March is always a favorite month for me in the produce industry. It is when everyone’s eyes and ears are directed to a critical aspect of business— marketing, something I live and breathe in my professional life. For Fresh Avenue, March comes after ending the winter lull where we are implementing our marketing strategies for the year. Then March arrives and those plans take hold and begin to work their magic. Also, United Fresh holds their Brandstorm conference each year around March for produce marketers and gives a much-needed charge to the creative batteries in the industry that tells stories and drive campaigns.
But why should a company invest in graphics, video, blogging, and all these things that seem to create expense and not directly bolster the bottom line? Marketing is the long game to producing sales. You will not see immediate results, but that is by design. The important thing to remember is the immediate hit from sales will lose its potency over time without the foundation and reach of a brand’s story and reputation.
So that brings us to a point that many marketing professionals preach; for a business to sustain with an increasingly technological and connected world, they have to be media minded. That doesn’t necessarily mean hiring an inside creative team to start writing blog posts and producing videos, there are many agencies out there to help you tell your stories. What it does mean is that if a company wants to survive and grow, they need to tell their story, keep telling their story, and tell that story once again.
As you can see, we love the month of March and getting into a marketing mindset— and what a wonderful industry to be a marketer in! There is so much to explore in produce, so many people in a variety of roles that goes unnoticed but are critical to our supply chain, and many passionate people who have made agriculture their life work. What this means is that a produce marketer’s work has only just begun.
At Fresh Avenue, we keep this mindset so we are always telling the stories of our growers in effective and memorable ways!
