If you do user research for a living, you get used to a certain kind of pushback from product teams. You mention a usability problem or a customer frustration, and someone immediately pulls out a spreadsheet to show you how the performance metrics look fine on paper. But as we've seen time and again, numbers don't tell the whole story. I've conducted more than 200 interviews with people who rely on our tools, and the focus is almost always on how the tool fits into their actual workday, not just what it claims to do.
When you look at heavy machinery, it's easy to get lost in the numbers. For decades, the entire compact industrial equipment industry ran on a very simple playbook: you list the horsepower, you show off the bucket capacity, you boast about hydraulic flow rates, and you hope your dealers can close the deal on price or proximity. But a machine is just steel and oil. The real magic—and the real business value—happens at the intersection of that machine and the human being operating it.
Enter Laura Ness Owens. In July 2025, she stepped into the newly created role of Chief Marketing Officer at Bobcat Company, a division of the Doosan Group. Reporting directly to Scott Park, the CEO and Vice Chairman of Doosan Bobcat, Ness Owens took on a corporate mandate that goes far beyond managing ad placements or showing up at trade shows: her job is to bring the voice of the customer directly into the brand's identity and operations.
Ness Owens isn't some executive hired from a completely different industry to give the brand a fresh coat of paint. She's been at Bobcat for more than 20 years, having first joined the company back in 2003. When you spend two decades working your way through dealer development, commercial training, North American marketing, and global brand management, you acquire a deep, native understanding of the business. You aren't guessing what dealers want or speculating about how operators behave. You've sat in those training sessions; you've visited the dealerships in rural North Dakota; you've heard the complaints and the praise firsthand. With a bachelor's degree in political science and communication from North Dakota State University and an MBA from the University of Mary, her background blends a sharp analytical understanding of public sentiment with the business acumen required to steer a major global brand.
Her long tenure has taught her a key lesson that many marketers miss: you cannot humanize a brand if you don't know the people who use it. Bobcat has a nearly 70-year legacy of engineering and industrial machinery production. Since inventing the first compact loader, the company has built its reputation on reliability, ruggedness, and mechanical utility. But as competition in the compact construction, grounds maintenance, and agricultural machinery sectors has grown fiercer, holding onto that legacy requires more than just claiming you make a good tractor. It requires proving you understand the life of the person in the driver's seat.
Inside the Operator's Mind: Why Specs Aren't Enough
In my work doing user research, I've conducted over 200 customer interviews. I've spent hours talking to software engineers, product managers, and finance teams. And while their tools are lines of code and cloud dashboards rather than excavators and skid-steer loaders, the human psychology remains the same. When you ask someone why they prefer one tool over another, they rarely start by quoting performance metrics. Instead, they tell you a story about a time the tool saved them from a late night, or how it felt intuitive when they were exhausted, or how a customer service agent went out of their way to solve an issue.
Ness Owens' strategy at Bobcat rests on this exact insight (it's what we in the research world call moving from transactional utility to emotional connection). In her interviews, including a Wall Street Journal video interview, she has talked openly about the challenge of humanizing a 70-year-old manufacturing brand. The shift under her leadership is deliberate: migrating the conversation from pure machine specs to the actual, daily lived experiences of the operators.
Think about the traditional way of marketing a loader. You zoom in on the track system, you highlight the high-flow hydraulics, and you use a voiceover that sounds like it belongs in an action film. But under the new brand mandate, the customer takes center stage. A commercial might focus on a landscaper who built their family business from the ground up with a single Bobcat loader, or a farmer who depends on their machine to feed their livestock before sunrise. By showcasing real human voices, Bobcat is doing something rare in industrial manufacturing: they are validating the customer's identity.
This kind of storytelling isn't just a clever marketing trick; it's a strategic feedback loop. The voice of the customer (VoC) is now being integrated directly into how Bobcat shapes its product design, dealer training, and global campaigns. When you listen to the operator, you discover things that a CAD designer in an office might never notice. You learn that a slightly repositioned joystick can reduce wrist fatigue over an eight-hour shift. You learn that a clearer view out the back window prevents near-misses on busy construction sites. You learn that local service turnarounds are more valuable than a 5% increase in engine efficiency.
Gathering these insights is hard work. It requires setting up channels where operators feel heard. It means looking at the digital touchpoints where customers interact with the company and ensuring those interactions don't feel like a one-way street. By putting real operator experiences at the center of their branding, Bobcat isn't just selling machinery; they are reinforcing a community of operators who feel seen and respected by the manufacturer.
