Robin Swanger, Head of Brand Marketing at Baker Hughes

welcome to the podcast above the cloud stories from the boardroom in every episode we interview Business Leaders who are navigating the complex world of B2B marketing whether you're trying to grow Revenue swoop into a new market or launch new products we promise you've landed in the right spot and now you're host Richard bird all right in this episode we bring on Robin swanger head of brand marketing at Baker Hughes Robin thanks for joining us uh in every episode we kick it off with asking our

uh Our Guest what their Spirit Bird is so if your company was a bird what kind of bird would your company be Robin so I answered it in terms of what I would be not my company you know but I but I have to tell you um probably it's the same for Baker hes um I've recently moved to San Antonio and so what I get to see all the time in my backyard is Birds I've not seen before on a big level two of them I think could be our spirit Birds one is a Road Runner I don't know if you know this but a Road

Runner can fly it'll just kind of run around your yard and then leap up in the air and it spreads it swings out so it does fly and the other one is a hummingbird hummingbird who fly backwards who knew a hummingbird can fly backwards but when I think about a Spirit Bird for me or for Baker Hughes you got to be able to fly when people don't know you can do something people don't know you can do and the second thing is sometimes you have to fly backwards when people don't know you can fly

backwards so for me in my marketing career that's always been two good things to have yeah I like it Speed and Agility too yeah speed agility and at the end yes yeah I love it that's great well you know Rob and I we've we've known each other for a long time and you know and we've worked for competitive companies for a long time and you know I've always admired you and the work that you've done for for all the companies you work for maybe could you just walk us through your career a little bit

for our audience sure um it has to go back to really what drove me into this career and the truth is I'm a word person I love words they really do something for me that pictures don't and this is a really good example of it when I get in an elevator you know those little signs in an elevator that point out the arrows point out or they point in when somebody's coming down the hall telling me hold the elevator hold the elevator I panic and the reason I panic is because I don't know which button

to push to keep the door open it just said hold or keep the door open and I could read it I'm there so you know the word I have a real affinity for words and words to me have always been a way for me to debate or they've been a way for me to persuade so when I got out of high school I thought that's probably pretty good for a lawyer and so I started out in college thinking that I would be a lawyer because I do love words I love to I love to argue and I love to make a point but I put myself

through school for most of the time and by the time that I got my undergraduate degree I was so tired of waiting tables and living on less than minimum wage and being poor that I thought no I'll work for a little bit so what I did was I moved to Houston and I got a job working at a place that was then known as a secretarial service and I typed but one of the one of the talents I think that I had became evident to one of our main customers and that was I could string some words together and I

could make sense of very technical jargon that he was writing he was a consultant who had really just recently gotten out of working for shell and he was starting his own company as an exploration consultant so he was very technical I was very worri oriented and we were a perfect match made in heaven so he hired me away from the secretarial service and I came to work for him and one of the things that we did was we put the words together to sell stuff and that is the beginning of my fora in

marketing so I left that place after about eight years and since then I've worked for um Downstream companies in the process Industries like Aspen Tech or Honeywell I worked for a couple of startups that were both both oilbased U Petra vages one and another one was u a a joint venture between halberton and shell called well Dynamics and of course I worked a little bit for halber and then I landed at Baker Hughes and when I came to Baker Hughes I had I've been here about 15 years I came at a

time that Baker Hughes was building one brand a single brand out of eight individual divisions and as we were trying to build that single brand they acquired four more companies that were very small consulting firm and then to add insult to injury they acquired BJ Services all in the same period of time so that was uh that was my career builder I'll say um I always tell people there wasn't probably 15 days of that first year that I didn't get my car and cry on the way home every day that was

where I really Built My Career character wow that is a great story you know I think about how valuable that is to be able to speak engineer and then translate that to something that gonna work commercially and that really is s such an important skill especially well with any I think any technical industry but but especially oil and gas yeah very true you really see it and also I think you know when that at Baker you know with all those Acquisitions you know from a marketing and brand

perspective and sales like people just don't understand what happens to the internal marketing teams when a company goes through a big uh acquisition like that and how work is created uh it it's a lot of work it's a lot of work and it's emotional it's so emotional because people don't want to give up where they are or what they know and it's very scary transition for a lot of people so you know that that was one of the hard things for the Baker Hughes is that the Baker Hughes work is that

