New agricultural operators should all learn a thing or two about marketing

In recent years, while conducting research at the rural grassroots level, I have come into contact with quite a few family farms, specialized large-scale farmers and farmers' cooperatives, and visited many agricultural enterprises, including even national- and provincial-level leading enterprises in agricultural industrialization. I found that these new agricultural operators are growing into the driving force behind “who will farm the land” in China and the accelerator of modern agriculture, but marketing is a shortcoming that seriously constrains their development. The Third Plenary Session of the 18th Central Committee of the Party called for accelerating the building of a new agricultural operating system, and the Central Rural Work Conference further stressed the need to encourage the development of and vigorously support these new entities, which shows that the central leadership has great expectations in this regard. In this sense, if new agricultural operators have the lofty ideal of building a “century-old brand” and want to shoulder their responsibilities in the historical process of making the country strong in agriculture, making rural areas beautiful and making farmers rich, they must lose no time in “building up their health” in many ways, and the first thing they should do is learn a thing or two about agricultural product marketing.

First, it is very important to always be clear about your position in the coordinate system. When studying market positioning, you cannot rely on feelings; you have to use a bit of mathematical knowledge. Finding out your market positioning through investigation and research is an indispensable basic skill for new entities. First, analyze your product thoroughly in order to lock onto the target market. Is your product an ordinary mass-market item or something new, unusual and special, and what unique quality and nutritional value does it have; which groups of people or occupations is it suitable for, and which groups will not like it; is it welcomed locally or elsewhere…… Second, analyze your production capacity thoroughly in order to judge your supply capacity. Make calculations for several situations, including maintaining capacity, intensively raising capacity (such as raising per-unit yield) and extensively raising capacity (such as renting more land), and determine your market supply capacity under different circumstances, including the characteristics of supply, such as whether you can supply continuously all year round or only seasonally. Third, analyze market capacity thoroughly in order to plan your own growth path. How strong is the regional, national and even international growth of the market in your industry, how big is the overall market at the current stage and what is its trend, and what is your share of it and what is the trend. To figure out these questions, smaller entities can make a basic judgment by consulting relatives and friends; larger ones should conduct special investigations or even entrust relevant institutions to investigate, using professional survey methods to analyze the problems through data. Once these questions are clear, the market positioning for yesterday, today, tomorrow and even the day after tomorrow will naturally surface.

Second, always formulate marketing strategy around the “triangle and four sides”, and it must be adjusted dynamically and promptly according to changes in the situation. Spending more energy on telling you and your product what value it can bring to customers is far more meaningful than fixating only on price. In studying and determining marketing strategy, you must always proceed around the “triangle and four sides”. The so-called “triangle” means, first, that the “target” must be clear, that is, with whom you are doing marketing; second, that “information” must be sufficient, and you should tell customers more about the “value” you can bring them (or her), rather than fixing your eyes only on “price”. Price is what consumers need to pay, and saying more about it means making customers repeatedly think about the necessity of paying it; value is what consumers gain, and saying more about value means letting customers know the return they can obtain from paying; third, that the “tools” must be chosen appropriately, and you must carefully consider whether to rely on print media, new media or sales personnel for promotion. The “four sides” has two angles: from your own side, it includes what product to produce, where to produce it, how to set the price and the way to promote it; from the customer's point of view, it includes demand satisfaction, convenience, purchasing cost and the way information is spread. Of course, the best marketing strategy is to be different from others in everything from product to service (that is, differentiation), because in many cases marketing strategy is corporate strategy, and it concerns future survival and development. At the same time, you must also know that today's successful strategy may be the cause of tomorrow's failure. Therefore, you must often carry out analyses of the external environment and internal environment, and on that basis optimize the strategy according to developments, carry out strategy evaluation and formulate implementation plans.

Third, if you want profit, you must learn to consider problems from the customer's point of view. If you can serve customers in the spirit of a “shop assistant”, you will eventually be surprised to find that the real object of your service is yourself. Considering problems from the customer's point of view and genuinely taking the customer's feelings into account is the premise and foundation for improving products and services and enhancing customer “stickiness”. There are many ways to consider problems from the customer's point of view: First, establish your own customer information system and grasp changes in customers and their individualized needs as the basis for your decisions. Second, find ways to talk with past customers, because past customers understand best where your problems lie, and that is exactly the direction for your improvement and efforts. Third, hire important personnel such as marketing and customer service staff from among customers, and in this way implant consideration for customers into your operations. Fourth, establish channels and mechanisms for reflecting customer wishes. In fact, those large enterprises that do well all place this in a very important position and must “rack their brains”; merely setting up a toll-free customer service telephone line is far from enough, and it certainly must not become “harassment”; it should be warm and full of human feeling. Fifth, find a way to experience once what it feels like to be a customer. Sometimes putting yourself in another's shoes is more targeted and persuasive than reasoning. Sixth, you can also experience once what it feels like to be a customer of a competitor, and your understanding of yourself and your rivals will become clearer. At the same time, make good use of the “80/20” rule, especially for those important customers who already are or may become your main source of profit; you should observe their words and watch their actions even more, and making them feel “at home” is the real sharp weapon for enhancing customer stickiness.

