Farmers Deserve A B2F Approach To Marketing

ARTICLE #1 OF 7 IN “REFRAMING AGRIMARKETING”

This blog post is part of a series originally posted with Quarry Integrated Communications.

If there’s one thing we know from experience it’s that farmers don’t fit comfortably into conventional marketing models. And because marketers tend to embrace these marketing models, agricultural marketing isn’t what it could be. Nowhere near. It’s time to look at how ag marketing needs to change and in [seven] upcoming posts, we’ll look at specific barriers that we need to address to make that change.

As an introduction to the series, let’s look at where we want to be and where we’re currently at. As in most sectors, we as agricultural marketers want to be customer centric — helping farmers solve the real world problems they face — yet we remain decidedly product centric. Even when we try to be customer centric, too many of us reverse engineer the process. We’re trying to discover a problem that our product solves. We’re not making the earnest effort to identify a problem the farmer already has and finding a way to solve that problem, even in situations where we have the know-how to do just that.

Part of this is a hangover from old B2B models of agricultural customers. Granted, most full-time farms would qualify as significant businesses with annual cash flow in the millions of dollars. But unlike most business managers, farmers don’t have checklists of required product specifications (let alone RFPs). Yet our B2B approach takes a very rational approach to product marketing, where quantifiably better product should always succeed. Farmers have to be smart to survive, but their decisions aren't exclusively rational either.

What’s missing is the realization that farming is both a lifestyle and a business venture. The farmer produces more than an agricultural commodity and his ambitions aren’t those shared by most CEOs. At the same time, the two aspects of business and lifestyle are intertwined in a way that adopting a B2C customer model isn’t a better solution. What we have is a customer who is a hybrid — and, because the added layers of complexity and constraints, something distinctly new. 

What we’re proposing is a model that recognizes the unique aspects of farmers, a business-to-farmer or B2F model. It’s a model that is still customer centric, but one that's built to service this uniqueness. As ag marketers, 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 to being customer centric. Our businesses must overcome organizational barriers to achieve an authentic sense of customer centricity.

In the coming posts, we’d like to talk about some of those barriers and how we need to shift our perspective on farmers, farming and farms.