Brief · February 2021 · Go-to-market strategy · Industrial gases
Brief set by the company as part of a senior hiring process. Unpaid, using public information.
Air Products: the freezer is sold to a food plant. The reason to buy it comes from the supermarket.
SECTOR
Industrial gases and food freezing
MARKET
Europe
BRIEF SET BY
Air Products
FORMAT
15-minute proposal
DATE
February 2021
COMPANY
airproducts.comStages covered
01
Research
02
Competition
03
Segment & position
04
Message
05
Launch & enable
06
Measure & maintain
The same six stages as the PMM Operating System.
What they asked
Present a go-to-market proposal for APPI and our connected MP V4.0 tunnel freezer. How would you learn about the end users and the value proposition of these products for them?
Brief set by Air Products
February 2021
Circa fifteen minutes
Present a proposal (circa 15 minutes) for the go-to-market strategy for APPI (datasheet attached) and our connected freezer (MP V4.0 tunnel freezer).
How would you learn about the end-users, the value proposition of these products for them?
Feel free to give your own point of view and ideas. The datasheet and the presentation are only informative/guidance and are still internal Air Products documents. The APPI product and the connected freezer haven't been launched yet. You may make any changes and proposals you like.
Quoted from the brief. The attached datasheets and internal sales presentation are not reproduced anywhere on this page.
What I had to work with
15 min
To present
2
Unlaunched products
0
Customers I could talk to
Not givenNo pricing, no launch date, no customer list. Two internal datasheets and a sales deck.
The situation
Cryogenic freezing preserves food quality by freezing it fast.
Air Products sells the gas, the tunnel freezers that use it, and — at the time of this brief — two things that had not yet launched: a process intelligence layer, and a connected version of the freezer.
The buyer is a food manufacturer or packager: meat, seafood, vegetables, cheese, bakery, ready meals. The person who signs is under cost pressure. The person who runs the line cares about downtime and cleaning. Neither of them wakes up wanting a smarter freezer.
What they do have is a customer — a retailer — who is being asked by shoppers for food that is locally processed, chemical-free, sustainably produced and traceable. That is the pressure the product actually relieves.
The call
Sell the freezer to the plant. Write the value proposition for the shopper.
Nobody in a food factory wants a smarter freezer. They want their retail customer to stop asking questions they can't answer. A connected freezer produces the evidence behind those answers, and the gas savings that make them affordable. Start the argument at the end of the chain.
15 min
To present
2
Unlaunched products
0
Customers I could talk to
The brief, in three numbers.
What I proposed
Five moves, in fifteen minutes.
01
01 Research
Learn the end user without meeting one
- The brief asked how I would learn about end users, so I answered that before proposing anything
- Separated the direct customer — food manufacturers and packagers across meat, seafood, vegetables, cheese, bakery and ready meals — from the final end user, the consumer reached through supermarkets, retail, restaurants and cafeterias
- Used the demands already visible in the retail channel as the proxy for the customer research I had no way to run: locally processed, chemical-free, sustainably produced, traceable
02
02 Competition
Where the product sits
- Two axes: standard or smart, individual or integrated
- The claim was the empty corner — gas, freezer and intelligence sold as one thing rather than a monitoring add-on bolted to somebody else's equipment
- Mapped the field by category rather than by name: the major industrial-gas groups, the regional gas suppliers, and the equipment manufacturers, each of whom sits in a different quadrant
Where the product sits
Smart
Standard
Smart
Monitoring, bolted on
A connected layer added to somebody else's freezer
The proposal
Gas, freezer and intelligence sold as one thing
Standard
Equipment, off the shelf
A freezer bought on price and lead time
Gas and equipment bundled
Supplied together, but nothing is measured
Individual
Integrated
Four quadrants, and the one worth claiming was empty.
