ANAHEIM, CA — Thinking ahead and not trying to imitate past successes was the common theme of the two breakfast keynote speakers during the Produce Marketing Association’s Fresh Summit, held Oct. 17-19, here.

Complacency, repetition and protecting what you have achieved are three “traps” that businesses fall into, admonished Jeremy Gutsche, founder of Trendhunter.com and the main speaker at the Oct. 18 general session.

The biggest marketing mistake companies make is not “marketing in the year we live in,” Gary Vaynerchuk, founder of Vaynermedia, said at the Oct. 18, general session.

The message during each of their hour-long presentations was that if you are not looking at what’s coming next and act upon it, you are doomed to fail.

Gutsche said some of the best, and even most forward-thinking companies, have failed because they were too busy protecting their current niche to create a new one. In fact, he spoke of several companies, such as typewriter icon Smith-Corona, who actually guessed right about the future but then fell into protection mode, and instead of innovating it reinvested in its core business before eventually failing.  

Smith-Corona developed a word processor well before anyone else, but the company’s senior management decided it wasn’t going to catch on and it stuck with the typewriter, largely because it was successful and was the company’s cash cow, Gutsche indicated.

He said a successful company has to be willing to destroy last year’s success and focus on the next success. “You have to break free from your past success,” he said.  

He told the crowd to carefully look for opportunities and scour the world for new ideas. His message was that the opportunist is often successful.

Gutsche, whose still-short life has resulted in several huge successes, said most “competitors are lazy,” so the road to success is lightly traveled.

Vaynerchuk’s message was similar but his method of delivery was a bit more abrupt. He constantly told the audience that there was a lot of wasted effort and resources being spent out there as more than 90 percent of marketing dollars are misspent, according to this man who made Forbes’ list of powerful CEOs under 40.  

He told the crowd that he had spent considerable time looking at how the produce industry markets its products — and for the most part he found it to be lacking. He told the crowd of what he perceived to be business owners to take control of their own communications to the end-users. Do not leave it up to retailers, he advised.

Vaynerchuk said we are living in during the biggest communication shift in the world, adding that the Internet and social media enable companies to have intimate interactions with the end-users.

For example, he told the audience that during a five-minute period that morning, 10,000 people around the globe had said something about apples on Twitter. Not one of those tweets, he said, was followed by a message from an apple company.

He believes these are lost opportunities for companies to be interacting with consumers and telling their own story.  

Vaynerchuk said at least once a day every company should be searching Twitter to see what is being said about their product or their company, and they should be responding.  

But he said if you are going to respond, it is important to be truthful and put information out there that is consumer centric, not just propaganda about your firm.

He advised, however, against hiring the closest 23-year-old to run the social media department. Remember, he said, “they use the internet to hook up!”

Because most companies are not forward-thinking, Vaynerchuk believes they are “massively vulnerable” to being replaced by a firm more in tune with what’s going on today. Most people, “make decisions based on how they want it to be rather than how it is,” he said.

Seemingly speaking of many consumer products, Vaynerchuk said fragmentation is at an all-time high and questioned whether mainstream media is reaching the masses anymore. He was especially critical of television advertising, asking for a show of hands of how many people watch television shows via a box or some other delayed method and then fast forward through the commercials.  

Most in the audience said they do, which led the speaker to opine that television advertising is grossly overpriced. He also discounted the influence and price of free standing inserts as an advertising mode.

Vaynerchuk opened his speech rattling off his own many accomplishments but then asked how many people had heard of him. Few had, which made his point that connecting with people through traditional mainstream media is not effective.

He concluded his talk stating that a company might have the best message, but before they can tell it to the right person they have to find him.