popular. I kid you not most popular. We've all seen this and we're like, Oh really? Is it the most popular? And how many times do you personally look twice or maybe just buy what the most popular item is?
Imagine adding. Most popular to your business's website, or as you think about targeting for a specific formulation. So let's just say, um, surfactants and laundry detergents, right? So, you know, putting on your website most popular. For laundry detergents. Right. How cool is that? You provide formulations. I know that you do, um, in many cases, right? With one of the services that many chemical companies and distributors offer. But what about just that visual nudge of.
Most popular favorite best product, right? So we've seen this, we see those a lot on a consumer basis. It's certainly, um, something to consider doing on a business basis. And, um, here's another comment of Melina. Here's a little clip from Melina talking about just that.
one thing that's really important too, when we understand human behavior is that we humans are a herding species, just like sheep and cows and guppies. We look to others like us to know what is safe, how we should act, what's right. We want to know someone else did the due diligence so our lazy brain doesn't have to. This is why ratings, testimonials, social proof, knowing someone like me did this and they had the same concern I had, but they love it. But I would love it too, right?
There's safety in that even listing something on a menu that was most popular and actually just writing most popular over the top of it increased the likelihood that people bought that 20 to 30%.
The third strategic insight comes from the topic savvy segmentation with Jeanine Hurry of Xenon arc and Shelly Linkerhof of Clariant. And these two ladies teamed up to provide a really great hands on conversation about customer journey and customer experience. And the thing that stood out for me, in fact, this nugget that Janine shared, is around segmentation. Is a catalyst for growth, right? So we don't often think about that.
I know chemical companies from time to time have struggled with how do you really segment your customers? We've all gone through it, we do it, and then it lags, et cetera. But I'm going to share just a nugget here from Janine and Shelley talking about the importance, number one of your brand story, right? So what is it that your company stands for and how do you demonstrate that? And The importance of segmentation and that segmentation is truly a catalyst for growth. Here's Janine and Shelley.
And the beginning of that bridge is your brand story. That is the creative and the emotional connection to your customer that some of the engineers I've worked with in the past have been a little bit uncomfortable with, right? And why is that? It's because it's sometimes hard to calculate. And engineers like their Yeah, they like the data. Indeed.
And so, but we all know that a brand, a strong brand like Coca Cola or Apple really does connect the customer and it helps build that brand loyalty, which is the other side of the bridge. And Melina was talking about that this morning as well. So that's one reason why the brand story is Super important. Super important. I'm just curious. How many engineers are in the room? Yeah, that's not as many as I thought.
Yeah. So as the engineer in the room, I definitely had to learn how important that brand story is and it's strategically important. Doesn't stop there though. No, it really doesn't because that brand story should make sure it articulates your purpose and it connects the customer with why they want to do business with you. It's your voice and it's your identity and it's your differentiator. And so. Even though it's hard to quantify, if you don't have it, you'll get lost out there.
But what's also very important is the customer loyalty aspect of it. If your employees know your brand story, and they're living it day to day, then the customer experience isn't just the customer service desk. It's everybody in the organization really trying to build that, that customer loyalty. Okay. SJeaninene, how about we make it stick for everybody? So you guys are going to have some homework here in a few minutes, but to make this stick, uh, segmentation is a catalyst for growth.
So hopefully just a couple of stories. Help you believe that, um, it is the first step toward growth, but it has to be paired with the journey and experience completely aligned with Milena. You guys all have the capacity and capability for a good segmentation analysis. Most of us here have, we've talked about this too, data, we're drowning in data. We now have integrated platforms. Many of us do and access to AI, which should help you with that analysis.
There's real value in helping the customer across that bridge. Sometimes that that bridge there's it's opaque to get across that bridge. But I'm building that pathway is way more than a brochure. So lastly, revisit these steps at a frequently frequency that makes sense for your team. It's not just once and done. So you need to iterate, evolve and improve. So let's wrapping it up. Customer segmentation, start small, prove results, customer journey, build the pathway.
A customer experience, it's more than a brochure.
the fourth strategic insight that I want to share from day two of the chemical summit is the importance of consistency. In building trust with your suppliers and your customers. And okay, that kind of makes sense. It also, we all recognize, right? That sometimes that doesn't always happen. So this insight, and, and again, it was a power hour of insights from Michael Siever of Integrity Biochem. Jamie Creamer of Carpenter company and Frank Fisher of South Carolina chemical.
