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“Food is the moral right of all who are born into this world,” said Norman Borlaug, father of the “Green Revolution.” Borlaug, who passed away late last year, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his work in fighting world hunger by developing high-yielding wheat crops and bringing agricultural improvements to developing countries.
Today, however, the very high yield technologies advocated by Borlaug are under attack in Europe – due in part to a lack of understanding of the safety and benefits these agronomic practices provide. This includes even mutagenesis, a naturally occurring process that, when harnessed, allows plant breeders to safely isolate genetic traits and pave the way for more profitable crop production and plentiful food.
In North America, the livestock industry is embattled. As noted by Dr. Dan Thomson with the Kansas State University Beef Cattle Institute, cattlemen need to be very smart, very diligent and very focused in order to take back the hearts and minds of the consumer when they are being vastly outspent by advocacy groups opposed to modern production practices.
Framing the debate
Communications are key, of course, but the food industry cannot ignore the simple power of being sensitive to how everyday production practices are perceived – how and when we treat and handle livestock, for example. By taking steps to ensure that our most basic food production practices are defensible to the majority of consumers, we can more effectively frame the debate around the benefits we provide.
Empowering stakeholders
Among the programs available to help is the National Pork Board’s, “Operation Main Street.” This initiative provides training in presentation skills and connects pork producers and industry supporters with community leaders and consumers across the country. It is an outstanding example of empowering stakeholders to speak out on the issues facing global food production and putting a positive face on modern agriculture.
Norman Borlaug’s research sparked the Green Revolution. Our advocacy can help to keep it alive. What do you think about public issues facing the food industry today? Join the conversation.
In a complex purchase decision process for highly engineered products or services, your prospect’s journey from awareness to purchase may not occur with uniform speed. We often assume that this path is a straight line, and we invest our resources uniformly based on this uniform assumption. But greater insight into your customer’s buying experience may yield some surprising results. “Information hurdles” may exist in places where they were not anticipated.
So how can technology help – or hurt? In today’s hyper ebusiness world, your customers will interact with numerous ecommerce technology touch points. Another important, yet often overlooked, part of this buying experience is how your internal teams interact with your internal-facing technology such as CRM, Reporting Tools, Internal Portals etc., and how those interactions can benefit or frustrate the efforts of your team to create great experiences for your prospects.
Insight into how these technologies affect your customer’s experience can be gained through a number of “well understood and practiced methodologies” such as “Eye Tracking” and Usability Testing. But quantifying how much they can improve the buying experience requires a new way of enumerating the value of customer experience through the purchase decision process. Ultimately, this should be the critical lens used to focus your technology investment.
Improving the efficiency and experience of these internal and external technologies can decrease the time it takes to create a great buying experience and can lower or remove the hurdles in the way. Ultimately, the speed at which we create a great buying experience is perhaps the best, measurable success metric.
Through a combination of customer insight, business process review and analytics, it may be possible to uncover other opportunities to more strategically invest in enhancing your customer’s buying experience.
How do you evaluate the experience of your customers – and your team – with your technologies? Please comment below and join the conversation.
A wise man once said, “Sometimes it’s not about being better, it’s about sucking less.” In the world of marketing, often it is not the smartest one who wins - it’s the one who screws up the least. Here are five mistakes to avoid so you don’t get beat before you start.
“Branding,” at its highest level of practice, is an art. Certainly, it draws upon a teachable understanding of the processes of meaning – how meaning is created and reinforced in the imagination, how meaning is negotiated in social groups and how meaning can be transferred from elements of the culture to the signs, products and concepts of corporations. But while the process is reproducible, the product of the best branding work is not.
We often find many marketers tend to think they need huge budgets and a lot of customers involved to obtain any useful feedback on their products or services.
Today’s Marketing Automation technologies give us unprecedented visibility into who are visiting our websites and what they are looking at, all in real-time. Marketers and Salespeople leveraging these new demand generation technologies face an interesting new question though: To pounce or not to pounce?
It has been almost a year since Google rolled out their SearchWiki features, but with their Sept 09 integration of these features into the Google Toolbar (now called SideWiki) it means that millions of Google users are much more likely to post public comments about your web properties. Google went a step further days ago when they launched a SideWiki bookmarklet that works in all browsers and does not require you to have the Google toolbar.
There are so many tools out there for social media monitoring and reporting - it seems there’s some new offer in my inbox every day. Sometimes I’m asked for my opinion as to which product is best and the usual answer is (you guessed it) “it depends.” Mainly it depends on what data is most important to your social media efforts. With any type of ongoing report that will be shared within an organization, the challenge is not providing enough data, but limiting the data to the metrics that matter most.
Doesn’t everyone love to learn? Experience suggests students are only attentive if the topic is something of interest. For example, an avid college football player may be doing poorly in school, but if something is presented that will help them improve their game, they are fully engaged. No surprise.
With radio, it took 38 years to reach a market audience of 50 million; with Facebook, only 2. The impact of digital media on business-to-business and business-to-consumer marketing is unquestioned. But the marriage of “new” media and agriculture is more nuanced, owing to demographic and geographic issues that make communicating with ag producers unique.
