Farmers: Time to start advertising
Dairy farmers don’t think they are in the advertising business. But they very much are.
Bill Bernbach was the cofounder of DDB and is credited with inventing modern advertising. Bill understood how people and the world work and he knew how to communicate.
He said: ‘‘Word of mouth is the best medium of all.’’
This is what makes all dairy farmers advertisers.
Anybody who has had a good or bad experience with the dairy industry in the past 20 years has told their friends about it. That includes anybody from the motorist driving past a herd of cows to the employee milking the cows or someone interacting with Fonterra.
We’re more likely to trust information that comes directly from people we know. That’s why word of mouth is so effective. It’s trusted.
But word of mouth cuts both ways. It can be good and bad.
Today, dairy farmers want to tell the world about the good stuff that is happening in the industry.
That’s an advertising problem.
An advertising problem always starts with the question, how do we get someone to do or think what we want?
To get to the core of that question you need to ask another question, what’s in it for them?
If you want to change someone’s mind there has to be a benefit to that person.
In the case of the dairy industry, they want to convince people that they have made lots of changes and are therefore not bad anymore.
The product in this context is for people to believe that dairy farmers are good.
What benefit is there for a person to change their mind and believe that? What’s the payback to them?
Bill Bernbach said: ‘‘You can say the right thing about a product and nobody will listen. You’ve got to say it in such a way that people will feel it in their gut. Because if they don’t feel it. Nothing will happen.’’
Emotion is a payback. If you’re a farmer and you tell your story, what emotions would people have? If they have no emotion or negative emotion, then you are losing.
Some more quotes from Bill: ‘‘You can’t sell a person who isn’t listening.’’ ‘‘If your advertising goes unnoticed, everything else is academic.’’
People have to notice your message and actually want to listen to it. Why would someone want to listen to your story? How would you stop them from scrolling past your message?
Again from Bill Bernbach: ‘‘No matter how skilful you are, you can’t invent a product advantage that doesn’t exist. And if you do, and it’s just a gimmick, it’s going to fall apart anyway.’’ ‘‘A great ad campaign will make a bad product fail faster. It will get more people to know it’s bad.’’
So, if your message/product isn’t actually attractive, then it will fall apart as people see through it and the more you advertise it the faster it fails.
So much of the messaging coming from the dairy industry is safe, ignored and dismissed.
Compare this to the alternative milks, animal welfare or environmental groups. They have some of the best advertising in the world.
Their ads grab your attention, deliver a brutal message quickly and definitely provoke an emotional response.
Those ads change people’s minds. That’s what farmers are up against. This is no joke.
Could you create an ad of your farm’s story that roused a similar level of emotion? Would it cause people to change their mind to your way of thinking? Or would they dismiss it as a gimmick?
At the moment, for most dairy farmers the pain of losing the PR battle is less than the pain of fixing the PR issue.
The good news is people actually quite like farmers. The fact Country Calendar has been the most-watched TV show in New Zealand for decades is evidence.
People want to like dairy farmers and they want to be proud of our dairy farmers, but farmers have to make it easy for people to feel proud of them and make it easy for people to like them.