The inaugural edition of the Global Supply Chain Marketing Summit has launched, bringing top-level marketing executives together to network and discuss successful strategies in promoting supply chain products, services and solutions.

The idea for the summit was to create a community of marketers across the supply chain spectrum, including solutions in planning, forecasting, sourcing, procurement, warehousing, distribution and logistics, says Brad Berger, publisher of SupplyChainBrain, the summit’s sponsor. For three days, supply chain marketing executives from virtually every vertical met at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel on Amelia Island, just outside Jacksonville, Florida.

“We had these marketing professionals talking to executives about how they could better market and communicate their messages,” says Ralph Henderson, producer of this year’s event. Marketing executives presented on four main topics: branding, lead generation, search engine optimization and content development. “Executives said content development is where trust is formed,” Henderson says. “They said, ‘Don’t try to be all things to all people. Tell me exactly who you are, what you do, why I care about it, and I'm going to trust you through that content development.’ That was a big epiphany for some of the supply chain marketing professionals.”

The next summit is scheduled for June 5-7, 2024, also at the Ritz-Carlton, but in the meantime attendees and event organizers will meet remotely every quarter to further look at the four topic areas. “That way, we can really put some meat on this,” Henderson says.

Helping attendees to apply what they learned at the inaugural summit is one of the purposes of the quarterly meetings. “We want to celebrate someone, or even multiple people, and their successes at next year’s event,” Henderson says.