About 20 companies will be represented as more than 100 executives and personal gather at Red Bull Arena in Harrison, Red Bulls General Manager Marc de Grandpre said. They are expected to include representatives from major New Jersey organizations such as Bayer, Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey, Prudential Financial and Hackensack University Medical Center.



Those attendees will be on hand for what de Grandpre said will be a summit focused on discussing best practices in integrating their brands and highlighting “platforms that we can leverage for our partners, so we can better deliver their message to our fans.” It’s also a chance for the Major League Soccer club to report back to its partners.



“For us, part of it is to give our partners a state of the union on the club, because we’ve made some tremendous progress over the last 18 months,” de Grandpre said. “So I want them to clearly get a picture of where we’re going and where we’re going to be in the next five years.”



He said last year’s inaugural summit led to several renewals and spurred leads that led to some of the major deals unveiled in the past year. That includes a partnership unveiled in July with Bayer, whose Bayer HealthCare unit has its North American headquarters in Hanover, in a deal centered on community involvement and the Red Bulls’ vast youth development program.



The club earlier this year also announced its largest-ever marketing partnership with Yanmar, a Japanese heavy equipment maker. The deal led to the first-ever branding on the Red Bulls’ training jerseys that wasn’t related to the club’s energy drink parent company, among other aspects.



de Grandpre said Thursday’s event will also touch on the Red Bulls’ youth sporting initiatives and the overall state of Major League Soccer, which will have representatives in attendance. Club executives will also highlight the Red Bulls’ performance on the field — it has clinched a playoff spot and is now gunning for the Eastern Conference regular season title with two matches to go.



“The season has been amazing and it’s part of the story we want to tell more,” de Grandpre said. “A lot of folks counted us out back in January. But I think we had a clear plan, we have a coach and a front office staff that are focused on executing the plan and I think the results on the field are obviously driving the results off the field and vice versa.



“The energy in the building has really been channeling itself on and off the field and everything is going in the right direction.”

