This morning at FreightWaves LIVE, FreightWaves founder and CEO Craig Fuller and Director of Passport Research JP Hampstead announced the launch of FreightWaves Communities, a new initiative to build highly engaged audiences of supply chain professionals in specific industry verticals.
Sign up for the FW Communities newsletters here.
Beginning with a focus on retail, consumer packaged goods (CPG), and automotive supply chains, Communities will deliver newsletters, editorial content, podcasts, and videos directly to practitioners in those spaces.
“Retail, CPG, and automotive supply chains are being transformed by important themes like e-commerce, direct-to-consumer, and electric vehicles,” Fuller said. “What’s great is that the supply chain professionals leading these transformations in many cases are already part of the FreightWaves audience—but now we’re creating unique experiences designed just for them.”
Hampstead will serve as Head of Communities, overseeing content creation, engagement, and growth with a team of analysts focusing on each supply chain segment.
“At FreightWaves, we’ve been able to build these incredible feedback loops where not only are we keeping highly engaged audiences informed and even entertained, but they contribute to the conversation and make all of us smarter,” Hampstead said. “Communities is about sharing news and analysis in a very targeted way and serving up exactly the right content for specific folks in these very different supply chains.”
Communities is launching with three newsletters—Point of Sale for retail, The Stockout for CPG, and Transmission for automotive—and will roll out podcasts and video as each community gains momentum.
FreightWaves’ hybrid data-media business model has fueled a flywheel where the media operation uses fundamental market data to educate our audience, then the data is taken up and contextualized and used in new ways by that audience. That helps everyone in the broader FreightWaves community gain an information edge on their competitors.
But where FreightWaves has traditionally focused on transportation markets, there’s an entire world of upstream supply chains with their own nuances, problems, and trends that we have not specifically addressed. Communities will replicate that same mechanism by growing new, highly engaged audiences from the ground up and recreate the same virtuous cycle for retail, CPG, and automotive supply chain practitioners.
“By blending headline analysis, data, and market research into fresh multimedia editorial content, we hope to deepen our reach into these crucial supply chain segments,” Fuller said.
Sign up for the FW Communities newsletters here.