Factory Reset: Fixing Manufacturing’s Brand Problem.
Australia’s been put on a clock.
Between News Corp’s Back Australia campaign and ANCA CEO Martin Ripple warning that we’ve got (maybe) 15 years to turn “lucky country” into “smart country”, the message is blunt: either we scale advanced manufacturing now, or we watch it quietly move offshore for good.
On paper, it all sounds promising:
Back Australia is splashed across national media telling people to buy local.
ANCA is exporting CNC machines to 45+ countries and showing we can beat Switzerland and Germany on precision and automation, not cheap labour.
REDARC, R.M. Williams and others are poster children for what “made here, sold everywhere” looks like.
And yet.
In Western Sydney, ARCC builds a world-class, award-winning zero-emissions bus, which is proven in trials, price competitive and has an Australian Made Award on the shelf. Then the NSW government orders three buses from ARCC and 126 from China — and the local manufacturer publicly says they could be gone within months without a serious order. That story went viral for a reason. It showed the whole system in one ugly snapshot.
So yes, we’ve got high energy prices, over-regulation, a patchy industrial policy and decades of offshoring. But underneath all of that, there’s an under-recognised problem: Australian manufacturing is still too easy to ignore and too hard to choose.
That’s a brand problem. And unlike global gas prices, it’s one we can actually do something about this year.
The brand problems we keep dodging
So let’s park subsidies and energy policy for a minute, because you can’t fix them from the factory floor this quarter. You can fix these.
1. The brand of Australian manufacturing
Outside our bubble, the story about Australian manufacturing is wildly conflicted:
“World-class engineers, clever problem-solvers, great quality” v “Too small, too expensive, energy-stuffed, manufacturing is dead.”
Back Australia is trying to reset that story by showing ANCA, Lovells, REDARC and others as proof we can build high-value, export-ready products from here.
But then ARCC hits the front page: local innovation that ticks every box but is still losing to imports on a technicality dressed up as ‘value for money’
That contradiction kills business confidence. If ARCC can’t get backing here, who on earth can?
2. The brand of each individual firm
Walk into an expo like Industrial Transformation Australia, Land Forces or any heavy industry show and a pattern becomes apparent:
Smart factories with dumb branding
Beautiful machines described by beige stories
Stands full of capability but empty of distinction
The problem is that most advanced manufacturers and tech firms look and sound like each other. Theyury the proof three clicks deep, alk to job titles rather than buying moments, and
assume that “if the product’s good enough, they’ll find us.”
In reality, shortlists are tiny. Buyers in defence, transport, mining, energy and medtech don’t calmly evaluate 20 options. They call the few names they remember and trust when something breaks, the spec changes, or a tender lands.
That gap - between what you can do and what the market can recall - is where growth dies.
The science is already on home soil
Here’s the ironic bit. The world’s leading evidence on how brands grow is Australian.
The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute has spent decades showing that brands grow by:
reaching more category buyers - penetration, not just “loyalty”
building mental availability – being easy to notice and recall in real buying situations
building physical availability – being easy to find and buy wherever buying actually happens
using distinctive assets – colours, shapes, phrases, devices buyers can spot in a split second
accepting the 95–5 rule in B2B – most buyers are not in-market right now, but will be later.
EBI’s B2B work is crystal clear: the main levers are being easy to mind and easy to find, not obsessing over tiny segments or mystical “differentiation.”
We then add effectiveness evidence from places like System1 and the Effies. They have demonstrated that big, emotionally engaging creative actually multiplies profit over time when it builds and refreshes those memory structures.
In other words, the brands that win are the ones people can spot, find and feel something about when it counts.
Australia has the research. We just haven’t wired it into how manufacturers market themselves.
ANCA’s five steps set the macro stage
At the top level, the News.com.au Op Ed by ANCA’s Martin Ripple has already laid out a decent national to-do list:
Mandate real Australian content in public contracts, not token final-assembly.
Cut red tape and regulatory drag so advanced manufacturers aren’t punished for innovating here.
Lock in trade deals like the EU–Australia FTA to open doors for high-value exports.
Back value-added manufacturing, not just shipping unprocessed resources.
Align government and industry around a long-term roadmap instead of lurching program to program.
But that’s only the macro job.
Factory Reset is the complimentary – and equally necessary - micro job. It’s what individual firms can do for themselves while Canberra, eventually, works out which end of the screwdriver to hold.
Factory Reset: the brand behaviours that move the dial
Think of this as the practical side of the marketing science, stripped of jargon.
