What AGCO Can Learn From Atlanta's Super Bowl Collapse

Don't compete, change the subject.

Midway through the third quarter of Super Bowl LI, there was a moment when the Atlanta Falcons seemed invincible. They were leading the New England Patriots 28-3 and had just scored their fourth touchdown, a pass from quarterback Matt Ryan to running back Tevin Coleman. The game seemed to be over; all the Falcons needed to do was hang on to their lead for the next 23 minutes of play, and they would be Super Bowl champions. The stands of NRG Stadium in Houston, Texas, were packed with more than 70,000 fans, many of whom had visibly checked out of this apparent blowout - and then something happened. 

On the Patriot’s next drive, they slowly moved 75 yards down the field and scored on 13 plays - mostly short passes that the Falcons seemed more than happy to concede. After all, they were still winning by three scores - 28-9. All they had to do was keep from giving up any big plays. 

Atlanta took possession of the ball, but something had changed in their demeanor. They were no longer as aggressive. They began to make mistakes. An errant pass from Ryan on second down. A Patriot’s sack on third down. A special teams penalty on Atlanta as they lined up to punt. 

To begin the final quarter of play, the Patriots again drove the ball downfield on an increasingly flat-footed Atlanta defense and came away with a field goal. 12-28, the Falcons still held a commanding lead. 

On Atlanta’s next possession, Matt Ryan was sacked and fumbled the ball into the hands of a Patriot defender. The Patriots quickly scored. 20-28 Atlanta. 

On the Falcons’ sideline, heads were down, and there was visible frustration. Veterans encouraged younger players. Coaches held strategy sessions. The confidence they had just one quarter earlier was gone. They were losing their lead, and everyone in the stadium could feel it slipping away. 

With five minutes left, the Falcons put together a promising sequence with a 22-yard pass from Ryan to star wide receiver Julio Jones. But a sack and another offensive penalty stalled their progress, and they were forced to punt again. 

The Patriots moved down the field again, traveling 91 yards with six big throws from Brady, ending in a one-yard run by running back James White and a subsequent two-point conversion pass from Brady to receiver Danny Amendola with 57 seconds remaining. The game was tied 28-28. 

On the Falcon’s last possession of regulation, their kickoff returner, Eric Weems, decided to take the ball out of the end zone, where he could have kneeled and given his team the ball at the 25-yard line. He was tackled at his own 11, giving the team terrible field position. After two short passes, Atlanta was forced to punt the ball back to New England, sending the game into overtime.

In overtime, the Patriots capitalized on a slow-moving Falcons defense to quickly move the ball downfield. A foolish Atlanta penalty brought them to the goal line, where the Patriots running back James White smashed through three Falcon’s defenders, and mercifully, it was over. The New England Patriots were Super Bowl champions. They had defeated the Atlanta Falcons 34-28. 

Groups of people often fail under pressure. Sports teams blow huge leads, and businesses are disrupted by comparatively insignificant opponents. 

In the fog of competition, leaders fail to lead with vision, and team members lose focus. When this happens, we tend to blame the tactics. We say a team should have passed more or handed the ball off to their star running back when the game was on the line. We say that companies should change their sales and marketing, shift operational procedures, or change their pricing model. While these are all inarguably a factor in the success or failure of an endeavor, they are insufficient as standalone solutions. 

We need something more than tactics and planning. 

The management thinker Roger L. Martin has famously made a distinction between planning and strategy. The number of facilities you’re going to operate this season is planning. It’s one of a set of activities that your company has committed to this year. You control the decision and you alone dictate the outcome. 

Google’s decision to be the most streamlined, easiest-to-use search engine was, by contrast, a strategy. It was a theory that led the company to make an integrated set of choices about how they were going to win. Yahoo! and others were trying to become portals. They had over 500 words on their homepage with a variety of buttons. Google had just 50 words with two buttons, one of which said “I feel lucky.” 

Strategies require hypotheses and judgments of uncertainty, and the hard part is that we do not control their outcome from the boardroom. 

The team at Google had a theory about what their customer wanted, and so did the engineers at Yahoo! and Internet Explorer and AltaVista and Lycos and any number of computer scientists and journalists. For that matter, so did every tech blogger at the time. But only one of those companies, Google, now owns more than 91% of the global search engine market. Their strategic theory, that the consumer wanted fast loading and no decisions, was correct and provided them with a clear decision framework for all of their otherwise disparate organizational activity. 

