Marketing to Millennials

I'm Bob Larson. Baby boomers may chastise them, but Millennials are the future and marketing your crops to them has never been more important.

That was the topic being hammered home by several speakers recently at the Washington Tree Fruit Association's annual meeting in Wenatchee.

Domex Superfresh Growers' Director of Marketing and Customer Relations, Mike Preacher says he cringes when he hears Millennials criticized because they're a force in the market that needs recognition ...

MIKE PREACHER ... "We've got several young people in our company and they're making ever more of an impact, of course, so not only are they our most critical customer, in the future, but they're also part of our companies and our organizations. I spend a lot of time with retailers and I see that their organizations are also beginning to develop and propagate millennials. So, we're kind of at a perfect point in time to not only capture them as customers, but to capture them as employees and really consultants who can guide us on where we need to go in the fruit industry."

Preacher says Millennials are game changers in everything we market, including fruit ...

MIKE PREACHER ... "For sure, and they just work differently than we do in a lot of cases. They have more tools than you and I enjoyed when we were their age. But we do, we spend an awful lot of time, from a marketing perspective, figuring out where are we going to intersect with these people. They're really the main focus of that."

Preacher says with a middle class that's growing everywhere, marketing to Millennials needs to be a worldwide effort.