Archive for June, 2010

Last Thursday we held a marketing RoundTable at our facility to gather like minds in marketing. Jim Beretta, formerly the Marketing Manager at ATS and now the Event Manger for Canon Communications Canadian Show, ATX Canada described it as “professional, high value and creative.” Also in attendance from Canon Communications was the Director of Sales, Events Division Josh Dome who is responsible for over 45 of Canon’s trade shows.

My vision was to pull a group of minds like this together for many years. The intent of this meeting was to share ideas of successes and failures with three specific segments of marketing: print, .com’s and shows. Jim and I have been friends for years and talked about doing this prior to shows, however we never found the time. We finally set a date apart from the shows to get the ball rolling.

The event began the evening prior with dinner the Montgomery Inn Boathouse on the Ohio river. The entire next day was great; we hit topics such as blogging, what the future holds,  email campaigns, the evolution of print as well as the ever important personal interaction and trending of trade shows.

Although the title of the meeting was catchy utilizing the moderators name, the overall theme of the meeting was “personal touch” and how important it is to take the time to actually see and meet with customers. Yes we talked about lead procurement and quality product, however time and time again the meeting drove towards people coming closer together.

Jack Aguero, Vice President, Business Development & Marketing and Brent Meyer, Director of Marketing Communications from Pro Mach Integrated Packaging Solutions joined us, along with Richard Meyer, Senior Program Manager from Fanuc Robots, Bob Pompei, President and Joe Cantara, Vice President of Action Automation, the northeast’s leading industrial automation distributorship. Also joining us were Bill Hornsby, Director of Marketing and Marc Knable, General Sales Manager from Habasit, the largest belting supplier in the world. We invited a strong group of vendors to support our efforts including Don Neumeister from Packaging World Magazine, Michael Perryman, Global Spec, Roger Judson, Precision Metalforming Association (PMA), Lee Sjoquist, Skyline Exhibits and Rick DeMoss, Industrial Research Services (IRS). All these excellent companies contributed a great amount of information.

Many thanks to everyone who made the trip here to QC Industries for their time and contributions to this meeting.

Fanuc Robotics recently introduced their new robot, the M-3iA. It’s an intelligent, parallel-link robot which is designed to maximize speed and flexibility for assembly, small part handling and picking applications. It’s shown here moving product on top of our new Automation Series low profile conveyor. The robot was introduced at this year’s ATX show in Charlotte, NC. Fanuc is currently buying many QC Industries conveyors for their marketing opportunities, demo cells and material handling lab.