Want More Results? Market The Problem

Your marketing channels aren't broken, your message is...

Many years ago, a British shoe manufacturer sent two salespeople to Africa to investigate and report back on market potential.

The first salesman reported, "There is NO potential here - nobody wears shoes."

The second salesman reported, "There is MASSIVE potential here - nobody wears shoes."

Most marketing approaches the market like the first salesperson - it begins where demand already exists and seeks to catch a portion of it…

However, the greatest companies successfully market the problem they solve and thus create demand for their product or service.?

Market the Problem

“If I had an hour to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions.” —Albert Einstein.

Today, most companies are feeling pressure to show performance. We need marketing to cough up some results…

So, we find an adjacent market that we can sort of compete in, and we race right to this market and begin bludgeoning the people we find there mercilessly with different facts or incremental statements about our product and how great it is.?

·?????“We’re 5x faster than so and so.”

·?????“Our thing is best in class.”

·?????“The competition gets you five readings per hour. We do 60!”

·?????“PLEASE PICK US!”

It’s differentiation by volume…who can shout loudest? It’s also why 82% of web-based advertising is ignored, and 21 cents of every media dollar is wasted.

…it’s not Google’s fault or the big, bad ad platforms…

No, it’s your fault for being boring and lacking a compelling worldview.

Stop blaming your distribution channels and pay more attention to what you’re putting on those channels.

• Is your message unique?
• Is the problem you solve compelling?
• Does it create the space for customer intrigue, or is it just like what everyone else says?

Too many of our agtech companies today assume demand for the products we’re selling instead of effectively marketing the problems our customers are facing.

No one is interested in how fast your technology moves or how robust your service is if they don’t know they need you.

If you fail to make the problem compelling and visceral, it will make no difference to the customer how good your solution is - they will go on without it…they’ve made it this far, right?

You Can’t Be Everything to Everyone

There are many products in agtech today that could be valuable to a group of customers, but most of them will fail.

They will not fail because of engineering challenges or “wrong timing,” they will fail because the companies who make them refuse to market them well.

They’re not advertising their customer’s problems and have totally neglected to build a narrative that pulls their customer out of their problem and into a better future using their solution.?

It’s not a matter of intelligence; it’s not a matter of technical skill…those are important, but competent teams fail every day.

They fail because they chase the mass market and neglect a customer to serve.

They fail because they do not articulate the problem they are solving – or they pick so many problems that their perceived market value is diluted to nothing…

1. They fail to create a category.
2. They fail to prime the market.?
3. And they fail to make it their time.

Your technology probably needs some functional work to make it easier and more intuitive, which is very important. But even more important is your customer’s view of the problem you are solving.

You are NOT in year six, or seven, or eight, and still stuck in trials because farmers hate adopting new technology; you’re probably stuck in multi-year trials because you have failed to articulate the problem your solution exists to solve.

You have failed to tell a compelling story, but it is not too late to start now!

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

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