Marissa Mayer, who used to run Google’s search products, tells a story about emails they would get from one of their superusers in the early days. “Every time he writes, the email contains only a two-digit number. It took us a while to figure out what he was doing. Turns out he’s counting the number of words on the home page. When the number goes up, like up to 52, it gets him irritated, and he emails us the new word count. As crazy as it sounds, his emails are helpful because it has put an interesting discipline on the UI team so as not to introduce too many links. It’s like a scale that tells you that you’ve gained two pounds.” Instead of chasing the rest of the industry towards introducing more optionality, Google focused on being the easiest to use, defining and designing a fame they could dominate. And they won. 

The distinction between a plan approach and a strategy approach is not trivial. 

If you were to analyze the soft drink market in the 1980’s through the plan lens you would assume that the best way to compete with the dominant player, Coca-Cola, would be to create a drink that tasted better than Coke, came in a larger can than Coke, and was less expensive than Coke. If you consider the same market through the strategic lens, though, you’d have to wonder if all of those plans might lead you to be another “also-ran” cola. Instead, you’d want to identify yourself as altogether different than Coke. You’d want to double down on what makes you distinct. You might make a drink that tastes awful, comes in a small can, and costs a good deal more than Coke. That's what Dietrich Mateschitz and the team at Red Bull started doing in 1987 and in 2023, the company sold nearly $11 billion worth of Red Bull. 

If plans go wrong, the response is frequently to apply the same set of tactics again—this time with more enthusiasm. Strategies, though, offer opportunities for continuous improvement by asking, “What would have to be true for this strategy to work?” and then watching for whether we see those situations play out in real time so we can adapt. Plans have simple solutions and take a one-size-fits-all approach. Strategies do not. 

If you listened to the analysis of Super Bowl LI, you’d most likely come to the conclusion that Atlanta’s problem was a plan problem. 

Many people blamed their offensive coordinator, Kyle Shanahan, for bad play-calling down the stretch. Others blamed running back Devonta Freeman for missing a block that led to a Patriot’s strip-sack. They pinpointed individual plays, criticized calls, and did all of the things that fans and pundits normally do after a team loses a game. And most of them missed the point. The Atlanta Falcons’ problem in the 2017 Super Bowl was not a tactical issue but a complete breakdown that came as the result of having no collective strategy for winning the game. The difference between the Patriots and the Falcons was that the Patriots had a winning aspiration while the Falcons just wanted to compete and play in the game; Atlanta was happy to be there and hoped to hold on to their lead. When one side is set on winning, and the other is just focused on showing up, it means that no matter what the score says or how bad the odds look, the team with a collective strategy for winning always has the advantage. It’s a seemingly obvious point, but one that nonetheless bears repeating, particularly when we’re in the midst of assessing industry announcements like the recent joint venture between AGCO and Trimble. 

PTx is the result of AGCO purchasing an 85% stake in Trimble, an enormous opportunity for both companies, especially AGCO, to define and lead the conversation around automation and precision in agricultural equipment.

And that is why the announcement of PTx in April was so disappointing. Over the last five years, John Deere has sucked all of the oxygen out of the category conversation around agricultural equipment. They’ve planted all the flags in the industry. They’ve set the pace of innovation. They’ve set the standard for autonomy with product introductions in places where ag doesn’t traditionally show up, like CES. They’ve dominated the conversation around precision with products that have become synonymous with the category like See & Spray. This is what AGCO, CNH, and every other equipment company is up against - how do you outmaneuver John Deere? 

Unfortunately, AGCO’s launch of PTx will do little to change the conversation from revolving around Deere. The reason is simple: just like the Atlanta Falcons and wannabe Coca-Cola brands, AGCO has failed to differentiate its offering from Deere’s. Thus, all of their marketing, all of their advertising, and all of their re-branding is essentially going to fuel Deere’s story. Put another way, AGCO has failed to redefine the conversation with their customers, leaving them executing a plan with no real strategy for designing a game they can win. 

The headline of AGCO’s press release introducing the new brand read, “AGCO Launches PTx, a Precision Ag Portfolio to Accelerate Technology Transformation.” In a separate interview, CEO Eric Hansotia said, “AGCO intends to be the most farmer-focused company in the industry. We're going to serve every single farmer. We're going to serve the farmer that already has a piece of equipment that wants (a) retrofit upgrade, we'll serve the farmer that wants a new piece of equipment from one of our OEM partners, or a new piece of equipment from one of our brands.”

Could you think of a less differentiated way to introduce your new brand? Could you think of a worse way to define your target market, to align with them on something they believe? Essentially, AGCO is saying, “We are introducing a rebrand of the same technology we’ve had in the past with virtually nothing new, and it’s way better than Deere…because we love farmers more than they do.”

Over the last five years, we have all watched as John Deere has run away with the profits in the equipment category, leaving every other equipment company in the dust. We are watching a category king take its rightful place because, as we know, the category king captures 76% of the market economics on average. AGCO has an opportunity to carve out its own niche and define a market category it can uniquely own, and it is clearly chickening out. 