03
04 Message
Three people, three arguments
- A value matrix built by role rather than by feature: the user who runs the line, the decision maker who signs, and the gatekeeper who has to install and support it
- Each row runs pain, then product value, then the message — so the message is derived rather than written first
- No two roles are given the same reason, and none of them is given the whole product
One freezer, three people who have to agree
Persona
User
Pain
Freezer efficiency, cleaning and maintenance, downtime
Product value
Higher productivity and lower gas consumption, remote monitoring and notifications, real-time data and predictive maintenance
Message
Smart freezers
Persona
Decision maker
Pain
Food quality, cost, sustainability
Product value
Quick freezing for better quality, prolonged equipment life, reduced waste
Message
Custom and sustainable freezers
Persona
Gatekeeper
Pain
Installation, troubleshooting, support
Product value
Installed by an Air Products engineer, suggestions to resolve issues, remote customer support
Message
Easy to install, in days
Pain first, then value, then the message. Written in that order so the message has somewhere to come from.
04
03 Segment & position
Two packages, three tiers of market
- SMEs and large enterprises separated by package, channel and message rather than served one campaign
- SMEs: reached through trade shows, trade magazines and field teams; concerned with cost, onboarding and support; sold the basic intelligence tier with the freezer
- Large enterprises: reached through trade shows, social, email and paid search; concerned with food quality, efficiency and carbon footprint; sold the premium tier
- Geography sequenced in three waves rather than launched at once: level 1 ES, PT, FR, BE, NL; level 2 DE, PL, CR, SL, HU; level 3 IT, GR
05
05 Launch & enable
Sell the category before the feature
- Physical: field sales, the trade shows this industry attends, and the specific trade press it reads
- Digital: owned site, e-CRM, paid search, the industry web properties, and a B2B e-commerce route
- Content ordered deliberately — cryogenic freezing against traditional blast and mechanical freezing first, the connected layer second, because a plant that hasn't accepted the category will not pay for the intelligence on top of it
Where I pushed back
The brief said two products. I proposed one.
APPI and the connected freezer were presented as two launches. Sold separately, the intelligence layer is an upsell a plant manager can defer indefinitely and the freezer is a commodity bought on price. Packaged with the gas contract and split into a basic and a premium tier, they become one smart integrated offer with a reason to choose the more expensive version.
I also answered a question the brief didn't ask — what the shopper at the end of the chain wants — because without it the connected freezer is a maintenance tool rather than a commercial argument, and there is no fifteen-minute version of this that works otherwise.
The judgment call
Sell it to the plant. Write it for the shopper.
A connected freezer described to a plant manager is a maintenance tool. Described through the retailer, it is the equipment that lets their customer make a claim about carbon, waste and traceability and have the data to back it. The gas savings pay for it; the provable claim is why it gets approved.
So the value proposition starts at the end of the chain and is transferred back up it. That is also the answer to the part of the brief asking how I would learn about end users with no access to any: read the demand the retail channel is already placing on the manufacturer, because that demand is public and it is what the manufacturer is being measured on.
What I'd do differently
I proposed a tagline, and I shouldn't have spent any of fifteen minutes on it. Taglines are the part of a go-to-market proposal a brand team will replace, and offering four alternates signals that none of them is right. The packaging argument and the three-tier geographic rollout were the load-bearing parts and they got less time than they deserved.
How it aged
The category went where the deck said it would.
Feb 2021
I presented this. Neither product had launched.
After
Air Products launched a digital intelligence tool giving real-time and historical analytics through live dashboards, retrofittable to existing Freshline freezers, positioned on remote performance evaluation, reduced food waste and lower nitrogen consumption. Food and Drink Technology
Mar 2026
Air Products showed its Freshline IQ Freezer at Seafood Expo North America, describing Freshline Smart Technology as remote monitoring of food manufacturing equipment to optimise processes and track key performance parameters. airproducts.com
The positioning held: a smart, integrated freezing solution sold on efficiency, waste and sustainability rather than on freezer specifications. So did the retrofit logic — the intelligence layer had to reach the installed base rather than wait for new equipment sales, which is what the launched product does.
The wording didn't survive. They market Freshline Smart Technology and Freshline IQ, not my line. That is the normal fate of a candidate's tagline and it is not the part of the proposal that should have been judged.