In the middle of last summer, Ollie Barr spoke to the MANN Hummel UK Sales Manager, Damian Milling to try and find out what the key success for global manufacturers is. Damian was confident that the answer to this is very simple.
When asked what MANN Hummel were in Birmingham to do, Damian was excited to say, ‘We are here at the NEC in Birmingham, stands P120-P125. And we’re here to engage with the automotive aftermarket, to talk about the filtration industry, the automotive industry, the challenges and the changes we’re facing and how we can all work together to adapt to those. We’ve learnt so much and the outstanding feeling we’ve got from people is the fact that they’re desperate to get back in contact with us as suppliers, as manufacturers, as leaders of change. They want us to understand what’s going to happen in the future and how what we develop as OEMs help them in the aftermarket to grow and develop to thrive profitably in the long term. The most exciting thing about being here is just being with people and talking to people to learn and to understand what they want from us. The only way we’re going to grow and remain the number one is to listen to our target market and without that, we have absolutely no chance of protecting their future and ours so, it’s extremely important to us. It’s all about embracing the future.’
He was then questioned on the firm’s business objectives for the future. He stressed, ‘We need to grow like everybody in this world facing the challenges we face with production and distribution costs Etc. We need to engage to understand what the market needs help with, to listen and to evolve ourselves and adapt our strategy to what best suits the marketplace in the UK. There’s a lot of fear about EV and change in fuel cell technologies and the drivetrains of vehicles. But we can reassure people that we’re here for the long term to support them, to help them remain here in the future.’
Finally, he was asked about some of the challenges for large scale manufacturers when seeking to find out exactly what consumers want. ‘For the aftermarket, it’s about letting those barriers down as a global manufacturer, it can be quite difficult to engage with people that are touching our products. These are the people who are fitting their products and getting their hands dirty every single day. So, let’s break those barriers down as we can’t survive without those technicians: the technicians can’t survive without our product. It’s a true opportunity to bring those teams together and grow from our perspective. It’s all about trying to make sure that we are approachable and it’s great for us. It’s great to see what our competitors are doing, what the market is doing and, where the changes are evolving because what we necessarily do can be quite intimate. So, for us it’s also a learning experience. We want to learn from our competitors, from our customers, from the workshop. So, while we’re here to support those networks, we are getting a tremendous amount of support back from them. It’s key to our growth as well.’ He responded.
