Greg Hutchinson
Marketing, Communications and PR Manager
Some days I wake up and still can’t believe I work for the power brand that is Caterpillar. I don’t take the opportunity lightly. I have worked hard my entire career to get an opportunity to prove myself on the biggest stage.
Now, I am running free, building global strategies and working closely with marketing and technical development teams to grow in creative new ways.
I get to solution an e-commerce platform, changing the industry landscape and how it showcases machines online. And I’ve built a powerful skill set which allows me to see across multiple business units and platforms and discover integration possibilities.
But before I got here, I was also living a dream. For nearly five years I was leading the charge at SPEC MIX, a well-respected brand in the construction industry, to address their critical need for support in all aspects of marketing and communications. The challenge was exciting, and I was eager and ready to prove myself.
My primary superpower might be problem solving. After more than a decade working in television, I learned to find answers and implement them quickly. Which is what was required with the SPEC MIX brand, as their digital presence was surrounded in outdated practices.
I got the opportunity to build a North America facing website for a major brand in the construction industry, from scratch. I built all aspects of the site, with no team available to assist in the process. I was given a platform by our web developers, and the rest was on my shoulders. I built the strategy for the site, wireframing, page templates, graphics, content and keywords, and then designed the digital market strategies to leverage what I created. The results were well worth the effort. In less than 2 years we tripled our unique visitor count which led to a boost in sales and market share.
While doing the lions share marketing for SPEC MIX, I also produced and executed on a bricklaying world championship, the SPEC MIX BRICKLAYER 500. When I first started working on this experiential marketing effort, the average viewer count on the live-streamed event was about 30,000 total viewers. But the time I left, we were well over 100,000 and growing. Our social media presence was taking off as well. I started the SPEC_MIX_OFFICIAL Instagram page and watched it grow to more than 14,000 users in only 3 years, with some reels reaching more than 1.5 million viewers. My background in television was essential to understanding how to create engaging and effective content and coaching our team to do the same.
But before all of these exciting career challenges, I cut my teeth in marketing by working my way to the top in the automotive industry. I left a long and formative career in television news working as a photojournalist and started over by shooting cars on a hot concrete pad in Durham, NC for a start-up Hendrick Automotive Mercedes-Benz dealership. On day one I became a sponge and vowed to never let anyone outwork me. That work ethic and drive led to the fastest lead times for photos to make it market out of any photographer in the company, and eventually led to me become their marketing director.
But my story wouldn’t be made possible without excellent leadership and training. I knew each new challenge would be unique, and I was given multiple opportunities to fail forward, allowing me to grow in knowledge and confidence.