2019
By the nature of their profession, marketers tend to experiment. This, in fact, is how interest arises in whether the marketing toolkit differs from one product to another, and whether personal marketing differs from product marketing.
Since we are in the agribusiness field, I will try to outline the differences and «tricks» of agricultural marketing:
- agricultural marketing has a specific product: it is alive, it grows in the field for 6 months or more, before that results are collected and analyzed, there are clear seasonal curves and many natural dependencies;
- the product requires agronomic knowledge — without it, marketing is impossible;
- given the product, the needs, «pain points» and wants are also specific. They are nothing like the needs to «quench thirst», «satisfy hunger» or «freshen up clothes»;
- communication is heavily tied to opinion leaders, and this is also where the specifics of the marketing toolkit lie;
- you can exaggerate or «do some editorial polishing» only once — next season you will no longer be on the market;
- the market is quite conservative, and this fact also dictates the use of its own tools.
Based on all of the above, in agricultural marketing the absolute musts are:
- Understand the product (an agronomic education or a good mentor who will teach you the practical basics): why farmers need you, how you differ from everyone else, what the main advantages of the product are that will increase yields at minimal (optimal) costs.
- The farmer constantly needs support: visit, show interest, give feedback, respond to his needs with the company's services, study your product thoroughly, improve it and give advice. A full agrotechnological service.
- Since the market is conservative, people trust a friend, a neighbor or an opinion leader in the region most of all. Whatever can be seen in the fields (production fields, not demonstration ones) is the truth. The seeing is believing tool. This is the only way to convince or change the mind of your target audience.
- Everything said on billboards, in printed materials and in videos must be confirmed in the field, in practice. If there is storytelling in the media, it works only once.
- You cannot simply count the liters or bags that left the warehouse and record them as your success. You need to go and see what happened, ask about the problems encountered on the ground, and try to fix them next year.
- The success of all big strategic presentations lies in them reaching the ground and being executed there. Otherwise it will just be a strategy on paper. Operational excellence and full execution.
I am not touching on the fact that marketing is not only advertising and mock-ups; it is, above all, strategy and service to the business idea, which includes portfolio building, pricing, understanding your target audience, brand building and development, communication and distribution channels, all kinds of analytics and monitoring of results. All this is relevant for any business that has marketing, and the topic deserves a separate article.
Yuliia Kamenieva, Marketing Director of LNZ Group