1. Make your company impossible to miss
Pick two or three non-negotiable brand cues and weld them into everything:
A colour that isn’t just another shade of corporate navy blue
A shape, stripe or visual device you can spot across a hall
A short, human tagline that sounds like you, not a committee
Then hammer those three cues across your:
website
datasheets
tenders and proposal covers
machines, vehicles, uniforms
exhibition stands
LinkedIn banners.
If I can rip your logo off a stand or a brochure and nobody knows it’s you, you’re donating free attention to your competitors.
That’s not “fluffy brand work”. That’s mental availability 101.
2. Market to tomorrow, not just this quarter
Ehrenberg-Bass’s B2B data and the 95–5 rule are brutal: most of your future buyers are not shopping this quarter.
If you only spend money talking to people already “in-market”, you’ll adore your short-term metrics and hate your long-term pipeline.
So:
show up where your category hangs out even when you’re not selling something specific
run brand-level activity that builds familiarity and trust with future buyers
and stop treating everything like a last-click lead-gen campaign.
Back Australia is basically telling the country the same thing at the consumer scale. Its asking us to move a bit more spend local now to create resilience later.
3. Talk to buying moments, not just job titles
Most manufacturing and tech marketing is aimed at caricatures like Operations Managers=, =Procurement Managers and Chief Technology Officers.
But in the real world there are real people, with skin in the game, who wake up thinking:
“The line is down and we’re burning cash”
“Audit in 60 days, we are nowhere near compliant”
“We promised the minister those zero-emissions buses by 2027”
“We can’t afford another asset that fails in year four.”
Your challenge is to name those moments And then write one plain sentence for each - i.e. “When this happens, here’s why you call us first.”
Put that on your homepage, on exhibitor walls, in your decks, on tender intros and make your relevance obvious at the exact moments people are deciding.
4. Put proof next to every big claim
We don’t need any more “world-class innovative solutions.”
What we need is receipts. For example:
before/after numbers on downtime, energy, emissions
certification and compliance, clearly shown
photos of your kit in real sites, not just renders
named quotes with context, not anonymous “5-star” fluff
On one scroll, a nervous buyer should be able to move from “sounds good” to “this is safe and defensible if someone asks why I picked them.”
If we want governments and primes to choose local firms like ARCC or Stealth ahead of cheaper imports, we have to give them cover, proof that they can point to if someone challenges the decision.
5. Be where the buying actually happens
Physical availability isn’t just about having a website and a sales rep. It’s being:
on the right panels, tender lists and vendor registers
specced into the standards and reference designs
in distributor catalogues, integrator decks and marketplace listings
easy to find when someone starts Googling in a panic at 10pm.
A lot of Australian firms are brilliant at R&D and hopeless at distribution design. Then they are surprised when the order goes to the only name in the system. If you want “Back Australia” to mean “back you”, you have to be visible wherever money changes hands.
Why this feels urgent now
None of this sits in a vacuum. Manufacturing’s share of GDP has fallen from around 13% in 1990 to roughly 5–5.5% today, which is well below the global average. Energy costs have jumped by more than 200% for electricity and 300% for gas since 2000, squeezing heavy industry.
Australia is launching campaigns to tell itself manufacturing matters, while procurement still ships big, symbolic contracts offshore. And every month, another disheartening story like ARCC or Stealth Bikes is reported.
Those stories typically have these elements in common: a local firm spends years and millions building exactly what was asked for, they prove it works but lose to overseas suppliers on narrow criteria and then consider moving their capability offshore.
We can excuse that as “economic Darwinism” but with heavy foreign subsidies and one-eyed “value for money” definitions, it’s not Darwinism, it’s culling your own species.
This isn’t a eulogy. It’s a call-up.
So where does that leave an advanced manufacturer or high-tech brand reading this?
You can’t rewrite procurement rules this week, halve your power bill by Tuesday or force Canberra to implement ANCA’s five steps by Friday.
But you can make your business visually and verbally unmistakable in your category. You can:
show up consistently to buyers who aren’t ready yet, so they remember you when they are
tie your story to real buying moments your customers actually live through
put proof on the table so choosing local looks like the safe, rational move, not the risky patriotic one
and get yourself into every place where decisions are specced, shortlisted and signed.
Australia doesn’t have a capability problem. We never did. We have a visibility problem, a buyability problem, and a courage problem.
Back Australia? Great.
Now let’s back the brands that build it, and if you’re one of those brands, do the work so it’s impossible to pretend you’re not there.
Author: Grant Belcher, Head of Strategy, Big Brand Theory
