Johnny Cash on Marketing AgTech

Johnny Cash became one of the best-selling artists of all time with what he discovered about keeping an audience entertained. Incredibly, he started working on the assembly line of an automotive plant outside of Detroit. And yet, what he discovered is nothing less than the secret of how the greatest performers in history have kept us coming back time and time again.

Johnny Cash called it ‘mystique.’

He discovered that holding a piece of himself back from the public established gravitas and magnetically drew people to his work.

According to Cash, a critical element of his ability to attract record-breaking crowds and sell millions of albums was never wearing out his welcome with the people he was called to serve.

What would it look like if we brought this same approach to building our brands? How different would the landscape look?

This would be a massive shift for our industry, but it is one that I believe needs to happen.

The reality in agtech today is that most of our marketing material sounds like a breathless outburst of feature lists…a scramble for relevance.

This desperate messaging is based on the knowledge that we are selling in a low-trust environment. Most of our prospects have seen the dog and pony show; they’re very ready to call BS on us.

And that is terrifying…

But maybe listing every possible feature our technology COULD provide is NOT the answer. Maybe the customer’s demand for long feature lists is a test that we collectively fail repeatedly.

Maybe they want a partner they can trust. Maybe the way we’re building that trust is having the opposite effect on the market.

Maybe transparent overpromising is killing us…

Everybody knows that you can’t do everything…at least not well. In our haste to one-up each other, we are saying too much, and we are not leaving room for our customers to become intrigued…

The Way Forward

Technology is amazing. More precisely, your technology is amazing. The future of agriculture may depend on what you’re bringing to the market today. That is why it is so imperative that we get our act together and go to market in a way that encourages adoption and builds trust.

The onus is on us to ensure that our messages draw our target customers to our companies.

4 Rules for Communicating with Gravitas

1. We need to remember that we are serving a knowledgeable group of people. Communicate with respect.?

Whether you’re talking to the head of R&D at a major corporation or a row crop farmer in central Iowa, these individuals are generally brilliant. Don’t talk down to them, don’t water down your message – make it tangible.

2.????Simplify with purpose.

Simplified communication is imperative to effective messaging. You cannot capture and draw attention to everything, no matter how eloquent you are. That will lead to our entire message being ignored.

Instead, we should approach each piece of communication with a singular idea that we want our customers to understand.

3.????Make it interesting.

Honest communication should not be boring. We live in an incredible world. Get excited about the potential of what your technology could mean to the group of people you’re marketing it to.

TELL A STORY. Cast your customer as the main character, vilify the problem you solve, and tell them how you can help them defeat or overcome that villain.?

Start talking about the shared values you have with your customers. Start aligning your company to match their worldview. Give them something inspiring to believe in.

4.????Don’t give everything away upfront.

Be like Johnny Cash. Build an aura of mystique around your brand. The most juvenile and mundane stories are those stories where the characters fully expose everything about themselves.

If your audience is over the age of 2, they’re searching for depth from you. Please give us some depth in your brand narrative. We don’t want a list of features; we want to know how your product will change the day-to-day of customers and finally help them overcome the obstacles they face.

Lost co-creator and screenwriter Damon Lindelof said, “There is no suspense in the inevitable.” We need to create some suspense with our marketing.

The good news for us is that nothing in our business is inevitable. Quit pretending otherwise and start telling stories; we’re all bored of spec sheets. Yes, even the researchers are bored.

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

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