REDONDO BEACH, CA - A new beginning can also be a homecoming. I am reminded of this as I sit down with Julie DeWolf to discuss her newly founded company, DeWolf Marketing, as she tells me that COVID-19 changed her entire outlook on her life and career. Lucky for us, the industry trailblazer is just getting started.
Most of you know that Julie spent the last 16 years at Sunkist Growers as the company’s Director of Retail Marketing, a job she greatly enjoyed. She has only positive things to say about her experience there and the opportunities she was given to grow the citrus business. Once COVID-19 hit and she, like so many others, was forced to work from home, her priorities shifted and she started to give more thought to how she could make a bigger contribution to the industry.
“The more I spoke with other marketers in produce, the more I realized the need for a focus on account-specific retail marketing strategies and tactics,” she says. “Traditional brand marketing tools are imperative of course, but companies should also be paying attention to marketing at the retail level. This notion of carrying marketing all the way down the marketing funnel to the point of purchase is still somewhat new in our industry, and that has been the impetus for starting my own business. What I would love to do is bring understanding to our industry about what this looks like in practice and why it's important.”
The big differentiation, according to Julie, between retail-focused marketing and traditional brand marketing is the call to action. Brand marketing goals focus more on awareness and engagement, whereas retail marketing efforts always contain a call to action for shoppers that encourages them to make a purchase.
“If you offer a retailer the chance to save their customers money or if you can provide free shelf space in the form of a display unit, they usually want to take advantage. By working in partnership with them, you can strike a deal that makes sense financially AND drives volume,” Julie tells me. “Once you see initial success for both parties through simple value-added vehicles, it's much easier to build lasting relationships that ultimately lead to more detailed, robust, and effective promotions.”
Unsurprisingly, Julie also wants to help brands represent themselves in the most positive way possible. In this vein, one of her plans is to offer strategic promotional premiums, ensuring that a brand’s representation of itself is as high-quality as possible for anything that contains its logo.
“I love the idea of us all supporting each other in this endeavor to promote our brands in the best possible way. That extends, in my mind, all the way to the promotional products you use or distribute on your company's behalf, and even the outfits you wear at trade shows,” Julie explains. “It’s about more than just printing logos on products. It’s about problem solving, exceeding goals, and delivering on-target and on-budget results.”
While these are some of Julie’s main focuses for her new business, DeWolf Marketing is truly a full-service agency, providing marketing strategy, creative, execution, website development, SEO/SEM, video capabilities, and just about anything this determined team can dream up.
For more of what DeWolf Marketing can do for your business, please visit Julie’s new site here.
Congratulations on this endeavor, Julie. We cannot wait to see what’s to come!