⟦NL> Fourth, the person who understands you best is yourself. Do not rush to bundle everything away the moment you encounter a sales problem. Agricultural product marketing must follow general rules. New entities must first recognize that, with the continuous deepening of China's agricultural market-oriented reform and the increase in market openness, for agricultural products, especially fresh and live agricultural products such as vegetables and fruits whose production has maintained sustained and rapid growth, the era when “good wine needs no bush” is already a very distant matter, and proactively carrying out promotional activities is necessary. After summarizing a century of practice in the advertising industry, someone put forward ten principles, which are equally applicable to new entities: First, tell the truth, because false publicity will bring more loss than gain; second, provide all relevant information, including the production area environment, production procedures, harvesting methods and so on, because in a certain sense consumers are buying not only the product but also the culture it carries; third, speak of both the good and the bad sides, which groups it suits and which groups it does not suit, and this should have been studied and considered well long ago, because it means market positioning and market segmentation; fourth, use more text and fewer graphics, and the eye-catching topic sentence must explain who we are and what is different about us; fifth, keep the style concise, because the result of bluster is that “the riot of blooming flowers gradually dazzles the eyes”; sixth, be positive and uplifting; seventh, pay attention to details, and you must give people considerate consumption guidance; eighth, respect everyone; ninth, do not seek cheap popularity; tenth, do not be farcical and affected, because no one is willing to imagine the feeling of enjoying delicious food from that.

Fifth, brand cultivation is of course very important. Do not go in for diversification just because you have a bit of fame; sometimes the one who pulls the rug out from under you is yourself. At present we are in an exploratory period in which people are beginning to attach importance to agricultural brands while many problems still need answers sought in practice. On the issue of brands, new entities should pay attention to avoiding several undesirable tendencies: First, do not separate brand cultivation from your own daily production and operation process. There is no way out in discussing brands for the sake of brands; you must do everything possible to convey your unique production and processing techniques to the market brand and endow it with quality, taste and cultural connotation. Second, do not consider diversification and pluralism just because your own brand has gained a bit of fame, and rush to cultivate several more, because that actually dilutes the influence of the brand. You should put full effort into maintaining the brand, promoting its influence and tapping its value tension. You should protect and develop your own brand as you protect your eyes, and exert force in both connotative production and extensional markets. Third, do not separate brand protection from the marketing process. The brand should be used as an important carrier for conveying information to customers and feeding back customers' market opinions. Only when operating entities and consumers form a kind of interaction and tacit understanding in brand cultivation will brand influence burst forth. Fourth, do not separate your own brand from regional public brands. You should care for regional public brands as you care about your own “profit statement”. You should support the development of relevant associations, not only forming an atmosphere that safeguards the image of regional public brands, but also exploring the establishment of mechanisms to protect regional public brands; otherwise it will be difficult to break the dilemma in which the value of regional public brands rises while product prices fall.

Sixth, the shortage of marketing talent is a feature of the times. Do not assume that understanding production and processing means understanding marketing. It is worthwhile to be willing to spend money so that your management team has marketing capability. In the development of new entities, there is no lack of “able-person economy”. Quite a number of rural able persons who “roamed the rivers and lakes” in the 1980s and 1990s gradually carved out their own careers, and now most of them have begun to consider the succession and development of their careers, while the weakest link in their management is often marketing. There are only two paths to solve this problem: First, external recruitment. Seek to bring in top marketing talent. There are success stories in this respect, as well as lessons of failure, and a very important one is poor stability. How to solve the loyalty problem of externally hired senior managers, whether through value identification, high salary or equity incentives, all need to be explored. The other is to train your own.

Many successful people intentionally let possible successors start at the grassroots level, and this is absolutely necessary. But this method of “under the eaves” often makes it difficult to cultivate talent that surpasses the previous generation of managers. Therefore, you should also be willing to invest and give some time, letting the new generation go out to broaden their horizons, learn and temper themselves, so that it is possible to raise the level of management to a new step and achieve sustained development of the career from a higher starting point. Of course, at present a large amount of external capital is entering agriculture, and their management and marketing are often at the frontier. When we ourselves are unable to climb higher and encounter a bottleneck, considering cooperation is also a path, but you must protect your own core competitiveness well.