Operationalizing the Vision: The Infrastructure of Brand Stewardship
You can have the most beautiful customer-centric philosophy in the world, but it doesn't mean anything if you can't operationalize it. A CMO can't do this alone, especially not in a massive global enterprise like Doosan Bobcat. That's why the organizational restructuring that accompanied Ness Owens' promotion is so significant. The brand didn't just appoint a CMO; they structured a leadership team to dismantle the old silos and build a data-driven, global approach.
Two key moves highlight this transformation. First, Bobcat promoted Kristen Hintermeyer to Vice President of North America Marketing. Like Ness Owens, Hintermeyer is a long-term company veteran, with over 20 years of experience within the organization. Her mandate is to lead digital strategy, product marketing, data analytics, and demand generation. This is where the voice of the customer meets reality: by combining data analytics with digital strategy, Hintermeyer's team can track exactly how customers engage with the brand online, what features they search for, and what pain points surface in their digital interactions. It ensures that the qualitative stories Ness Owens wants to tell are built on a solid foundation of quantitative customer behavior.
Second, Lanelle Vasichek was promoted to Senior Director of Global Brand. Vasichek leads global brand activation, experiential campaigns, strategic partnerships, and customer experience. Experiential campaigns are vital for a brand like Bobcat. In the heavy machinery world, customers don't just buy online after looking at pictures; they want to sit in the cab, feel the controls, and dig some dirt. Vasichek's focus on brand activation and partnerships means Bobcat is creating physical and digital experiences where operators can interact with the machines—and the brand's teams—directly.
What makes this leadership group so formidable is their shared history. Having Ness Owens, Hintermeyer, and Vasichek heading up various aspects of marketing and brand strategy means the leadership has a collective memory of the company's growth. They've seen how the market has shifted, and they understand the culture of the dealer network, which is the lifeblood of Bobcat's business model. They aren't trying to impose a superficial marketing template onto the organization. They are expanding Bobcat's authentic history and adjusting it for a digital-first, customer-driven market.
When you look at this new alignment, you see how Doosan Bobcat is building a modern brand stewardship model. It's a combination of qualitative customer empathy (led by Ness Owens' vision of humanizing the brand), quantitative digital demand and analytics (executed by Hintermeyer), and experiential brand activations (driven by Vasichek). For industrial legacy brands attempting to thrive in an era where customer experience dominates, this offers a practical model. It proves that even if you manufacture heavy, steel-plated machinery, your most valuable asset is still the relationship you build with the human being at the controls.
The Dealer Link: Bringing the Frontline into the Fold
One of the things that stands out in Laura Ness Owens' career trajectory is her extensive background in dealer development and commercial training. In the heavy equipment world, dealers aren't just salespeople; they are the primary point of physical contact between the brand and the buyer. Unlike a software subscription that you buy with a credit card, buying a compact excavator is a major capital investment. It usually requires a visit to a local dealer yard, detailed negotiations, and long-term service agreements to keep the machinery operational.
Because of this structure, you can't build a customer-centric brand without getting the dealer network on board. In my own research, I've seen how a brilliant product strategy can completely fall apart if the frontline sales and support reps aren't aligned with the vision. If a marketer creates a beautiful campaign about human dignity and operator care, but the customer walks into a dealership and gets treated like an annoying line item on a ledger, the entire illusion breaks down.
Ness Owens' background in dealer development and commercial training is therefore key here. Since she spent years designing commercial training programs, she understands how to translate high-level brand strategies into practical tools for dealer representatives. Her appointment signals that Bobcat's new marketing vision is designed to be lived, not just advertised. By training dealers to ask operators about their work environments—rather than just selling them on engine output—the brand is turning their dealerships into research hubs where customer data is continuously gathered.
In legacy manufacturing, feedback loops are historically slow. An operator might struggle with a poorly placed control knob for years before the message gets back to the engineering team. But by integrating dealer feedback directly into the brand strategy, Bobcat is creating a mechanism to shorten that loop. When dealers are taught to listen to the specific, day-to-day work concerns of local farmers or landscapers, those insights can quickly bubble up to Kristen Hintermeyer's product marketing and analytics teams, which in turn informs design updates and future marketing angles. It represents a systematic effort to align the corporate office, the dealer network, and the end-user in a single conversation.
