One of the breakout sessions during the NAMA Fall Conference was a presentation by Stacie Marshall, Bayer CropScience. The session title was “Working Together to Help Growers: What Agriculture Can Learn From Consumer Marketing.”
Stacie started out by dispelling some myths about farmers that she has heard, even from people involved in agricultural marketing. For example, some people still believe that farmers are not very tech savvy. Also, that they aren’t online very much. I still hear this myself, along with the notion that farmers don’t use mobile technology and are certainly not involved with social media. It’s just not true.
Stacie uses some examples to help dispel these myths. For example, there has been a lot of buzz about self driving cars but farmers have been dealing with gps control for steering for quite some time. Another great example is that Google searches for ag related terms (mostly technical) are up 2,000 percent in the last year.
Another take away from Stacie’s presentation is that we shouldn’t think of digital as a separate channel. She says we should think of digital, television, magazines not as channels but all in the same light as behaviors because they are things we do to get information. And of course we are seeing a change in the age demographics with younger farmers who have grown up using digital technology. We also need to look at consumer marketing and get inspiration from it because farmers are consumers. I can’t agree more.
You can listen to my interview with Stacie here: Interview with Stacie Marshall, Bayer