Sergio Cáceres —Gerente y Director de Marketing de Plátano de Canarias 3

In the third part of the interview conducted by Lucio Hernández, Sergio Cáceres—Manager and Marketing Director of Plátano de Canarias—clearly explains the strategic transformation the brand is undergoing: sports sponsorship and integrated communication across various formats have ceased to be mere complements and have become key tools in defending the product's value against the competition and audience fragmentation. Cáceres begins with a fundamental observation: Canary Island bananas enjoy an objective quality advantage and a perception built over decades of advertising, but this advantage must be continuously nurtured. In a landscape of fragmented media and micro-segmented audiences (television, social media, press, search engines, events, etc.), the brand cannot simply replace one channel with another; it must combine them, which increases costs and requires prioritizing tactical investments. Within this framework, sports sponsorship emerges as a particularly effective area: banana consumption is closely linked to sports—from elite athletes to schoolchildren—and allows for associating nutritional properties with everyday habits. For this reason, Plátano de Canarias sponsors the Spanish national basketball team, promotes the Plátano de Canarias National Running Circuit, and has football ambassadors like Pedri and Vicky López to connect with diverse and emerging audiences. To expand resources without increasing producers' contributions, Cáceres highlights the recent success in securing European funding: a promotional program with 70% financing that will allow for greater advertising investment over the next three years. These subsidies increase the demands for control and rigor, but their awarding reflects the European Commission's positive assessment of previous results. In addition to communication and sponsorship, the manager emphasizes his responsibility for operational and market aspects: prices, transport costs, phytosanitary measures, and the availability of the fruit itself, which is affected by climatic and situational phenomena (such as post-volcanic changes). He points out that supply volatility harms customer loyalty and distribution presence, making it crucial to combine promotion and management to maintain consumer confidence. In response to production uncertainty, Asprocan is promoting a project to estimate production through bi-weekly monitoring of representative plots on several islands. The goal is to create a reliable historical record that will allow for more accurate medium- and long-term forecasts and improve sales and campaign planning. Overall, the interview reveals that Plátano de Canarias is focusing on strategic communication: maximizing the impact of sports sponsorships and social media, leveraging external funding, and strengthening production intelligence to protect both the perceived value and the actual supply of the product.