everybody was so emotional and it all a it was just going to happen anyway for sure you know you think uh oil and gas engineers and you know tough guys and you know all these things and I've never seen anybody get so emotional when you tell them that they can not wear orange coveralls anymore now you have to wear blue coveralls and they lose their mind but yeah truly that truly did happen yeah oh man well you guys went through another big change too at from Baker Hughes whenever you guys merg

with GE Oil and Gas how talk to me a little bit about that that must have been a major transition a big two very different cultures for coming together huh you know when we first started to look at GE and you know we heard that we were going to merge with them and all of us of course went and did a lot of background work on GE and you know um and we really did think we were very similar in terms of culture and how we looked at things but what we found out is that we we weren't really as close

in in the way that we approached things as we thought we were um and it was a a Growing Experience too I worked as part of the team the brand Team through the transition period so I learned a lot so you know Baker Hughes um it was always when we worked at Baker Hughes it was mostly homegrown we were an internal team and you know we owned most of everything we did in marketing GE on the other hand was really a company that like to um Outsource a lot so we had a big culture Shi there um and then

the other thing was GE was really more of a Communications Ori uned organization than a marketing organization not to say one is better than another it's just the way we were looking was towards you know what can we sell and the way GE was looking was how do we communicate it and drive some publicity and Goodwill for it so um those are some really hard for little set we had to overcome yeah you know it I I know exactly what you're speaking of and we've worked with companies who are

Communications based or some of our clients are Communications based and the people that are that are really marketing forward they all get lumped into the same bucket boy they really see the world differently and one you have to understand the language that those customers are speaking because you know um if you get too aggressively you know commercially focused with somebody's a communication person what are you talking to us about that for uh versus uh you know um and and likewise if you

just if you're not getting if you're not talking about commercial uh things with a marketing person they're like what are these guys even doing here get them out of here they're not at any value to us always but how are you selling it how are you selling it you know and they laughed at me for a long time because that was always my question I love it well that's for for the people who don't know are not familiar with Baker Hughes um and I think the people who are familiar with Baker Hughes I

think you that you guys are a really surprising organization and that a lot of people think you guys as a oil and gas Services Company exclusively but tell us a little bit about the size of the organization where you guys work and the the product lines and service lines so so Baker Hughes is an energy technology company that means we sell services and we sell equipment um Hardware um for the energy industry not just exclusively to oil and gas we have two businesses one which is the the

subsurface business which is the one that is the Legacy Baker Hugh business and then an industrial component that we call industrial energy technology and that one is really more about um Machinery at compressors turbines things like that the company itself's about 55,000 people we work all around the world about 120 companies and um all walks all walks of life and uh I think there are 12,000 women in the company out of that 55,000 wow that's um that's actually you know for the oil and gas

industry pretty uh J diverse that's true that's true yeah cool well what's I guess you know your role has changed a lot since you've been with the company tell us a little bit about your new roles I feel like you know that George straight years that song 15 years going up I feel like I've been I've been working here for 15 years for a long long time feels like just yesterday um but mostly my background has been in marketing and the roles that I've had Baker use have been in marketing um the

latest one I have though is head of brand marketing and I really enjoy this role because we get to do something that I haven't done in a long long time since I really came to Baker use and that is take a look at what our brand looks like today so I have a very small team it's uh three people total um both of them are in Europe and I'm here so you know we make the time zones work but our remit is to look at the Baker Hughes brand strategy as it is today so we know that we're in the middle of an

energy transition but also an energy expansion where not just oil and gas but all forms of energy are going to have to play in the world's Energy Mix in order for the world to have the energy it needs in the future and now so we're taking a look at that in terms of how does that impact the business and how does that impact the brand um there's a brand management component to it so how do we represent our brand how do we train people to be compliant what about the way that we go to market with

new messaging and new positioning that kind of stuff and then one thing that I'm really excited about that I've wanted to do for many years is a customer experience component so I report into the organization that is um customer growth and experience so or gr growth and customer experience so um our remit is just to do that to grow into new markets where we haven't played before and also to deliver an unparalleled customer experience so that's part of the remit of of my organization in terms of

brand how it relates to Brand that's awesome yeah think about that and you think about the that's a that's a terrific onew punch you get the growth component and then you make the their customer sticky by providing great experience and well that's a that's a great combination so exciting right now I really I'm I haven't been this excited about a new role in a long time yeah oh I bet because that's something that can really you know affect the trajectory of the whole company and I think that is

