EDITOR INTERVIEW In conversation with... Erin Durham, Vice President, Global Sales & Marketing, Kline Group
For those unfamiliar with Kline and its services, can you introduce your company and your role within it? Kline Group is a B2B market intelligence and insights firm that provides high quality syndicated reports, custom research and consulting services to a selection of market segments. From our 1959 origins as a chemicals consulting business, Kline today is a market leader fully immersed in the energy sector, covering the entire 360° value chain. Our clients range from start-ups to multi-nationals and many are specifically focused on finished lubricants, base oils and petroleum specialty products and related markets. In my role, I oversee the sales and market research division of the firm, working closely with Milind Phadke and Yana Wilkinson, our respective VPs of Lubricants & Base oils Market Research, and Lubricants & Base oils Custom Research and Consulting Services.
What makes Kline’s approach different and relevant to the lubricants’ market? Where we stand out in our field is that our product insights can be acted upon, they’re not just data or observations. Through our approach, clients can better understand, evaluate, track and analyse the present markets so they can build and support their future business strategies. We leverage our historical knowledge base, our industry expertise, our global- to-local coverage and, most importantly, connect with the end-use sectors. Ultimately they will shape and define the demand for our areas of focus, including end-use applications, mega-trends, key end-use industrial sector trends.
How did Kline adapt its services to overcome the 2020 challenges faced by global business markets? Staying visible and relevant is paramount for a trends’ reports consultancy. Like everyone else we faced the challenge and impact of having to work remotely, quickly. We closed almost all of our international offices, but our already established flexible approach to remote working meant our global team could continue what they were doing, working from home
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and adapting to virtual, remote communication and engagement quite smoothly.
Were Kline’s own internal processes impacted upon - how did you overcome these? The crisis forced us to review what is essential from what is nice to have; these hard-learned lessons will be used to reshape and refine what value we add to our clients, Identifying what topics, insights and data are most relevant to help them deal with the highly uncertain environment and unprecedented changes. We ramped up our online presence, increasing our content-marketing; we tested new formats like Podcasts, online “Debates with Industry Experts” and Zoom interviews. These helped us to stay connected and to remain a reliable resource of insights and trends for the lubricants industry. We supplemented our reports with a COVID-Impact update, evaluating in real-time how Covid was affecting the industry, creating best, worst and most likely case scenarios.
What is the most significant trend facing our industry today?
Sustainability is a Mega-Trend of our time, and will play a critical part of the future for our lubricants clients and their business strategies. The industry is being pushed from the top down by government regulations and corporate commitments and from the bottom up from end-users, consumers, suppliers, partners. We are excited to be a part of the solution for our clients in both framing as well as detailing their sustainability strategies.
The long-term future is bright for industry players who are able to identify opportunities and embrace the evolutionary changes that are on the horizon and execute decisively and consistently.
To read the full interview with Erin Durham, please visit
www.lube-media.com/digital-exclusives.
LINK
https://klinegroup.com/
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