The United Fresh Produce Association’s BrandStorm event takes place next week and aims to tackle a whole slew of topics relevant for marketers in 2021, from budget to empathy to sustainable packaging to digital media.
As in previous years, the event agenda has a combination of speakers from within the industry and outside it, and the schedule includes sessions focused on business-to-business relationships as well as consumer-facing communications.
The events of 2020 have shaped this year’s BrandStorm in several ways, from surfacing new topics to consider — empathy in marketing, for instance — to allowing for the addition of more international perspective.
“Because of the growth of our global attendance last June at United Fresh Live!, we started making some new friends around the world and found that there were some other voices and opinions on a global marketing scale,” said Mary Coppola, vice president of marketing and communications for United Fresh. “We thought this was a good opportunity to bring some of those trends and those voices into the programming.”
BrandStorm will also cover changing shopper behaviors, consumer media and sustainable packaging, among other topics.
“We really wanted to explore who pumped the brakes on sustainable packaging initiatives and who maybe just kept going because, if you look back, it wasn’t just our packaging innovations that maybe didn’t make the cut, there were a lot of companies that were (hit) hard in March that had to make some significant cuts in their budgets, and innovation tends to be one of those places where you make a budget cut – and marketing, as we all know, again, going back to the budget conversation,” Coppola said. “So to be able to explore maybe who was hardest-hit, how they were hit, and conversely, who decided to double down on sustainability during the pandemic and when they did, what are the results, so we’re going to take a look at some of those.”
BrandStorm kicks off with a virtual networking reception March 8, with the bulk of the content following March 9-11. The entire schedule is available on the United Fresh website.
