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http://www.kleberandassociates.com/

Kleber & Associates, 1215 Hightower Trl, Bldg C, Atlanta, GA (2026)

08/28/2026

STANLEY built a campaign around calling out marketing hype.

Which means the brand just handed every contractor a yardstick to measure STANLEY by.

That's the interesting part.

Tool marketing has never lacked confidence. Tougher. Stronger. Faster. More durable. Decades of finding new ways to say one tool beats another.

"ALL BUILD. NO BULL." moves the conversation somewhere else entirely.

At the center is Stan, a talking toolbox who calls out marketing hype, unnecessary features and jobsite nonsense. The humor gives it personality. But the idea underneath is what caught our attention.

STANLEY isn't telling contractors what its products do. It's telling them, "We see the world the way you do."

The tools are straightforward because the people who use them are straightforward.

The customer becomes the hero. STANLEY becomes the ally who shares the same standards.

That's harder to copy than a durability claim. Another brand could talk about getting the job done. Adopting "ALL BUILD. NO BULL." and making it feel natural? Considerably harder.

It also helps that the heritage supports it. STANLEY traces its work-first equity back to 1843. So the campaign isn't a reinvention. It's a sharper expression of something already true.

Which is usually where the strongest positioning comes from. Not inventing a new story. Identifying an existing truth audiences already recognize, and making it matter more.

But strong positioning comes with consequences.

STANLEY can't mock meaningless innovation while shipping features nobody asked for. It can't criticize exaggerated language and then use it. Customers now get to judge everything the company does against one simple question:
Is this useful, or is it bull?

The brand has found distinctive territory. But it also created a standard it will have to live up to.

08/21/2026

Four out of five new B2B products never gain meaningful traction.

Not because the technology failed. The product usually works.

The commercialization strategy simply was not there.

Consider GE Appliances. The self-cleaning oven arrived in 1963, after seven years of development and more than 100 patents just to make it safe. Ice and water in the door followed. Then the over-the-range microwave.

Today nobody remembers when any of them were new.

But GE understood the invention was only half the job. The greater challenge was convincing a skeptical trade and a cautious homeowner to change.

Because no matter how groundbreaking the idea, innovation doesn't sell itself.
Here's the part that surprises most teams. The more innovative the product, the harder it can be to introduce.

Novelty increases the mental load on a buyer. More to process. More uncertainty. More internal justification required. So the instinct to explain every impressive feature makes the buyer more hesitant, not less.

Our industry proves it with its own memory. Carbon fiber was developed in the 1960s. It took more than two decades before the industry trusted it in critical structures.

Better did not mean believed.

Architects, engineers, builders, contractors and dealers do not celebrate novelty. They reward proof. And they default to what they already know… until we give them a compelling reason to believe.

The market does not reward the brand with the best technology. It rewards the manufacturer that makes the best business case for changing.

I broke down the five reasons good building products stall, and how to prevent each one, here: https://bit.ly/45EIg4A

How K&A approaches commercialization: https://lnkd.in/ebujVwRY

We'll be at IWF Atlanta August 25 to 28, asking exactly this question of the leaders we meet. If you're on the floor, tell me what innovation you think will have the greatest impact… and what it will take for the market to actually adopt it.

Because no matter how groundbreaking the idea – no matter how real the problem it solves – Innovation doesn’t sell itself.

08/19/2026

The Home Depot has quietly launched a platform. Which many building product manufacturers never expected.

While many brands were investing in campaigns, The Home Depot was investing in an audience.

Orange Apron Media just announced new integrations with Reddit and Pinterest. Extending Home Depot's first-party data into the places where contractors research solutions… before they buy.

Retail media has now grown large enough to eclipse television advertising. Thousands of suppliers as advertisers. Roughly six billion annual visits to its stores and website.

Read that from a manufacturer's chair.

Competitive advantage is no longer merely having the best product. It is owning the audience who discovers that product.

Every builder understands the difference between land you own and land you lease. Only one is still yours when the terms change.

Publishing works the same way. An algorithm shifts. A platform revises its policy. An editor moves on. And your reach moves with them.

Owned does not.

Consider what has already happened to borrowed traffic. Fewer than one in three Google searches now ends in a click. As AI answers appear at the top of the page, click-through falls by nearly 60 percent.

AI does not reward what a company knows. It rewards what a brand has consistently demonstrated. If none of it has been published, cited or reinforced, that expertise stays invisible.

