You Own The Brand, Not The Sales Channel

Article #6 of 7 in “REFRAMING AGRIMARKETING”

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

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.

This isn’t a situation unique to agriculture, but it is compounded in this sector by our reliance on retail to differentiate products and build demand. Yet the front-line sales person in the retail store is often beyond our reach, motivated by corporate edicts, sales margins, internal sales competitions, a tidal wave of product information and their own personal preferences. In most situations, we need to rely on customer “pull” rather than retail “push” to drive brand demand.

Because of the face-to-face nature of their relationship, the customer-retail bond is often a strong one. And, frankly, most retailers work hard to build relationships with their customers. After all, they rely on customers who return year after year to make what are typically high value, high volume purchases in order to keep their businesses running. 

A consequence of this trust-building is that retailers tend to be conservative or, at the least, very rational in their approach to sales recommendations. They don’t want to jeopardize the relationship with a bad (or poorly reasoned) recommendation. 

But as we know, what’s described as the best technical solution is contextual. And if the context — or the specific problem were trying to solve — is always framed in the same way, we’ll always arrive at the same solution. Or at least the same criteria for selecting the solution.

The opportunity in the ag sector is that we can establish a more meaningful context before the farmer enters the retail, at the early stages of the buyer’s journey. If we can identify a problem that the farmer really wants to solve and that hasn’t been identified by other marketers, and then address it in a credible way, we create an ideal — and very tenable — situation: farmers will walk into the retail asking for our brands specifically. 

We may be slow to cotton to the idea of the buyer’s journey in ag marketing, but there’s plenty of room to leverage it to our business advantage in the future.