All of those folks have tremendous depth of experience in the chemical industry, in managing relationships, in building trust and building consistency with their customers and suppliers. And so here is a snippet of Jamie Creamer from Carpenter talking just about that, how you build trust. Listen,
The next thing I think is super important is consistency. You have to be consistent with your customer or with your supplier, because that's what builds trust over time. we spoke earlier this morning about the peaks and the valleys, and a lot of times that's what builds that trust, right? You may have a situation that happens, and, your supplier comes to you and they say, Hey, listen, we messed up. They're transparent about the situation. They give you details on how they're going to fix that.
And that goes a long way in building that trust and that loyalty
Our final speaker of the day was so powerful. Jason Shanker, who is an economist and futurist. He brought so many nuggets of wisdom, um, insights about what's going on in the economy globally, broadly, the effect of The current election cycle that's going on in the US, what it means if we do and don't have a really clear, consistent answer, um, to that on November 5th, which I think is our election day.
Anyway, so, so many, so many great insights there, but the number one thing that I'm going to talk about here, and I think the takeaway for leaders to really think about is, Is, um, recognizing the variability of geographic spending and demand differences. Right? So if we think about U S North America, Europe, Asia, and just what the current economic strengths are and how that is driving trade tensions.
And really the importance of having scenarios in place so that you and your company are ready to respond. As the geopolitics and other tensions flare and impact and affect trade, affect, trade affect, supply chains, affect business. So here is Jason talking about some of those geographic demand differences.
On the upside, right now, we think about what's going on in the U. S. economy. Good news is, U. S. GDP is good and growth data have been solid. Inflation rates, which have been a major cause for concern, they have fallen, although they still remain elevated. Interest rates are poised to fall further. They've started falling. And of course, consumer debt delinquencies are low. So that's the big news, right? GDP growth is solid. Jobs have been pretty good. Inflation rates have fallen.
Interest rates are on the way down. Consumer debt delinquencies are low. Now that's really important because 70 percent of GDP. It's driven by the consumer. It's people buying stuff. I'll dig into all of these a little bit more in detail in a second, but the downside risks are also significant because job gains have slowed, even though they're positive, they are slower than what they were. Consumer inflation is still elevated. Interest rates are still high.
And Cold War II is ongoing and U. S. political uncertainty is high. And if you ask me what the big spoilers of the outlook could be, it's those last two, Cold War II and the political uncertainty. So let's start with the economic growth, right? Most recent quarter, we have data for Q2 GDP was 3 percent based on the data out today. Q3, this is from the Atlanta fed is likely to be 3. 2 percent compared to the growth rates in other advanced economies.
And I know this is small in the back, but the big takeaway is that if you look, the U S growth rate last year of 2. 5 percent was the fastest of any advanced economy this year. US GDP expected to be 2. 6. Same deal expected to be the fastest growing advanced economy in the world. Next year, the forecast is for it to be 1. 9%. These forecasts from the IMF.
If you do business as a chemical business is often want to do in Europe, the folks in Europe would absolutely like I see jaws dropping mouthwatering over the prospect of two and a half to 3 percent GDP numbers, right? These look more like emerging market growth rates than advanced economies. And then you've got though other concerns, some of which is tied to Cold War II, which is that China's slowed down.
So last year Chinese GDP was 5. 2, this year it's expected to be around 5, expected to slow further next year to 4. 5. And I would argue there's upside to the U. S. outlook and downside to the Chinese numbers. I'll talk about who the beneficiaries are of this ongoing conflict between the U. S. and China, but it's probably those unaffiliated countries like India, Mexico, that are neither in sort of the U. S. and its military allies, or Russia, China, and its military allies.
So, the U. S. labor market's been positive, but it has slowed. This is really the big thing, and the reason I'm going to talk about labor market data again is 70 percent of U. S. GDP is consumption. It's people with jobs buying stuff. And don't tell anyone, this is a big secret, people with jobs do buy stuff, and right now we have record high payrolls,
all right. That's a wrap guys. Five insights from day two of the chemical summit. Thank you for listening. If you want the full story, the speakers and their insights, hearing their speeches, um, and talks and hearing the questions and answers that they were able to provide to people in the community and in the conference itself, head on over to the chemical summit. com and get your virtual ticket. So Limited access on that.
We're only going to have it open for a short while, so you don't want to miss it. Also, you're going to get access to all the recordings plus access to a community of engaged chemical industry leaders, the people that were in the room, engaging, convening, and gaining insights. Really super cool, unique opportunity. Also pre sales for next year's event have started. You don't want to miss it. Seats are limited. Get your seats early. So that's my pitch there.
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