Ag Retail Doesn’t Need Better. It Needs Different.
Why safe strategies stall, bold choices spread, and reverse benchmarking is your new unfair advantage.
“An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.”
- Oscar Wilde
In 2006, Eleven Madison Park was the 50th best restaurant in the world. By 2017, it was number one.
That climb didn’t happen because the food got slightly better.
It happened because the team, led by restaurateur Will Guidara, stopped trying to be better than their competitors. And started being different.
After visiting the top-ranked restaurant in the world, Guidara and his team came back inspired. The food was flawless. The wine pairings, incredible. The service, impeccable.
Everyone wanted to copy it. But Guidara asked a different question:
“What did they miss?”
Two things stood out:
Beer drinkers were treated like second-class citizens.
The coffee experience was forgettable.
So Guidara flipped the script.
He made someone on his team the Beer Sommelier. He appointed a Coffee Sommelier.
Flights, pairings, storytelling. Reverence where there currently was none.
They didn’t compete on what was obvious or by trying to do what everyone else did. They won by owning what had previosuly been ignored.
Most ag retailers aren’t making bold decisions.
They’re just recycling safe ones. Look around and you’ll see the same formula everywhere:
“We’re local.”
“We’re trusted.”
“We have great service.”
“We offer a broad product portfolio.”
“We know your operation.”
That’s not a strategy. That’s camouflage. It blends in.
It’s the language of companies trying to sound right without being different. It’s what fills the void when no one’s willing to take a position.
And the result is that the market has been flooded with businesses that are technically average, but forgettable.
They don’t offend. They don’t polarize. But they also don’t move anyone to act.
In today’s crowded landscape, that middle ground isn’t safety…it’s the path to a slow death. You don’t get rewarded for being acceptable. You get ignored.
Because when everything looks and sounds the same, your customer does the only logical thing:
They pick whoever’s cheapest. Or the biggest. Or the closest.
Agriculture doesn’t need more companies doing the same thing slightly better. It needs companies willing to make real choices. To draw hard lines. To build something unmistakable.
And that starts by refusing to copy the obvious things everyone else is already doing.
If you’re trying to prove that your retail business is better than the competition, you’ve already lost.
Because here’s what “better” usually looks like in ag:
More SKUs on the shelf.
More features in the app or in the field.
More programs per acre.
More of everything…
Except clarity. Except a distinct choice about where we will win and how we will be different.
This is the trap that most ag retailers fall into.
Most companies in agriculture compete by comparison, trying to win a side-by-side battle against the retailer down the road or the co-op across the county line.
They front-load their pitch with features.
They lead with “unique value.”
They try to drown out the noise by being marginally louder.
But the best companies don’t win by comparison. They win by creating a new lens. By forcing a choice and not a comparison.
In the late 1990s, something strange was happening at Apple.
The company was shrinking. Microsoft had more than 90% of the operating system market. Intel was king of processors. Dell had cracked the code on custom hardware. And Apple? Apple was floundering.
To most observers, it looked like a game that had already been won.
So when Steve Jobs returned as CEO in 1996, everyone expected a familiar response:
new product features, a refreshed OS, a push for parity.
But that’s not what Jobs did.
He waited. He watched. He said, “We’re going to wait until the conditions are right to change the subject.”
Not win the debate. Change the subject.
Five years later, the iPod launched. And with it, a new frame: “1,000 songs in your pocket.” Not better software. Not better storage. A new lens entirely.
Seven years later, the iPhone followed. A device that wasn’t just a phone. It wasn’t just a music player. It wasn’t just a web browser. It was all three, packaged with a completely new category: the App Store.
Apple didn’t outcompete. It outframed.
And that’s the difference between playing to win and playing to rewrite the rules.
That’s the real job of marketing. Not to win a side-by-side comparison. To shift the lens your customer uses to make decisions in the first place.
Stop asking, “How do we beat what’s already out there?” Start asking, “How do we make the competition irrelevant?”
The goal isn’t to out-muscle the competition. It’s to force a choice; to make the customer say, “This was made for me.”
And that only happens when you stop benchmarking against your competition’s strengths and start building around their blind spots.
Don’t try to outmatch the competition on scale, access, or price. Design a different game entirely.
Because when you change the lens, you change the outcome.
In ag retail today, there are huge opportunities for contrarian thinking.
This is what the mathematician Carl Jacobi called "to invert."
In other words, the ability to turn a situation or a problem upside down or to look at it backward.