so exciting it's really smart of you guys to put that all Under One Roof and under one role uh or at least one group uh and so wow I'm really excited to see how all that that plays out keep you posted I hope you do yeah that's awesome that's great well um I guess you know the oil and gas industry is um you know you guys are in the energy technology space what do you what do you think the biggest misconceptions are around energy and oil and gas gas and that whole Energy Mix that you were talking

about earlier yeah I think that most people think that oil and gas is something that can be easily replaced by some kind of renewable you know wind or solar even geothermal but that's just not the case you know oil and gas today as we speak it's more than half of the world's Energy Mix and it's not just the Energy Mix it's also all of the infrastructure that's dependent on oil and gas and all of the things that you use every day in your house plastic bicycle tires those kinds of things are all

dependent on oil and gas and the ability of companies like Baker Hughes and our customers to get it out of the ground and then do something of it and so when people talk about it's so easy to get rid of oil and gas that you know we see we see protest and all of those things it it it hurts my heart because I'm I'm very proud to be part of this industry I I every day when I came to I started my career it was upstream and then I went downstream but now I'm backing upstream and I just look at the

genius that it takes to do what this company and this industry do every day and I'm really 15 years into this business with maker keys I'm still enthralled by what we do every day and the people who work here and the way they think is just it's really phenomenal yeah yeah that is um that's something I've noticed about you guys you know it's you know you see the the phds and the engineering and the the actual people out you know boots on the ground in the field that have to execute on that and

it's it's so impressive to think about how that industry has shaped the economy and and I think you know energy is one of those things that if it is if it is expensive uh you know it really slows down the whole economy it slows down everything and if there's not plenti plentiful you know affordable energy that that just really um you're never gonna have a good economy in that situation like that you're absolutely right um I think that one thing that we have to think about too though is that oil

and gas really will run out at some point um or it won't be economic to to produce and to refine so one of the things that I love about where we are right now in energy is that we really are looking at different paths to energy because we want to keep it needs to be always for the planet secure and affordable and sustainable so how do we keep that energy flowing we have to look at other new ways to of energy so that's why Renewables are so important but we also have an opportunity right now to

make the energy that we do have oil and gas or LNG clean cleaner more affordable more efficient so I I love the opportunities that we have right now and as a marketer I love to talk about those opportunities so U I think we're at a really good place right now yeah for sure you know I think about the energy mix and and all that we had one of our previous guests was um Claire Burton from uh John cockel they make hydrogen electrolyzers and she said the same thing that you said that you know

hydrogen is you know a fuel of the future and it has a place in the mix today and it's going to grow over time but it's not going to grow at a rate fast enough uh to keep up with demand and demand is really growing we were I was at a conference earlier today uh in the Aerospace industry and you know they they've got the new Artemis NASA's got this Artemis program where they're going back we're going back to the moon and all that and I thought that's interesting and I thought that's just kind of

a science experiment but there's there's um one of the big drivers of that is um helium 3 the element helium 3 that they can use for for Fusion right like hydrogen but it's more efficient and all these other things so it is one of these things where you know that is going to be that's going to make the economics of going to the Moon work out and it's just it's crazy that will be a whole new source of energy and we're going to get it from a you know off the planet to get energy source but you

know it's sort of a good analogy for the oil and gas industry because I know just from having been here as many years as I've been here there's always a challenge and every single time somebody with Brilliance figures it out and that's what's happening now I I think you know I think technology is the answer to so much and um and I really believe in that I agree well you remember you you and I have been were around when they said that oil was going to run out uh you know in in this like what

2007 or whatever like we're not going to have oil in 10 years and remember that big magazine cover the end of easy oil yeah well it didn't happen that way but it didn't happen that way well technology right technology solv it smart people good technology good ideas I love it well so we kind of look back and at the you know current state of of your industry what do you see coming down the pipe in the next 5 to 10 years we have to keep we have to keep pushing for energy that's coming from

different places and so that means you know trying to figure out what do we what do we have now what kind of Technology do we have that we could apply um how can we use sources of energy that we've used before on greater uh on a greater Spectrum like geothermal um but really I think it's all about energy expansion increasing the use of Renewables looking at what we're doing in terms of the sources we have now in terms of efficiency but again going back to technology yeah what what's Baker

