It’s a harsh dose of reality as you build a customer-centric brand, but you might not be able to influence the most influential waypoint on the buying journey, the point of sale.

Just because farmers buy your product repeatedly doesn’t mean they like you. And, for the moment, that might be okay.

Repeat buying has been synonymous with loyalty in the ag industry for years. But it’s a misguided notion.

As marketers, we need to remind ourselves that we’re in the business of solving our customers’ problems, not our own.

Most agrimarketers know just enough about their customers to be dangerous.

Don’t get me wrong, most ag marketers know and care about farmers and farming. But just do a Google image search on “American farmer” and you’ll see a pretty homogenous gallery of baseball and cowboy hats, families, farm animals and crops, and equipment.

On the road to customer centricity, agricultural marketers need to overcome the tendency to mistake the farmer for the farm. Or, to put a finer point on it, for thinking that the quantifiable aspects of a farm are inherently insightful of the farmer.