If You Want Loyalty, Buy A Dog

Article #5 of 7 in “REFRAMING AGRIMARKETING”

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

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. There are plenty of reasons, beyond loyalty and the emotional commitment it implies, for a customer to use a product year after year. The key is to figure out why they buy from you and help secure and bolster that reasoning year over year.

Let’s look at an example of brands that have true customer loyalty. Without naming names, I invite you to go to the kitchen or home section of a rural hardware store. Now look for a cookie jar, mailbox or bath towel that’s emblazoned with the logo of a brand normally associated with farm products. Believe me, they exist! When a customer is willing to pay to display a brand—much like they buy merchandise for their favourite sports team—you know that that brand commands a deep down emotional connection with their customers. 

These brands transcend mere functional competitive advantages. They have an emotional engagement with customers that helps them withstand the occasional product bomb. But such brands are a rarity. 

Most other brands rely on other forms of retention. In some cases, farmers may use a product because it’s the only one on the market that fulfills a particular functional need (at least until a competitor fulfills an equivalent role.) Or, it may be part of an integrated and proprietary system that’s so effective or convenient that farmers feel compelled or locked into to using it (despite how the farmer might otherwise feel about the brand). It could be that the product is a shopping-cart topper that helps farmers boost their total purchase and get more out a manufacturer’s rebate or discount program. Or, of course, the brand could keep customers simply by being the cheapest product in a commoditized category.  

In my experience, you really can’t have a true brand loyalty without some other forms of retention. But the converse isn’t true: just because you rely on several forms of retention tactics doesn't mean you’ll create a great customer-centric brand. That’s because these tactics are, at the end of the day, product-centric. 

What’s really required to create a great brand is continuous innovation that’s based on a real understanding of customers. Ideally this innovation takes place across all business functions, not just one, so that marketing, sales, loyalty programming, customer events, sales and product design all have a role to play. The key to this innovation is to ensure that it’s based on the same understanding of the customer, shared across the organization. When you have this kind of alignment — between customer motivation and company innovation and between an ag company’s business functions — that’s when customer centric thinking leads to great customer experiences.