The contrarian is the person who lives like Niels Bohr was right when he said, "The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth."
And embraces Oscar Wilde's belief, "In art, there is no such thing as a universal truth. A truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true."
There are two good ways to check into a hotel: contactless and high-touch.
There are two suitable environments for human productivity: collaborative and concentrated.
There are two effective methods of learning: structured and experiential.
The middle is boring. What's forgettable is the slightly cheaper alternative that gets the job done—the commodity that doesn't delight or leave the customer wanting more. It's the safe consensus that kind of stinks.
Unfortunately, most of what we have today in agriculture is similarly in the middle. It fills the market with something and gives our teams something to do today, but it is not worthy of us. It is a cheap imitation of someone else's work. It changes no one. And more often than not, it dies in obscurity. Nobody even knows it's gone.
Many leaders today are terrified of controversy. 'As long as no one says anything bad about what we do, then we must be doing something right.'
But animosity is not the greatest threat to the life of a business. Apathy is.
As Seth Godin said, "In a crowded marketplace, fitting in is a failure. In a busy marketplace, not standing out is the same as being invisible."
You don’t win by being another. You win by being the only.
And that requires us to give up some seemingly good options in order to be great.
You can’t be different without being decisive. You can’t be known for everything. You can’t be everywhere for everyone. You can’t maximize every opportunity without diluting the one thing that could set you apart.
So instead of asking, “What else could we offer?”, start asking:
What do we believe that the competition doesn’t?
What do we see that others haven’t seen yet?
What are we uniquely positioned to do that will set us apart?
Choose where you have a structural advantage, because of your people, your location, your reputation, or your know-how.
Don’t play wide. Play sharp.
If anyone in the industry could repeat your marketing, it isn’t marketing. It’s noise.
This is what separates smart retailers from stuck ones:
They don’t try to outmuscle the competition.
They out-decide them.
They build a business the competition can’t copy, not because it’s secret, but because it’s grounded in choices their rivals are too slow, too safe, or too scared to make.
You can’t just out-distribute or out-discount your competition anymore.
That playbook is worn out.
The retailers that win going forward won’t be the ones with the most acres or SKUs.
They’ll be the ones that design experiences growers actually remember, because those experiences create belief.
Will Guidara calls this the 95/5 Rule:
95% of your energy goes toward flawless execution.
5% goes toward creating unforgettable moments.
That 5%? It’s the margin most ag retailers leave on the table.
It’s experience design, moments that signal care, create confidence, and move people from transaction to trust.
Here are some ways you can put this type of thinking into practice:
Grower Loyalty
Typical Fix: Offer a rebate.
Strategic reframe: Write a note after a tough year. Host a private dinner for your top growers. Loyalty follows relationships, not line items.
Fertilizer Wait Times
Typical Fix: Upgrade infrastructure.
Strategic reframe: Add a wait-time display. Provide certainty about the length of the wait. Offer scheduled pickups. Provide good coffee and TV. Make the wait feel enjoyable.
Product Recommendations
Typical Fix: Lead with trial data.
Strategic reframe: Tell the story of a grower like them who found success. Make the recommendation feel personalized, not prescribed.
Onboarding New Growers
Typical Fix: Leave a brochure.
Strategic reframe: Design a 30-day onboarding experience. Walk their fields. Introduce your entire team. Send a follow-up summary that shows you listened and you understand their operation; their problems. Make it feel like the start of a partnership, not the end of a pitch.
Biologicals & New Tech
Typical Fix: Show the ROI.
Strategic reframe: Abandon the spreadsheet. Tell a story that makes the grower feel clever for trying something new. Position the product as an intelligent gamble. One that bold, forward-thinking farmers are already winning. Let social proof do what rational proof can’t. People don't buy because they are overwhelmed by evidence. They buy because of how owning or using this new product lets them see themselves in a new light.
Because the grower’s experience isn’t just agronomic, it’s emotional.
It’s experiential.
Eleven Madison Park didn’t become the best restaurant in the world by copying what others did well. They got there by noticing what others ignored, and turning it into a signature.
Ag retail needs the same shift.
Most retailers aren’t losing to bad strategy. They’re losing to sameness.
And the opposite of bold isn’t bad. It’s invisible.
So here’s the challenge:
Don’t build another me-too retail. Don’t chase growth through noise and volume. Don’t settle for playing the same game incrementally better.
Define what you believe. Decide what you’re building. Design an experience your customers can feel.
Make something different. Make people care. Make fans, not followers.