A New Perspective

Article #1 of 9 in “Unconventional Thinking”

A few years ago Maurice wrote a series of blog articles on the need for a new marketing model to serve farmers. He argued that agriculture isn’t served well by either B2C or B2B models and that farmers and the decisions they make deserve to be understood in their own way. As he said then “most of us care deeply about our customers, what they do, and the adversities they face. But that sense of caring is only the start of being customer-centric. Our businesses must overcome organizational barriers to achieve an authentic sense of customer-centricity.” 

“We must have empathy for our customers”

Our focus is and always has been on customer-centricity. In order to be customer-centric, we must have insight into (and empathy for) our customers. The agricultural market is both over and underserved with insight. It is over-served in that few industries have as much access to facts and observations about their customers.  Farmers are still wonderfully accommodating people. They spend far too much time answering the same questions repeatedly, for reports that far too often end up sitting on a shelf. In the conventional world, the “facts” in these reports are sometimes referred to as insights. We respectfully disagree. The market is underserved because little of the research is about farmers themselves: their motivations, their plans, their needs, hence little of it is insightful.  

Perhaps even more important, we have noticed that many individuals and organizations struggle to take action when they have been insightful. Why? We believe it’s because breaking away from the status quo is difficult. We’d like to help with that.

“Breaking the Status Quo is difficult”

In the next few posts, we’ll dive into how we, as agri-marketers, can develop a better understanding of those whom we wish to serve. We’ll talk about the nature of insight, and go beyond to see how we apply real insights to designing desirable experiences for farmers. 

Join us as we explore the link between emotions, rationality, and decision making. More importantly, we’ll talk about some of the tools and techniques for discovering, understanding, and utilizing that emotional content to help drive the connections between your brand and your customers through human-centered design. 

If you think we’re on the right track, send us a note with some encouragement or constructive criticism. And if you think we're wrong please tell us why (Maurice.allin@centricengine.com or bob@wilbur-sp.com).