Designing for Farmers: 3 Empathy Traps
Article #4 of 9 in “Unconventional Thinking”
One of the great things about being involved in the business of agriculture is how great the people are. Seriously, having worked in a number of industry verticals, it’s not as common as you might think. Almost everyone in this business knows and has empathy for those who farm - but is it the right kind of empathy for the job?
A critical objective within the design discipline is to “design for someone, not for everyone.” In order to do this effectively, one needs to empathize with the individual, developing a deep understanding of their motivations, to be able to recognize the experiences they desire.
“ There seems to be a reluctance to narrow the focus”
Many agrimarketers fail on this front for two reasons. First, there seems to be a reluctance to narrow the focus, trying to appeal to as many customers as possible, thereby watering down the offer so it appeals to no one in particular. Secondly, they fail to recognize farmers as people first, choosing to put the focus on the farm or the farming practice instead.
We are not insinuating that agri-marketers don’t care about farmers but we have noticed three traps that they invariably get caught up in:
The Customer-Focused, not Customer-Centric trap. This occurs when we think about customers only in the way that they are a customer. Most effort is spent looking at the customer through the lens of a product or service offering. We typically know a lot about the users of our brand, but it is only organized in terms of attributes that are important to the brand or category. It is not helping to solve future needs or create future experiences. When we fall into this trap, we are likely to miss ways in which customer experiences could be improved – either through enhancing the experience around the core product or by identifying an entirely new need.
The Farms, Farming, or Farmers trap. Most of the time, the information that we have about customers is organized around the physical entity of the farm or the agronomic actions related to the practice of farming. It does not focus on, or prioritize the farmer, an individual. They do not focus on the farmer as a person with specific motivational and aspirational needs. The consequences of this trap are to confuse the physical aspects of the product, such as capacity or efficacy, with the experiential needs of the customer, like agency or lack of complexity.
The Father/Uncle/Friend trap. The agriculture industry places a high value on farming experience, as many organizations make this a recruiting requirement. This is indeed a valuable attribute, but in many, if not most organizations, the knowledge that comes with this experience is not structured consistently nor is it available to those who need it most. In fact, our experience indicates that without a unified view of the customer the anecdotal knowledge of one person’s experience typically competes with and often contradicts that of others in the same organization. Falling into this trap means that our design target is unlikely to be truly representative of customers we are appealing to, leading to misspecification in our design, or even worse, that the design is incoherent.
“Do you have the right kind of empathy?”
We shouldn’t confuse the narrower specialties within the discipline of design with the overall act. If you are involved in any way in the planning, development, or execution of strategies and/or tactics you are a designer. You should think like one and remember, as Adam Judge says: “the alternative to good design is bad design, there is no such thing as no design.” Avoiding these three traps will make you a better designer.
