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.

Target Audience

Target Audience: Rachel Hunter is 34, and works in publishing in Ann Arbor. She moved to Ann Arbor from Cleveland two years ago along with her husband Peter, a PhD student at UM. They live in a 2-bedroom condo near Briarwood, and she does most of their grocery shopping at the nearby Busch’s, where she appreciates the fresh produce and great selection of inexpensive wine. She also enjoys shopping with friends in downtown Ann Arbor, especially on weekends in the spring and summer when they’ll visit the shops and sometimes the farmer’s market or Zingerman’s. Rachel and Peter take weekend trips every couple of months, either for conferences or to visit friends and family in various U.S. cities, and also take a few longer camping trips or beach vacations in the summer. During the year, she tries to stay active, and to make time in her busy schedule to enjoy of local concerts, festivals, and parks.

Customer Definition (from previous module, but it goes along with the target audience thing):
Demographic: Women, 25-55, with a college degree.

Geographic: residents or visitors in Washtenaw, Macomb, Oakland, Monroe, Livingston, Wayne or Jackson Counties.

Behavioral: buys from the farmer’s market at least once per year (61 percent of Michiganders say they do, who largely also meet the above demographic characteristics)

QUESTION:
"Rachel" is probably one very valid descriptor of our target audience, but I feel using that description glosses over people with kids, and baby boomer retirees, both of which could be very important segments. It's easy for me to market to "Rachel" because she's pretty damn similar to me, but I don't feel that using this description is going to help me target older customers. Does this matter? should there be multiple targets?

The Good We Do

So I'm pretty proud of this graph, even though it's not directly marketing-related. It's for a grant we're writing and it shows the impact that the tours will have for the farmers that host them. The goal of the project is to create a self-sustaining business model that boosts farmer income - according to this we're set to do that over the next 2 years!

Strategic Quadrant

Should be obvious, since we're a start up, but:

Objective = Acquisition
Source of Volume = Stimulate Demand

Category Definition = Educational Agritourism in Michigan

I guess that's narrow enough for us to call ourselves a market leader.

I toyed with the broad category definition of "day trips," in which case we'd be stealing share from museums, parks, sports games, shopping, etc., but this seemed neither relevant nor useful.

I also thought of "Agritourism" as a category, which is fairly narrow. This category seems to be dominated by single-farm activities: corn mazes, hayrides, U-Pick orchards and the like. We're doing something different from this, in that we are organizing trips on behalf of several farms that are focused on farming, not tourism. Also, we're trying to add an instructional component to all our programs.

Distinctions aside, "growing the category" - be it agritourism or educational agritourism - is pretty important. If nothing else, so I can stop having this conversation:

me: I'm starting a business!
you: Oh great! what kind of business?
me: it's an agritourism company.
you: a what, now? [attempts to exit conversation]

Reverse-Engineered Positioning

Reading through the Positioning area, I'm realizing how much we're guilty of all the chronic problems of a start-up marketing campaign. The good news is that there's a lot of passion and energy. The downside of this is that we tend to run full speed ahead, coming up with taglines, product and price definitions at will, with no strategic planning or even a speck of forethought.

Still, there are clues to our final product in what we've already come up with... So i'm going to try to reverse-engineer them into an STP strategy.

Tagline #1: Sustainability in My Back Yard
Benefits implied:
- learning about sustainable practices
- exploring nearby places - "staycation" appeal
- personalized approach

Tagline #2: celebrate the land, connect with the people, and taste the future.
Benefits implied:
- direct connection with farmers
- meeting new people
- tasting local food
- connection with your local area (staycations again)
- learning new things (ostensibly about the future)
- not sure what celebrate the land means, but i guess some people are into that...

Business Objective

The beginning of a marketing plan, comments and thoughts greatly appreciated:

Fundamental Entity: SIMBY Agritours

Core Competence: building working relationships with a variety of farmers and producers.

Goal: To engage at least 200 people on fun, interactive tours that highlight Michigan's local food economy and promote small, local producers of food and agricultural products.

Time Frame: in 2010, with hopes to double that in 2011.