Episode Details

Connect with Ed Delia: edelia@delianet.com

Website: Delianet.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eddelia/

Lisa Ryan: Hey, it's Lisa Ryan. Welcome to the Manufacturers Network podcast. I'm here today with Ed Delia. Ed is president of Delia Associates, a B2B brand growth firm based in White House, New Jersey. As a second generation of the firm founded by his father, Ed and his team of 12 serve a broad range of manufacturers in various market sectors, helping them use brand power to accentuate growth. Delia Associates has received over 50 industry awards for B2B brand marketing effectiveness in the last four years alone. Ed, welcome to the show.

Ed Delia: Thanks much for having me, Lisa. Great to be here.

Lisa Ryan: share a little about your background and what led you to do what you're doing with Delia.

Ed Delia: Sure. Delia Associates was founded in 1964 by my father. Being part of a family and a family business, you grew up around it. I was always. And involved in the family business but never see it as a future occupation. Until shortly after college, I was all set to take a job outside of Philadelphia, and Dad and I had one of those heart-to-heart talks, and he said what do you think about coming into the business?

Learning it from the ground up, and you buy me out and take it over? And it took a weekend to think about it. And said, wow, I'm about to pass up on business ownership. I don't think I should do that hastily. I said, yes, let's do this. And when you're in a good place, when time kind of flies, I looked up, and a year passed by, and I blinked.

I'm like, wow, okay. Things are moving fast. I'm learning a lot. I'm doing a lot. This must be a good fit for me. That's where it all started. And. A few years later, we executed the buyout process, and then some years later, my dad retired, and the ship was mine. It started as a traditional business-to-business advertising and PR firm.

And I always had a real keen interest and passion for brands. After taking over, I started to explore and immerse myself in the power of the brand. I realized at the time there was an unmet need where there were a lot of manufacturers who were our clients. Historically, They've been clients in manufacturing, engineering, processing technologies, and automation.

There was no real clear sensibility of brand the power of a brand. It became my mission to bring that to them and to bring that to that audience and help them understand how powerful a brand could be when its marketing programs were enriched with a brand strategy and intent. So that became my life's work to date.

Lisa Ryan: Okay. And you think of manufacturing, you think of brands with the large manufacturers out there, but when it comes to your small and medium, mid-sized manufacturers, how important is your brand to near and long-term success and growth of the organization, no matter your size?

Ed Delia: It's critical even for the small manufacturers because they all compete. They're competing with companies of the same size, of smaller sizes. And often, they're trying to compete with much bigger entities. For them to have a voice in the mix, they can use brand power to accentuate their reason for being their mission, the value that they bring to we often say to our clients because some of them are small and mid-sized manufacturers, it's not about being the biggest, it's about being positioned as the best.

Because when a buyer sees you as the best possible option, and they have that emotional connection through your brand, they're going to say, we're going to go with this firm. They're the best; they're the best fit for what we