Counselors Over Advisors: Rethinking Our Role in AgTech
The transformative power of questions in shaping agriculture's future.
In agriculture today, everyone claims to be a trusted advisor, but what we actually need are more counselors.
Advisors give advice. Counselors ask the right questions that make us think.
We’re all eager to be proven right. To show why our company’s product is better than anything else on the market and why you need to take our advice.
The problem is that advice is inherently brittle, it doesn't travel well from one situation to the next. Good advice for me could be absolutely horrible for another person experiencing slightly different conditions.
Good questions, on the other hand, are far more resilient because they cause you to re-evaluate the basic presuppositions through which you're unconsciously evaluating every decision.
This is why most marketing in agtech fails.
Not because it's not well-designed, well-executed work, but because it spends all of its time and energy trying to force the customer to change his or her mind instead of providing them with a frame that provides an opportunity to take a new approach towards the problems they face.
It sounds like semantics, but it isn't.
An offer for improved efficiency, savings, sustainability, etc., leaves brands writing checks they can’t possibly cash.
What can a brand do on its own? Not much, it turns out.
Instead, we need to co-create movements of individual customers who approach the problems they face in the same way we do.
We need to frame thinking instead of trying to micro-manage it.
That's why Jimmy Carter’s speeches on stability and experience faded into oblivion when Ronald Reagan asked, “are you better off than you were four years ago?”
Arguments rarely persuade an audience to change their minds, but questions have the power to stay with us long after they are posed and to cause long-lasting change.
My goal in my marketing is not to convince you that I am smart and worth following, my goal is to help you rewrite the story that is playing in your head.
That creates change. That delivers true value. That requires an ability to ask good questions.
Become a counselor, leave everybody else to fight over the trusted advisor title.
Make something different. Make people care. Make fans, not followers.