Saturday Snapshot - April 1st
This Week's Snapshot: Market The Problem, Not The Product; Create, Don't Compare; Rick Bennett’s Sage Advice On Marketing
Happy Saturday, and Happy April Fool’s Day!
In addition to publishing this newsletter, I have also been working to create discussions on LinkedIn that level up the conversation around marketing and commercialization in agtech. I want to share some of those with you.
Every Saturday, I will post a few of the top discussions from the past week with links to the original post on LinkedIn. I would love to hear your thoughts on this format and the posts themselves!
This week:
1. Market The Problem, Not The Product
Most companies in #agtech are in love with their product.
“We’re the fastest/cheapest/best.”
But if you’re a startup or a company trying to do something new, then your product will iterate over time.
On top of that, if what you’re doing is non-consensus, then it is likely that there is no cohesive market for your solution today. It’s still being formed by you.
What stays far more consistent is the set of problems your customers experience on a daily basis.
If you fall in love with your product, you’ll risk missing your customer by miles.
If you fall in love with the problem, you’ll be the go-to for everyone who needs to solve it.
Like Wayne Gretzky said, “skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.”
Stop chasing product-market fit and discover product-problem fit.
Chase the problem, and you’ll find the market. Chase the market, and you’ll end up with problems.
2. Create, Don’t Compare
- “We’re better than Coke.”
- “We’re better than Coke.”
- “We’re better than Coke.”
Now all you’re thinking about is Coke.
The The Coca-Cola Company should really pay PepsiCo an affiliate fee for their marketing.
Pepsi unwittingly boosts the credibility of Coke every time they anchor their story to their competition.
It’s like saying to your customers “don’t think about green, don’t think about green…”
They’re thinking about green.
Most of us in #marketing accept the fundamental premise that what you see is what you get when it comes to “the market.”
Demand is set, the best we can do is fight for more of what currently exists.
We get so fixated on current solutions that we forget about solving the actual problem.
As a result, we unwittingly accept the gravitational pull of comparative mediocrity.
This type of thinking is institutionalized in nearly every business book, class, seminar, etc.
We’re encouraged at every turn to find our “competitive differentiation” or how we can “disrupt the market.”
We act as if the market is some magical force outside of human control or assume that the only way to solve your customer’s problem is by making incrementally better widgets than the current suppliers.
“We’re X, but faster.”
“We make Y, but cheaper.”
“The market demands X, so we’re making it better.”
…all good ways to become seen as a commodity.
In the past, we thought of our products as the hero.
We “won” when our product was better than the other company’s products…
This framework demanded that we start by looking at the competitive landscape, reverse-engineer the leading solutions, relentlessly focus on incremental improvements, and spend our entire marketing budget highlighting those improvements…
Here’s an example from remote sensing in agriculture:
“More datapoints than manual scouting alone.”
The minute we mindlessly follow this well-trodden path to comparative analysis, we agree to let our competition (the incumbent) define the problem, prescribe the solution, and set the value for the benefit.
All the customer is thinking about now is their experience walking fields, and that one year they caught the outbreak of that one pathogen in their crop because they happened to walk past it…and the sale is over, you have already lost.
In #agtech, we have naively anchored our new, innovative solutions to current practices, effectively canonizing time-tested methods as the gold standard for that specific discipline.
Instead, we should answer the question: why does the customer want 100x more data points?
In other words, what are they trying to accomplish? What is the problem you solve?
Go evangelize that…
Or sign up as an affiliate for the category leader.
3. Rick Bennett’s Sage Advice On Marketing
“Don’t say anything that one of your competitors would say.” - Rick Bennett (the advertising genius behind early Oracle and Salesforce ads).
Too often, companies in #agtech lack the courage to say something different than the rest of the market.
But if your company is not interested in saying something meaningfully different than everyone else, then at a certain point you have to begin asking the questions, “why do we exist at all? Whose message are we actually paying to distribute?”
- “What if someone doesn’t like it?”
- “What if we make someone mad?”
These are the frameworks that lead to World Agri-Tech stage sessions that put everyone to sleep.
(It’s not ALL their fault, there were some people suffering from jet lag).
Here’s the thing: anything worth saying inherently runs the risk of offending someone.
If not, you’re propbably running commodity content - something anyone and everyone else can say…part of the noise.
The other decision is to put forward a real point of view.
- People won’t all agree with you.
- People will tell you you’re wrong.
- People might even feel passionately that you should stop talking.
…and sometimes they might be right.
Their criticism might mean you need to re-think your position. It might mean that your idea wasn’t a terribly good one.
But it also might mean that what you’re building just isn’t for them.
Courage doesn’t mean that you turn into a tyrannical jerk who shouts everyone down the minute they disagree with you, but facing the potential of criticism also doesn’t mean that you sand down your edges, shut up, and get on-message with the rest of the crowd.
Things can move very quickly from “stupid ideas that will never work” to “just the way we do things.”
But this move always begins with someone who is willing to say and think something radically different than everyone else. Stop blindly following the crowd.
Make something different. Make people care. Make fans, not followers.