Sometimes, I feel we don’t give enough attention to the wider world of marketing and the ways and means by which people in all kinds of companies and organisations outside of the fresh produce sphere are managing to get their message across to consumers, retailers, importers and anyone else they feel should be listening. Perhaps there are lessons to be learned, for example from the way in which meat suppliers are promoting their pigs? (There’s a joke in there somewhere about mass emailing and spam, but I don’t think this is the place to go trotting out boaring old puns like that.)

The rise of online marketing tools that show huge potential for businesses to spread their communications far and wide at very little cost – for example Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn – has been staggering. Eurofruit Magazine now has a Twitter feed (twitter.com/eurofruit) and is beginning to attract attention down that channel. Only last week, retail analyst Planet Retail announced via one of its own ‘tweets’ that it was planning a series of so-called webinars (online seminars). We picked up the news immediately, posted it on our news website Fruitnet.com and, hey presto, Planet Retail have some free marketing and we have some useful additional content. As far as I can tell, in pure marketing terms, nothing has been spent beyond the overheads involved in running an internet connection and setting up an email account. This is marketing for the credit crunch, alright!

But let’s not get carried away with heady tales of marketing success. As our recent FRESH Congress in Valencia proved, there is plenty of work to be done on innovating and making improvements to underlying, fundamental parts of the fresh produce sector if it is to emerge from the financial crisis relatively unscathed. For more on what was discussed at the event, head over to p70-71 of this month's Eurofruit Magazine. Elsewhere in the magazine, we tackle issues including corporate social responsibility, oversupply and (naturally) the recession. Sometimes, a mere tweet just doesn’t suffice…

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