Getting Creative: Building a Brand Mascot w/ Josh Rozman

Brendon Forrest, Allen Fennewald and Wes Temple from Gorilla 76 show you how to build marketing budgets leadership will approve. Learn to work backwards from revenue goals, calculate cost-per-lead and balance digital versus traditional spend. We'll cover: - Working backwards from revenue goals to determine actual budget needs - Calculating close rates, SQL conversion and cost-per-lead to justify spend - Balancing brand building with demand capture spend - Using digital-first budgeting to show what works - Avoiding mistakes like building budgets in silos and skipping experimentation funds - Tracking expenses throughout the year to strengthen future planning If you run marketing at a manufacturing company this conversation delivers methods for budget planning backed by real data you can defend. For industrial marketers, manufacturing marketing managers and B2B marketing leaders preparing for 2026.

Marketers are asked to build brand and drive results all at once. But doing both well starts with knowing how lead gen and demand gen really work, and how to use them together. Allen talks with Gorilla 76’s Aren Buresh and Peyton Warren about what’s changed in 2025, what still works, and how to tell if your brand is ready. You’ll leave with clear, actionable advice and a smarter way to think about your funnel.

We’ve brought back Josh Rozman from a recent IMC: Live episode on call attribution. And if you’ve listened to that show, you’re probably also aware that Josh’s company, Oberlin Filter, has a pretty cool mascot that Josh has spearheaded. We want to dig further in, and really get to know Josh as a marketer and see how his thinking on marketing intersects with our own.

Today we’re stepping back from some of our more tactical discussions to talk about the industrial world at large. Donald Trump’s presidency has meant a lot of changes for industrial America, and we want to take an episode to talk about how.

In this episode of IMC Live, Peyton and Allen talk with Taylor Corrado, senior director of brand marketing at Wistia, about how modern B2B marketers can get more from their video content. You’ll hear how Wistia repurposes its State of Video report across formats and channels — and how you can apply the same thinking to your own webinars, podcasts and product videos.

Today, we’re talking about the metrics that matter for your marketing strategy, across the entire funnel. What should we be thinking about? And what might be a distraction? Brendon and Nihal dig in.

In this episode of IMC Live, we sit down with Josh Rozman — the one-person marketing team at Oberlin Filter Company — to unpack how creativity and tech are reshaping industrial marketing. Josh shares how he tackled one of manufacturing’s biggest challenges: marketing attribution. From “ghost hunting” lead sources to rolling out call tracking via CallRail, Josh talks us through the tools and tactics helping him earn internal buy-in and optimize spend. But that’s just half the story. We also meet Phil — an AI-powered chatbot and animated brand mascot that handles weekend calls, screens leads and helps humanize Oberlin’s technical offerings. Phil isn’t just a gimmick — he’s a scalable, brand-owned asset helping bridge the gap between web traffic and sales conversations.

In Part 2 of our series of conversations about positioning, Brendon and Nihal talk about how we handle positioning deliverables and what exactly the final product should look like. And, we talk a lot more about B2B marketing guru April Dunford.

Most manufacturers don't know how to quantify marketing success, so they default to asking "What's the ROI?” after three or six months. But when you're selling CapEx equipment through a longer, complex and consultative sales cycle, answering the ROI question can get messy. In this show, we welcome Gorilla 76 co-founder Joe Sullivan to the stage to examine both the leading signals and trailing metrics to know if your marketing program is positioning you for business growth and how to talk to your executive team about its progress.

All about positioning. Podcast co-host Brendon has been doing a lot of work on positioning and how it’s handled at Gorilla over the past couple of months, and co-host Nihal has some questions.