Safety industry fights product categorization
By Staff -- Industrial Distribution, 9/1/1998
Though safety goggles may be shelved beside fall protection equipment, end-users often arbitrarily divide those products into two categories: commodity and technical.Such categorizations can be attributed to integrated supply and the shift in responsibility for buying safety equipment from a safety director or industrial hygienist to administrative departments like purchasing.
"I have really seen [this trend develop] in the past four years and it's continuing to get stronger," says Jill Will, director of safety products for Cameron & Barkley Co., who addressed the topic at a Safety Equipment Manufacturers Agents Assn. meeting held in Atlanta in May. "What has really brought it about is integrated supply and people looking at the cost of doing business, not just the cost of a product. Purchasing departments are driving that cost reduction and when they take hold of buying products -- safety or anything else -- they just view it as any other product."
For example, Bata Shoe Co.'s line of protective footwear includes products that could fall into both categories.
"The trend toward that categorization is evidenced by shifts in the sources end users are buying products through," says Robin Roberts, Bata's vice president of sales and marketing. "There seems to be a shift on the part of many end users to buying safety products from general industrial providers...As a manufacturer, you have to be flexible and cognizant of the end users' needs and desires to look for different supply channels."
Jim Thompson, president of Vallen Corp., believes that employee demand and corporate consciousness is swinging the pendulum back towards placing more value on safety products.
"The world of safety today is being driven more by individual workers who want to be in a safe, protected environment," Thompson says. "Safety is being pulled to the forefront by more components -- regulation, worker's comp, worker's freedom of choice to work in a safe environment -- now more than ever."
Whether or not the pendulum has begun to swing may be debated, but the safety industry still has to react to the absorption of its products into general and integrated suppliers' lines.
Safety equipment distributors may consider focusing on technical products like gas detection instruments or self-contained breathing apparatuses.
"When you start selling [technical] products, you are still selling to folks like the industrial hygienist or the safety director and that's where you can build relationships and bring new products to the market," Will says.
In addition, the entire channel has to work together to provide support for technical products through value-added services.
"We tend to support distributors that we have broad-scale relationships with: distributors who stock our product and support our brand in advertising, inventory investment, etc.," Roberts says. "Realistically, the manufacturer-distributor relationship has not really changed other than in the supply channel, where end users are pushing more responsibility for value-added services to the distributor and the distributors are, in turn, pushing that to the manufacturer...The manufacturers that step up and perform for their channel of distributors will be the ones that are successful in the future."
Manufacturers also need to flexibly approach changes in the distribution channel, provide value-added services to support technical products, and create demand and customer loyalty for their commodity products.
"The manufacturer is responsible for developing the name of commodity products so that when a customer calls in, they ask for a product by name -- a lot of marketing and advertising needs to be done," Will says.
Talkback
Related Content
Related Content
Sponsored Links
View All Blogs
