What is your role in the company and who do you interact with the most?
AFG Packaging is a company founded in 1996, the acronym represents the initials of the 3 children of the property: Anna, Francesco and Giovanni. I mainly deal with the entire strategic part together with export sales and business development, so my role is not only focused on marketing also because this function has never been formalized in the company until now.
What led you to take on a position in marketing?
Working in sales with an inclination towards foreign countries, from the beginning I had a business development approach. I consider myself a very curious person and every time the opportunity arose to talk to a supplier I identified all the dynamics capable of bringing benefit to our company and to the partner with whom we signed a contract. In this way I found myself being requested by suppliers for support in the development of projects and all this led me to make contact with the marketing managers of the companies with which we collaborate, evolving internal corporate communication and subsequently improving external communication.
Which social platform do you use with the most involvement and which one the least?
Personally, I left the social world, maintaining only the LinkedIn reference. I was present on Facebook even before the birth of Instagram but it is a platform that I abandoned for reasons of time, I preferred to dedicate that time to my family also because I am not interested in comparisons or how other people live. From a business point of view, however, it is different because LinkedIn is undoubtedly a fundamental social network for our business: we are interested in recruiting and to evaluate the partners and suppliers on the market on a broad spectrum. In general I see a great lack of perception and awareness towards the world of plastic and sustainability across all social media. Precisely for this reason I do not exclude that, in the future, a platform on which we could be present to bring information and training could be TikTok or more easily Instagram, involving and including in our sector even the youngest people who now frequent it little. Hope must be placed on young people who, with their open-mindedness, can question what they have received. There is a lot of misinformation and I would like to actively contribute to changing the approach to the world of plastic.
How much weight do you give to social networks within the work context?
Until now AFG Packaging has given little weight to the social aspect but now we are starting to dedicate time and resources to it because we have understood their importance. What interests us most is to distance ourselves from our core product and also at a local level we want to show our active presence on the market for the first time, focusing on the authority. The working context is very important for us, especially for the individual worker, we want to expose our identity so that those who work in the company feel an integral part of the brand.
Have you thought about enlisting the help of professionals from the social world given the importance achieved by digital platforms and their management complexity?
Of course, we have just relied on an external agency to manage our platforms. In this area, competence but above all experience are important. To have these elements internally would have taken us too long in terms of time, unlike an external entity which instead brings knowledge and operational speed. I personally manage relationships in this sense together with my sister Anna. Our product differs from others and therefore attention to detail on a digital level is essential to communicate it correctly to the market.
What is a typical day like for you and what new area would you like to explore?
Every day I interface both at an operational level on the production side and at a managerial level with regards to the commercial side. Research and development is part of my daily life at AFG Packaging together with all the regulatory part which, in our sector, outlines the parameters through which we can then move on the market. The legislation, in our case, guides all marketing communication: when I find myself creating a new project I always follow the technical part thanks to which I can know the corporate limits towards which we can push ourselves. I find the regulatory aspect interesting because if on the one hand it limits us a lot, on the other it offers us opportunities. Sustainability is absolutely our driver.