Saturday Snapshot - April 22nd
This Week's Snapshot: Be Crazy On Your Customer's Behalf; Changing Our Beliefs; The Rising Rabbit
Every Saturday, I post a few of the top #agtech marketing discussions I’ve had over the past week with links to the original posts on LinkedIn. I would love to hear your thoughts on this format and the posts themselves!
This week:
The Rising Rabbit
1. Be Crazy On Your Customer's Behalf
Don’t just be crazy about your customers, be crazy for them.
Everyone is always ready to give you the painfully obvious advice, “you need to be customer-centric.”
The problem is that this piece of advice is frequently used to inadvertently lead start-ups astray.
When most people say “customer-centricity” they are pushing a company towards assuming an existing market, not encouraging them towards a new one.
Imagine for a minute that you stayed at a New York City hotel in 2007.
A few days later you receive a call from the customer service person who asks you the usual questions about “how you would rate your experience on a scale of 1 to arbitrary.”
You go along with it, hoping each question is the last - you have better things to do than this.
Finally, the customer service agent says “ok, final question.”
Thank the Lord…almost over.
“What was missing or disappointing in your experience with us?”
Let me tell you what you’re probably not going to say at this moment:
“I would love a hosted experience where an individual curates an experience for me and my family in the city from a property they own or operate.”
No. You won’t say that.
Instead, you’ll say something about a better mattress, continental breakfast, or amenities...something incremental.
Because any customer who started talking about an entirely new point of view on travel would sound crazy.
“That’s not the way things are done in the hospitality business, just renovate your rooms so they look like every other hotel room in the world.”
But the folks at Airbnb didn’t depend on their customers to identify the initial opportunity for them. They didn’t ask “is there product-market fit for this idea.”
They said “don’t go there (the solution most hotels offer), live there (the new opportunity).”
Your customers can tell you many things, but they can’t tell you why you show up to work every day. They can’t tell you how you will make the future a better place to live. They can’t spoon-feed you a unique point of view that makes you a leader worth following.
They can’t create your category for you; they can only tell you how to incrementally improve it once you’ve begun building.
The agricultural industry doesn’t need more #agtech startups who ask what they should build or execute Bayer RFP’s forever, we need companies with a vision for the future and the courage to see it through to reality.
We don’t need more companies telling us how crazy they are about farmers, we need more companies who are willing to be crazy on their behalf.
2. Changing What We Believe
Change what your customer believes, not just what brand they buy.
This is the charge of the category designer contending to be king.
In #agtech specifically, I see many companies struggle early in commercialization because their industry-trained salesforce struggles to realize that they’re not selling seed, chemistry, or equipment anymore.
We’re selling a new framework for #agriculture, a completely new farming system.
Many of our companies are coming up short because we don’t really believe in the new future our technology is delivering. It’s not that tech is “too disruptive.” It’s far more common that it is massively undersold and undervalued by us.
We say we’re “disrupting agriculture,” but those are just words on our investor deck or webpage. When it comes down to the brass tacks, we don’t see anything wrong with the current system, and even if we did, we have no point of view on changing it.
If we really believe that we have technology that will improve our customers’ lives, it is incumbent upon us to build our marketing programs around telling stories and providing education that helps to change the belief systems and action patterns of our target customers.
If you don’t give your customer a new identity by changing the way they view their problems, then they’ll always revert to what they know or try out the next new thing, leaving you in the wind.
But you’ll never be able to sell a belief that you and your company don’t already hold.
…and if you can, you’re a sociopath.
Don’t be a sociopath, build a future you believe in.
Make something different. Make people care. Make fans, not followers.