The Internet Era's Agricultural Transformation Urgently Needs Brand Building
The issues of agriculture, rural areas and farmers have always been problems the state is committed to solving, and the Central No. 1 Document has focused on agriculture, rural areas and farmers for 12 consecutive years. When traditional models cannot solve the various problems facing agriculture, the Internet, with its powerful process-reengineering capability, has given agriculture new opportunities.
Through the application of Internet technology and thinking, the traditional agricultural industry chain can be thoroughly upgraded in areas such as finance, production, marketing and sales, improving efficiency, changing the industrial structure, and ultimately developing into a new type of Internet agriculture that overcomes the various shortcomings of traditional agriculture.
The Internet has great advantages for the deep transformation and upgrading of agriculture, specifically reflected in 5 aspects.
Establish a safe and healthy brand image
Food safety issues have become the biggest bottleneck in the development of agricultural products. How can consumers regain confidence? Creating a transparent supply chain system through the Internet is the most direct method.
The traceability system extended from the food sector aims to solve food safety and food credibility problems. Through a QR code, consumers can scan it with a mobile phone and see the traceability information of the product, including where it was cultivated, when it was picked, who picked it, and the packaging date. All of this requires the support of technologies such as the Internet, the Internet of Things, online video and cloud computing. Ultimately, using Internet technology to achieve full-process traceability of production, combined with cooperation with quality inspection and other authoritative institutions, can create a truly transparent supply chain through multi-party collaboration.
Standardization of agricultural production
The inability to standardize agricultural production has always been an important factor restricting agricultural development. At present, the Internet of Things can thoroughly transform agriculture from the production stage, making agriculture automated, precise and traceable, reducing manpower, lowering costs, and ultimately achieving standardization of agricultural production. Although it is not very popular now, it is the trend of the future and still has great room for development.
Applying Internet of Things technology in agricultural production can use various wireless sensors to collect in real time parameters such as light, temperature and humidity at the agricultural production site as well as information on the growth status of agricultural products, then aggregate and integrate the collected parameter information, and finally use an intelligent system to carry out timed, quantitative and location-based processing, promptly and precisely remotely controlling the turning on or off of designated agricultural equipment, truly realizing intelligent agriculture.
Upgrading the sales model for agricultural products
Because agriculture has obvious seasonality and regionality, and is also easily affected by climate factors, and because China's smallholder management system makes it difficult to effectively connect with the large market, agricultural products often experience difficulties in selling and the harvest paradox of a bumper harvest bringing only a little more income.
Undoubtedly, e-commerce can shorten the distance between producers and consumers, so that agricultural products are no longer unsalable because of geographical reasons. In addition, because e-commerce platforms can allow producers' products to be delivered directly to consumers, omitting intermediate distribution channels, they also greatly reduce product prices.
More importantly, Internet channels can fundamentally change the relationship between production and sales, use big data analysis to locate consumer demand, and organize the production and sales of agricultural products according to consumer demand, thereby achieving zero inventory of agricultural products, as LeTV's ecological agriculture adopted this C2B approach.
Improve rural financial services
Finance is the core of the economy, and rural finance is the core of the rural economy. However, China's rural financial services cannot meet the needs of farmers.
Starting in early 2000, the central bank and the banking regulatory commission began gradually carrying out innovation in financial institutions, encouraging agriculture-related financial institutions to develop innovations in financial products and services in various forms, including village-level mutual aid funds, forest rights mortgage loans, microcredit, village and township banks, mutual fund cooperatives, and the company + base + farmer model.
However, constrained by multiple factors such as region, resources and industrial structure, this innovation in rural financial products led by the regulatory level has not effectively improved rural financial problems, and the problems of a single variety of rural financial products and insufficient supply remain prominent.
Create cheap and efficient marketing entry points
What is the Internet best at? Marketing. Whether it is the traditional principle of hunger marketing or new social tools, Internet people are always best at turning something dead into something alive.
In agriculture, various social media and communication tools can provide convenient marketing entry points for agricultural products, and more importantly, marketing costs are extremely low. Weibo, WeChat, QQ and SNS are all free resources, and no industry can establish trust relationships with consumers as easily as Internet people and use them to promote products.
Why has traditional agriculture not developed well? One important reason is the lack of brands, resulting in low added value of agricultural products and no profit for farmers. We believe the Internet is most suitable for brand building because it can spread marketing at low cost. Why are Chu Orange, Liu Peach and Pan Apple so popular? It is because of the Internet's powerful marketing ability.
The marketing attributes of Internet agriculture have three key factors: first, the good use of the concept of market segmentation, using big data to precisely locate target customers and avoid generalized marketing; second, using excellent customer service to achieve close interaction with customers and continuously improve product quality; third, appropriate industrial chain control, neither attempting to operate across the entire industrial chain nor simply outsourcing production. Good product quality control of upstream raw materials in the industrial chain and standardized production of downstream product processing are the best approach.