AGCO fell into the “better trap,” and things will get ugly if they don’t change course quickly.

But Hansotia and AGCO are not alone, in modern agriculture, we spend incredible levels of energy trying to be “better” than the competition. We aim to build and ship “very good” products. We spend millions of dollars ensuring our technologies meet a certain spec or function properly. And no one cares. 

No one cares because functional products don’t tell a story worth sharing; they're what's expected. No one cares because there are a million companies delivering similarly adequate service with somewhat knowledgeable staff and comparably sufficient product performance. And by the way, a few of them are local to your customers, too. Our customers don’t need more products that work as expected or value-added service lists that look like everyone else. They need more experiences worth sharing. They need more ways to differentiate you in their minds. They need a clear story to tell themselves about why you’re the only option for them. 

The greatest danger to future businesses in agriculture will not be vitriol or outrage in the market; the greatest risk will be the echoing thud of customer apathy.

In a world flush with options, playing it safe - only doing what is expected of you is a recipe for failure. As the Atlanta Falcons and their Super Bowl catastrophe show, playing it safe—playing just to play—is now the most dangerous option. 

Instead, we need to define what makes us different. We need to take the incumbent’s strengths and turn them into weaknesses. 

Marriott spent 100 years and many millions of dollars ensuring that every customer who walked into one of its hotels faced the same consistent experience. They built trust and invested in limiting variety. That’s what customers wanted, and that’s what they paid for. It made Marriott a very wealthy company. Airbnb didn’t come into the market and preach about being a better hotel - they didn’t try to out-Marriott Marriott. Instead, they flipped the narrative for their customers when they told them they could “live like a local.” Of course, Paris is different than New York. Of course, the amenities vary between Houston, Texas, and Minneapolis, Minnesota. That’s what it’s like to live in that place. Suddenly, not having room service or a semi-edible breakfast buffet isn’t a liability - it’s a feature of the experience. 

We see this pattern repeated across time in some of the greatest marketing of all time. 

• “Avis is number two, so we try harder.”

• Guinness said, “Good things come to those who wait”

• Stella Artois reminded us that they were “reassuringly expensive.” 

Yes, they’re advertising slogans, but they’re also much more than that. They are stories that customers can tell each other and themselves, stories that clarify how this brand is different and stake out a unique opportunity they can capitalize upon. These stories are strategies for winning. 

The leadership at AGCO needs to immediately find their version of “living like a local”; their “reassuringly expensive.”

They need to identify a truly different category that they can own. They need to decide what future they want to bring about in agriculture. 

As Howard Marks says, “You can’t predict; you can prepare.” 

What future is AGCO preparing for? What do you believe? Is there something that the rest of the market is wrong about? What is something true about equipment that Deere and CNH can’t own? 

What if instead of copying Deere, AGCO launched PTx to effectively target the independently-minded farmer who is uncomfortable getting stuck in Deere’s closed-loop system? 

This is the person who wants more control, more autonomy (personally and with their equipment), and more ownership of the tools they use. 

They increasingly feel that their equipment owns them. 

It’s not something they would express. It’s just something ever-present on their minds…it’s the sinking feeling they have when they lay awake at night wondering if they’ll be able to cover their payments. It was their discomfort when the Deere rep showed up to the last farm bureau meeting and stumbled when he answered, “Just exactly who is it that owns my data in Ops Center?” 

It’s what has driven this grower and his family to keep running Fendt, Massey, or Challenger all these years. It’s the control of knowing this company is on your side because they’re not the biggest, the fastest, or the easiest - and because of that they try harder and are able to be more personal. 

That would be truly different. 

The problem our companies run into is that we say things like “we’re on your side” and then muddle who's on which side because we’re trying not to exclude anybody. We want to say something without actually having to say something, and that never works. 

The act of marketing is the synthesis of experience. Not to manipulate or propagandize but to show value and help a select group of people understand that this is for them. “Pay attention; we made this for you.” 

What most businesses miss is that the opposite of a great market position is not a bad market position…it’s frequently another great market position. 

For example, there are two good ways to check into a hotel room, touch-free and extremely high-touch. The middle sucks. 

What AGCO has done here is shot right into the heart of the middle and as a result this announcement miss everyone.

The iterative logo…(thank you to Shane Thomas for pointing out the similarity)

…and the forgettable name (PTx) are all manifestations of AGCO not taking a position at all. 

It’s time to start exploring the limits of remarkable, to recognize that we have a choice between being distinct and extinct, and to have some courage in what we stand for. 

Make something different. Make people care. Make fans, not followers.