updates

Made some substantial changes in my thinking after meeting with Christie yesterday - many of them have been coming out as I look at a new website template. (incidentally, wordpress is way harder to use than blogger, but can do cooler things)

here's a summary:
1. Marketing Objective - after considering the idea that we're earning share from the farmers market, it was rightly pointed out that what we're really doing is taking FM customers and engaging them further. the sketch below was helpful.
2. Target Audience - I'd started out with the demographic characteristics of women with college degrees only because they are typical FM customers. Turns out this doesn't make sense, either from an earn share perspective (where my target would just be FM customers generally), or from a stimulate demand perspective (where i want as many customers as possible). Men, you're back in. Sorry to have slighted you like that.

3. FE - Basically I'd already determined that Bike & Beer wasn't a great fit with my positioning generally, since it's all about hands-on local food stuff. I think it's still a conceptual fit, just not a marketing fit. So, i'm going to keep the FE "SIMBY Agritours" but focus only on the farm tours, maybe market some of the others (wine & chocolate, bike & beer) separately, or else bury them in the "group tours" section of the site..

4. FOCUS! so the print ads i was playing with before do highlight local food, but they don't do much for my "hands on experience" message. Also "fresh" and "local" are two separate positioning statements, neither of which is directly related to my primary proposition "hands on experience"

MV/DV revisited

Ok i think i finally got it.

Main Variable: need to experience local food
Dynamic Variable: hands on

Acquisition/earn share from farmer's market

Print Ads

I realize that I'm probably getting ahead of myself, but my mind was filled today with some ideas of how to convey the benefits of local food, and then add the "experience" part to it. here's what I came up with:

commentary: I think the message is right, but looks more like a top-of-mind campaign than a raise awareness campaign. there's not enough information about what we actually DO. Also it might be a little to slick and not grass-rootsy enough.

segment

so i think i know what my true benefit/segmentation variable is...

"need for foodie cred"

Unfortunately i think that's the best way I can say it, but we're talking about people (like me) who often find themselves talking about food, recipes, etc, and for whom the "i got this from this little farm up the road I just found out about" story is the favorite one they tell.

It's a little hard to say this without buying into foodie elitism, but I kind of feel like foodie elitism is exactly what I'm selling. I feel a little dirty. Like a true marketer.

Positioning Statement

The more I get into this, the more I realize I'm probably earning share from the farmer's market. It's earning share but then our ultimate objective is to send the customers back to farmer's markets... It's like we're doing their customer retention for them. Oh this gets confusing.

Product attributes

this is a bit of an issue 'cause we have several different products, all with different attributes that seem to speak to different people. here's hoping we can find the common ground.

Search (things you can look up): location, time, date, number of tours, potential activities, whether there's food, cost, size of farm, main products available

Experience (things you know after your tour): feeling of milking a goat/eating peas off the vine/driving a horse and buggy/etc; who other participants are and if you liked them, stories that you have to tell, photos of you doing cool things, relationship with farmer, organization of tour, quality/taste of food, quality of any available products.

Credence (intangibles): gaining farmer/rural street cred, being more of a "foodie", feeling like you're part of a larger local food movement, helping your local economy

segmentation is hard

I've spent the last couple weeks doodling segmentation variable charts in the margins of my notebooks and I'm still a little baffled by the whole thing. I mean, i get that the category leader is supposed to be ahead on the Main Variable, but is this because they do the MV the best? Or just that they are the leader in terms of that MV? Is McDonalds more convenient than Wendy's, or just the market leader in "convenient food"?

This first doodle is of local food experience vs. fun, but it seems wrong. SIMBY is ahead because we deliver a great local food experience, better than Zing or the farmer's market, but we are not the market leaders:
Here it is, revised for the 2nd interpretation.

This is a fun one because I love the idea of stealing share from Zingermans. Having worked there, I can safely say that "we are more fun than Zingermans" is both an honest and potentially lucrative selling point. In truth I think my customers are probably farmer's market customers, but it is weird to earn share from farmer's markets because we're actually trying to promote farmer's markets.

Then I started playing with stimulate demand strategies, which seemed to make the most sense in most contexts.

i'm not sure if i need 2 variables here, but I think we can be a market leader in the "getting to know a farmer" BUT, is this really a variable that applies to a lot of people? I guess I would argue that the answer is yes and that it's a growing number, but this might just be among people I know. it's hard to see outside of my bubble sometimes.