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.

Search Engine Optimization

One of tonight's many emails to my partner, on marketing. SEO is a field in itself, but it might give us some insight into this whole fundamental entity thing.

hey lauren,
cool - i'm actually going to make a lot of suggestions for the home page... the thing to keep in mind is called "search engine optimization" Basically, thinking about the words that people would search for if they are looking for us, and making sure to use them a lot, first thing, on the homepage.

Some search phrases for us might be:
Michigan Agritourism
Michigan Agritours
Michigan Farm tours
farm tours
sustainable farm tours
local food tour
family farm tour

anything else? I'll think about it a little more - what would people type into google if they're looking for what we offer?

Fundamental Entity

I spent a good chunk of Thursday and Friday at Lauren's house talking about where to go with the business, and about this grant we're writing to USDA to get started. I think both of us were torn between doing all the things that really need to be done right away (scheduling, planning and promoting tours, as well as kicking out this grant), and were having trouble focusing on the "big picture," so to speak. Still, if we want to be effective at writing this grant we need to have a clear statement of what our business is, so we tried...

When initially described, the fundamental entity seemed like the simplest question to answer. We are a tiny company. The entity is SIMBY Agritours (also talked about names, more on that later). BUT, we have several different types of trips we'd like to offer that could (should?) be marketed differently:

- Family & Individual farm tours (mostly recreational and fun, some learning, more expensive, nicer accommodations, more choices, more food - focused on connecting farmers with community of food-interested urban folks.)

- School and group tours (mostly educational, also fun - focused on changing attitudes)

- Adventure/Bike tours (mostly fun, 18-30 crowd, longer hike and bike tours, beer, food, tent camping - focused on exposure to Michigan's food system)

thinking about grant objectives, the family and school tours are totally different. the family tours could increase sales for specific farmers as families visit them at the farmer's market or join their CSA, the school ones more about changing attitudes in general and may not lead to documentable sales. The adventure tours seem too "out there" to include in the grant, but are, i feel, an important niche.

so: am I getting the idea behind fundamental entity? Can we still market all three without diluting our brand? Or should we brand them all separately (which seems silly) but each has a different target market and goal. hmmm.