Owned media is how expertise leaves a trail.

Because campaigns are designed to end. Owned assets are designed to accumulate.

So here's the question worth raising in your next planning session. Not which channel deserves more budget. Rather… when the campaign ends, what remains?

Increasingly, competitive advantage is not merely having the best product. It is owning the audience. Who discovers that product.

08/06/2026

"Learning is experience. Everything else is just information." That was Einstein. He wasn't talking about marketing. Or manufacturing.

But he named something every building product brand eventually learns the hard way.

Information has never been more abundant. AI summarizes a category in seconds. Dashboards track every click. A specifier can research a product for weeks before you ever enter the conversation.

Yet more information has not made buyers wiser.

Because information is not the same as clarity.

You can read all about getting punched in the mouth. Until it happens, you haven't experienced it.

The same is true in this channel. A field report can tell you a spec was substituted late in a project. But until you've watched it happen, and traced why, you can't spot the early warning signs the next time.

Experience is a filter. It teaches the difference between motion and progress. Between a busy booth and a productive one. Between reach and relevance.
Systems without experience produce impressive PowerPoints. And expensive lessons.

That perspective is what turns information into foresight. And foresight is how brands get built deliberately, not reactively. It's also why some building products keep growing while others, often with bigger budgets, lose ground.

As K&A approaches our 40th year, that's what we've been reflecting on. Four decades devoted to one channel. A wealth of launches, repositionings and recoveries. Not just the ability to execute, but the perspective to recognize what a market is doing before it fully reveals itself.

I unpacked the full thinking here, including why every "unprecedented" challenge usually isn't:

If you're working through a commercialization challenge and would value a seasoned perspective, I'd welcome the conversation. Sometimes the pattern is clearer from outside the jar.

https://kleberandassociates.com/what-albert-einstein-can-teach-building-product-brands-about-experience/

Information is not the same as clarity. “Learning is experience. Everything else is just information.” – Albert Einstein

07/29/2026

A week ago, Spain won the World Cup. The sharpest marketing lesson of the night was on the scorer's feet.

Ferran Torres came off the bench and scored the only goal of the final. Extra time. One touch. A World Cup won.

He wasn't wearing Nike, Adidas or Puma. The brands that own that stage, with the biggest names and the biggest budgets.

He was wearing Under Armour. One of just nine players in a 542-player tournament.

Under Armour never bought the World Cup. It owned the moment.
Overlooked did not mean unimportant.

Now here is why that matters for building products.

23.9 million people in the United States watched that goal in Spanish. The most-watched Spanish-language soccer telecast in history.

That is not a niche audience. It is a market announcing itself in real time.

And it is already building this industry. Nearly one in three US construction workers is Hispanic. Last year Hispanic households added 441,000 net new homeowners, the largest single-year gain on record, even as homeownership fell across almost every other group. They drove nearly 93 percent of all household formation in the country.

Household formation is the leading indicator for nearly everything we sell. Windows. Cabinets. Flooring. Roofing.

Yet too many brands still treat this market as a translation task. A brochure converted word for word after the campaign is finished.

Reach is not the same as relevance.

And most manufacturers overestimate how ready they are. Bilingual brochures, but no bilingual technical support. Event attendance, but no distributor training. A translated website, but no idea how many Hispanic contractors actually become customers.

So the question worth answering honestly: when a Hispanic contractor chooses which manufacturer to build his business around, will yours be ready?

Hispanic contractors and homeowners now represent one of the fastest-growing sources of revenue in building products…

07/23/2026

Nike just pulled ad spend away from broad campaigns. Unilever moved half its budget to creator-led content.

Two of the largest advertisers on the planet. Pointing in the same direction.

For decades, the building products playbook was simple: reach more people, add more names to the database. That assumption is now being challenged. Not because brand building matters less. Because relevance matters more.

One product. Four completely different buyers — architect, contractor, dealer, builder. Each asking different questions, carrying different risks. Generic messaging flattens all of it into a features list.

AI can tell you what an audience does. It can't tell you who they are. That's the gap most brands are quietly losing ground in right now, and where we built a new tool to help close it.

We walk through how it works, plus a real client use case where it helped a global brand pressure-test a launch before spending a dollar, in this week's issue.

Reach cannot guarantee relevance. Audience segmentation allows brands to understand which audiences matter most.

07/15/2026

Your next customer may never Google you again. They'll just ask AI.

