Today is Election Day, and while we certainly hope that each of you have been to the polls to cast your vote for our nation’s next leader, we’d like to challenge you as marketers to complete your ballot for a different election. Fresh Produce Marketers have the opportunity as 2016 comes to a close to consider the challenge issued by Bryan Silbermann and Cathy Burns during the recent 2016 State of the Industry Address: How will your bright ideas take root to grab and hold consumers’ attention and create emotional connections to your brands?

As marketers, we have two directions we can choose from for 2017 and our future. We can continue to follow “Outbound marketing” and its policies: shouting our messages at audiences we haven’t learned about, pushing talking points about our products on social media without paying attention to who we want to reach, and continuing to market without knowledge of what works and what doesn’t. OR we can change course. We can elect “Inbound marketing” as our school of thought, and together we can turn our communications into a two-way street with our customers and consumers. We can offer thoughtful and helpful content on our websites and social media, and we can measure our activities to determine what to do next!

The infographic below illustrates our two marketing candidates and their stance on the issues of communication, getting found, creating content, education, earning permission and measuring our results. We think the choice for this election is pretty clear. Standing together as fresh produce marketers, we can make produce marketing great again!