Saturday Snapshot - April 29th
This Week's Snapshot: The Goldilocks Go-To-Market; Building Starbucks: Why Language Matters; The “We Need Marketing” Problem
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:
1. The Goldilocks Go-To-Market
Most #agtech companies have Goldilocks running their go-to-market strategy.
And it's not going well.
They don’t have a good idea of who the customer is. “Whose house is this anyway?”
And they take a middle ground approach to pricing. “This one’s too hot, this one’s too cold, this one’s just right.”
The problem is that everyone is selling to your customers this way.
With a good enough product, priced reasonably, that performs well enough for anyone using it.
Then we wonder why adoption is flat, and many of our companies are struggling
What if instead of asking, “How can we get the word out?”
We ask, “What would matter here for this customer?”
And what if instead of thinking, “What would the market pay for this?”
We started by thinking through, “What would guarantee my customer’s success in overcoming this challenge?”
Stop selling to everyone, get very specific about who you serve.
Stop having conversations around price, start every interaction discussing value.
Remember, the best Goldilocks ever does in those stories is to escape the bears. If you want to win, don’t let her run your go-to-market.
Make something different. Make people care. Make fans, not followers.
2. Building Starbucks: Why Language Matters
The language you use to describe your product matters.
Here’s proof:
In the 1980’s, coffee was seen as a commodity in the US.
The only question when you ordered it by the cup was, do you want a small, medium, or large?
Whatever choice you made, you would probably end up paying somewhere around $0.50 per cup…
Then in 1987, Howard Schultz bought a small, 16 year old coffee chain in Seattle called Starbucks where a cup of joe cost 3-4x normal prices. And people paid it.
They paid because the product was great, because it provided an affordable luxury, and because the locations provided a third place (not home, not work) to sit around other people just like you.
People paid the premium because Starbucks was different. And they immediately understood and participated in this difference based on the language Starbucks had them use when they ordered.
Instead of adopting the generic language of “small, medium, or large” for the Starbucks menu, Schultz introduced a new, Italian-inspired size list, “short, tall, or grande,” (venti didn’t come until years later).
Starbucks created, defined, and signaled the fact that they were building something different with the language they used to describe their product and today the company that was sold to Howard Schultz for $3.8M in 1987 is now worth $129B - that’s the power of language to create a new future.
Why are those of us in agtech shocked when our customers push back on pricing or struggle to understand the new value we deliver when we use the exact same language as the incumbents to describe our “new” thing?
We communicate identically to the competition at our peril.
As Christopher Lochhead often says, “A demarcation point in language creates a demarcation point in thinking, creates a demarcation point in action, creates a demarcation point in outcome and consumption.”
Make something different. Make people care. Make fans, not followers.
3. The “We Need Marketing” Problem
When most companies in agtech say, “We need marketing!” they are calling for the implementation of a particular set of assumptions they are using as a poor imitation of critical thought around their marketing strategy.
Marketing is not a summation of your tactics used to reach potential customers. Good marketing is a centralized theme or extension of your product that anchors it as the solution to your customer’s problems.
Marketing is the bridge you build to take your customers from where they are today to where you want to take them.
Most marketing is not executed through this lens, which is why most marketing fails.
Make something different. Make people care. Make fans, not followers.