For decades, building product brands fought for Google's first page. Now they're fighting to become AI's first answer, and most don't even know the game has changed.

Gartner is forecasting PR and earned media budgets will double by 2027. The reason: AI platforms are handing buyers fully-formed answers before they ever visit a website, and those answers are built almost entirely from earned coverage, not ads or SEO tricks.

That flips the old playbook. It's no longer enough to "get mentioned." Brands now need a repeatable trust engine, one that AI, editors, and specifiers can all read the same way. We break down the three moves building product brands need to make to earn that spot.

Here's the part nobody wants to think about: the same AI rewarding a trusted brand will just as faithfully preserve a damaging one. We walk through a real crisis where one company's shaky response became the headline, and another brand's discipline kept it out of the news entirely.

By 2027… a 2x increase in PR and earned media budgets…

07/09/2026

Moen used to tell us they cared about water. Now they're showing it.

Their new "Must Be A Moen" campaign pulls the product out of the spotlight. Streaked makeup after crying. Raw meat-covered hands. Awkward shaving routines. Real, unpolished moments, not staged kitchens.

Why the shift? In a mature category where every competitor claims quality and innovation, specs stop being a differentiator. So Moen isn't trying to prove it's better. It's trying to feel more relevant, banking on emotional recall long before a purchase decision happens.

That's a real bet. Faucets are a handful-of-times-in-a-lifetime purchase for homeowners. Trade pros buy more often, but through specs and reliability, not sentiment.

The creative is strong. The real test is discipline — staying with this positioning long enough for it to mean something, especially once short-term performance pressure kicks back in.

A more human form of positioning… that aligns product features with emotional relevance.

07/02/2026

When a buyer asks AI who leads your category — is your brand the answer?

Most building product brands are still thinking about PR as a top-of-funnel activity. A press release here. A trade mention there. Useful, but not strategic.

That calculation has changed.

AI systems don't search the way buyers used to. They don't return a list of links and let someone scroll. They synthesize. They weigh credibility signals — repeated mentions, trusted sources, third-party validation, expert commentary. And in many cases, they're helping decide which brands belong in the conversation before a specifier ever visits a landing page.
As much as 90 percent of the citations behind brand visibility in AI can be traced back to earned media. That's not a PR statistic. That's a growth strategy.

The brands that move early on this won't just be easier to find. They'll be easier to trust.

Seven rules for getting cited where it counts:

Earned media has become one of the most important AI strategies… a building products brand can invest in.

06/26/2026

Are your team's efforts pointed in a single direction… or scattered?

Most brands are aiming at too many targets at once. Bees figured out why that fails.

They return to the same kind of flower, again and again. Scientists call it "floral fidelity." The flower gets the right pollen, the hive grows more efficient, and both win… precisely because the relationship isn't random.

Nature already knows what marketing has to learn.

Focus works.

The generalist approach feels safer. Until it isn't. Building products is not just another vertical. It's a channel with its own language, its own buying dynamics, its own trust barriers. And a path that runs from awareness to specification to installation to repeat preference.

Architects need specification confidence. Builders want fewer surprises. Dealers want margin reliability. Installers want field-tested truth. Building owners may never know the product by name… yet they live with the result.

That's a lot of ground. And when an agency is still learning the category while trying to lead the strategy, momentum slips.

But category fluency alone isn't growth. The costlier problem is misalignment. Sales experiences one version of the market in the field. Marketing builds another in the conference room. Everyone works hard, and the organization still pulls in slightly different directions.

That's where momentum quietly leaks.

A generalist imagines an audience. A specialist sees the connections.

We've seen it firsthand with HydroBlok and TrimJoist. The growth challenge was never just awareness. It was aligning product innovation, channel strategy, sales enablement and market adoption around one objective. Once that alignment took shape, momentum accelerated… including recent earned coverage in Forbes.

That kind of focus doesn't happen by accident.

We pulled the full thinking into our new executive playbook, "Innovation Doesn't Sell Itself." It's a free download on why sales and marketing alignment, enabled by specialization, has become one of the strongest growth advantages a building product brand can hold.

Download it here: https://lnkd.in/eYv784ki

https://kleberandassociates.com/what-bees-can-teach-building-product-brands-about-specialization/

Are existing team efforts point in a single direction… or are scattered? Specialization maybe what you are missing.

Kleber & Associates

08/28/2026

08/21/2026

08/19/2026

08/06/2026

07/29/2026

07/23/2026

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06/26/2026

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