Hughes doing to prepare for that that five to year five to 10 year transition we're doing the same thing that I just said you know we're looking at how so you know on our plans when we look uh into the next five years what does energy expansion really look like What markets make sense which ones don't and you can see that acoss our competitor Horizons you know and and on the industrial side we're doing the same yeah well and I know you guys have some amazing technology in the hydrogen space and

you know the ccus space and geothermal and you know I think you guys go about solving these technical or these challenges through technology and you just go back to your your roots of of being innovators that's exactly what we do and you know the interesting thing is um when we first started to talk about geothermal in a big way a few years ago everyone was classifying it as new energy but Baker Hughes have been working in geothermal for 50 years you know we we had always done it's very easy to

apply oilfield technology to to geotherm sure yeah you guys will probably log in geothermal Wells on Wireline cable yeah that's before it dates before me but I think probably so yeah cool I guess from a marketing perspective and your in your new role in brand you know what are you guys what kind of tactics are you working on today how you bringing all those messages and all that um you know the great stories that you have at Baker Hughes to the market so it this is an interesting question for

me because I really think I I know about Ai and digital I think digitals bringing us all kinds of capabilities that we never had before but something struck me when I was at annual meeting earlier this month then as I said there 2300 people from many different kinds of Industries um highlevel people who are you know really the movers and the Shakers of this industry and what I loved most of all about it was the fact that I can use any tactic I want social media or you know having you speak at a

conference or you know whatever might be in the back but there is no substitute for having the people who are running the world of energy in the same area talking about what's bothering them it happens helps them because they get to air out their grievances with people who understand you know they get to talk about what's bothering and keep them up at night for Baker Hughes it's also great because we get to hear what our customers say and you know a marketer nothing if not an advocate for the

customer so to me that was that's a great tactic I don't think there's any replacement for face-to-face contact so you know I it's easy to talk about tactics on a way that you know we look at AI or we work about you know do we put a video on social media or whatever but honestly the content has to come from those people in the rooms caring your things out yeah I couldn't agree more with you you know we in marketing we always talk a lot about B2B and B Toc but really it's human to human and I

always feel like in a for a lot of the technical Industries we serve there's got to I call it engineer on engineer violence right you got to have that you know you got to have your engineer and their engineer talk about it work out all the technical things be able to talk about how what kind of value it's going to provide to their organization and then deals get done and just for the sake of the audience I know I've been to your annual meeting and uh and I will tell you it is it's Second To

None it is really um it's enjoyable and it's just a great experience but maybe tell the audience a little bit about annual meeting and this year was the um 25th Annual Meeting that U Baker hou has put together uh started out of course as a as a venue for G oil and gas it's always been held in Florence Italy and the Opera Hall I mean you we we can't beat Florence as a venue people love to come to it um and it's about a day a day and a h it's a day and a half of a mix of um presentations from

industry leaders presentations from people who are in the know um one-on ones Tech talks a solution spare to see what the latest technology from Baker Hugh is and uh even an opera presentation so it's it's quite uh it's a great Affair it's very open uh you just can't imagine the conversations that go on there and the access that you have to great leadership it's it's a phenomenal phenomenal of it yeah I think that was the thing that really impressed me the most was the leaders that you guys

brought in I mean it was a a who's who across that whole energy spectrum that you were talking about I really I couldn't have been more impressed in fact I uh it it's always in February and that is my anniversary so my wife stowed away when I went last year and I was working like crazy I was working uh you know and stay you know going to dinners and you know all these things the whole time and I felt bad for stranding my wife I we were going to stay a few days extra but I felt bad you know that

the for the three days of the event I was she was kind of stuck uh doing things so I called her and I was like are you okay like I'm sorry you know hav't spending time with you and she said well you know I'm crying in my appol Spritz right now but I think I'll get over it yeah there is no shortage of things to do in Florence for sure that's right no it's a great place to go all right that's great you know one thing too that I think about when I think about that event is just how great it it is

to have your customers there and have get that direct feedback from and get them in a in a situation where they can talk to you about their challenges and all that can maybe you can talk to us a little bit about how that's um affected the way you know maybe you go to market or the technology you develop uh you know just by having those Close Quarters conversations with their with your clients yeah and it's amazing too the the one-on-one chats are very interesting because when you talk with

customers oneon-one you learn so much more than you would if you just you know go on to say sales call or whatever you just having a cup of coffee um in the in the speaker rooms or whatever um but I really do believe that the role of marketing is to sell stuff I really think I tell all my teams if we're not selling something or we don't have some rooll selling it I don't know why we show up for work but to do that we have to be the advocate for the customer so for a marketer it's really great