LAYOUT DESIGN / ADVERTISING

This is KCF Technologies, Inc. and they’re here to save factories millions of dollars.

KCF pioneers a technology called predictive maintenance (PdM), which algorithmically tracks industrial machines and warns of catastrophic breaks. The only problem: despite being one of the oldest players with the most advanced technology, other competitors were stealing the market share, and fast.

If KCF has the superior product, why isn’t everyone choosing them?

If KCF was going to win this race, they’d have to capture the hearts of their customers. My initial research found that most closed sales were thanks to an “evangelist” within the client company, whose enthusiasm could persuade the rest of the decision makers. These evangelists were usually people actually on the shop floor, such as maintenance staff and plant managers. But for every evangelist, there’s a dozen more of their peers with hesitations about PdM:

“Don’t tell me what to do.”

“Are you gonna take my job?”

“Oh, we can do that ourselves.”

“That’s just the way we’ve always done it.”

The truth is, KCF’s target wants zero BS. And despite PdM being designed to improve their careers, for many, “predictive maintenance” just comes off as a buzzword.

But first, some one-pagers:

One of my main tasks was redesigning sales one-pagers for KCF. Overcoming resistance to new tech, I focused on clear explanations of KCF’s products that framed them as job enhancers.

It was important to show that KCF knew this industry. All icons were based off real industry tools and engineering manuals. For example, the "Pump Wear" icon specifically depicts a positive displacement pump, as the one-pager later reveals only those specific pumps work with that fault mode.

For authenticity, I highlighted KCF’s understanding of the industry through their vast photography of real customers at work. (All photos with backgrounds are of actual sites!)

Fun fact: All illustrations, pictograms, diagrams, and tables were initiated by me!

Since these one-pagers were mostly digital, I integrated hyperlinks to other one-pagers or the website where information was more fleshed out. Now, any curious reader can simply click on the underlined word.

How do you truly convert a skeptic to an evangelist? You walk a mile in their shoes.

Part of my research was understanding the daily lives of shop floor workers. I found three common themes in my independent efforts, corroborated by my customer-facing coworkers:

1. Bad hours = no family time

2. Upper management doesn’t know what they’re doing, and sometimes endanger the workplace

3. You can know a man by his toolhood decor

Based off these topics, I really wanted to hit close to home for our audience in the rest of my work:

For example, I found that it was very common for this target to put pictures of their family on their toolhood, leading me to composite this image.

In my research, I also found stickers to be a surprisingly large part of our audience’s culture. It wasn’t just common to decorate tool hoods, but hard hats as well. FieldOps seemed to confirm this for me, leading to a line of stickers for just these occasions: