Saturday Snapshot - April 8th
This Week's Snapshot: The Courage of Choosing Your Customer, Frameworks vs. Products, Making Your Story True
Happy Saturday and Happy Easter weekend!
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. Born to Run: The Magic of Building a Unique Point of View
2. The Courage of Choosing Your Customer
Quit hiding.
Many companies in #agtech today spend their energy hiding in the fallacy of the mass market.
- “We’re a tool for everyone in agriculture.”
- “We’re feeding the world.”
The mistake these companies make is tricking themselves into trying to serve everyone.
They cloak themselves in the safety of small changes for all, instead of critical change for the customer to whom they can really matter.
But why?
Because it’s safer that way. It’s easier to get to the end of the venture money, throw your hands up and say
• “See? We tried.”
• “We had such a big hairy audacious goal.”
• “The market just wasn’t ready.”
But did you?
Did you really have something new, a different approach, or are you just digitizing current processes?
Was the market not ready, or did you fail to define it?
It takes courage to study a small group of people and design a solution tailor-made for them.
It takes courage to tell someone, “here is this tool; this is what you can do with it. It will change your life.”
It is far easier to sling tech and hope for adoption; to ask, “what would you do with this?”
Because then you're not on the hook for the outcome.
But meaningful change only happens when we commit to being on the hook.
That's the definition of marketing - the act of making and keeping remarkable promises to your audience.
Have courage, come out of hiding, and make something that matters for the smallest viable market.
Make something different. Make people care. Make fans, not followers.
2. Frameworks vs. Products
Agriculture is not facing a lack of new products, but a lack of new frameworks.
These are what Warren Buffett’s business partner Charlie Munger calls “latticeworks on which to hang your ideas.”
In other words, the operating system or type of thinking your customer should use to get the best results from your product.
“We can not solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them” - Albert Einstein
Over the past few decades hundreds of agricultural products have been released to the industry. Many of which have been incredible technologies that were extremely hard to make.
Yet adoption has been a slow at best.
Some say this lack of adoption is due to technical difficulties and the inability to translate hype into change. Some people blame the industry, saying it is opposed to change.
I believe that the problem with adoption is that we have created new technologies that rely on old frameworks.
- “Agriculture needs a digital transformation.”
- We’re disrupting the agriculture industry.”
We don’t need your digital transformation, we don’t need your disruption. Both of these approaches mean slapping a new coat of paint on an old and broken system.
We need you to bring us new frameworks with which to view and overcome the problems we face.
Be different, build new frameworks.
3. Make Your Story True
Every marketing dollar you spend is wasted.
All that time spent in "strategic planning" sessions is better spent elsewhere.
Except when it's not.
Except when you're Apple, and you tell people to "Think Different."
Except when you're Airbnb, and you tell people to "travel like a human."
The difference between companies who burn marketing dollars and those who break through the noise comes down to one thing...
Story; more precisely, whether the story was well-told.
Many people realize that successful marketing requires telling a story, but very few can ever implement one. Instead, most people end up with a variety of narratives.
"We founded this company in 20XX out of my Dad's garage."
"First, we built this, then we built that, and now we're selling it to you."
Who cares?
The most important metric for storytelling in business is whether it consistently connects our audiences to what they most earnestly desire.
Does it help them solve their problem? Does it help them win the day?
Even the best marketing fails when we believe that it is only words on paper, only well-crafted prose, scripts so constructed that anyone can execute them.
Marketing with story is vision. Marketing this way is the ability to see further, to shine a light into the future that says, "here is where we are going; want to join us?"
Then do what you say. Make the story true.
Marketing is not a function of one person or a single department; marketing is the making and executing of promises to your target audience.
Marketing is storytelling. Stop making yours confusing.
Make something different. Make people care. Make fans, not followers.