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In their book Made to Stick, Chip and Dan Heath tell the story of Southwest Airlines CEO Herb Kelleher and a chicken salad.

Kelleher claimed that he could teach anyone how to run Southwest Airlines with one sentence:

“We are THE low-fare airline.”

“Here’s an example,” Kelleher said. “Tracy from marketing comes into your office. She says her surveys indicate that the passengers might enjoy a light entrée on the Houston to Las Vegas flight. All we offer is peanuts, and she thinks a nice chicken Caesar salad would be popular. What do you say?”

Kelleher continued, “You say, ‘Tracy, will adding that chicken Caesar salad make us THE low-fare airline from Houston to Las Vegas? Because if it doesn’t help us become the unchallenged low-fare airline, we’re not serving any damn chicken salad.”

Most companies in agriculture have slogans.

They have mission statements, value statements, strategic plans, and presentations filled with important-sounding words.

But none of those words help someone in your organization make a difficult decision. They are functionally impotent.

Roger Martin argues that strategy is a cascade of choices. The choices made by leadership create the context for the next choices, all the way down to the person standing in front of the customer.

• The CEO decides where the company will play and how it intends to win.

• The product team decides what to build.

• The salesperson decides which customers to pursue.

• The service representative decides which problem deserves immediate attention.

• The agronomist decides whether recommending less product today will create more trust tomorrow.

These aren’t merely execution decisions, they are strategy happening at different levels.

A couple of weeks ago, we talked about General Charles C. Krulak’s idea of the “strategic corporal.”

Krulak believed that modern warfare had become too complex, compressed, and visible for strategy to remain safely contained at headquarters.

In what he called the “three-block war,” Marines might be delivering humanitarian aid on one block, conducting peacekeeping operations on the next, and fighting a hostile force on the third.

No manual could anticipate every decision they would face, and there often wouldn't be enough time to ask a superior what to do. The person on the ground has to understand the larger mission well enough to make an independent decision under pressure. That decision could shape far more than the immediate encounter.

Krulak wrote:

“In many cases, the individual Marine will be the most conspicuous symbol of American foreign policy.”

The same is true inside our organizations.

The farmer doesn't experience your corporate strategy. They experience the salesperson across the kitchen table, the technician who returns (or doesn’t return) the call, the person behind the parts counter, the agronomist standing in the field, the dealer deciding whether to advocate for them or hide behind company policy.

In all of these moments, this person becomes the most conspicuous symbol of your company’s strategy.

They teach the customer what your organization values. They reveal who your company is really for. They demonstrate whether the promises in your marketing mean anything when keeping them becomes inconvenient.

This is why messaging cannot belong exclusively to marketing.

In the words of HP co-founder David Packard, “Marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department.”

A message is not merely something we want customers to remember; it should also help people throughout our organization decide.

Just like Kelleher’s sentence.

It told employees what mattered most. It helped them recognize which ideas belonged and which otherwise-good ideas would take Southwest somewhere it had chosen not to go.

Chicken salad wasn’t a bad idea; customers wanted it.

Because strategy is not demonstrated by rejecting obviously bad ideas. It is demonstrated by rejecting attractive ideas that don't fit with the broader change the organization exists to make.

A slogan tells people what you hope to become, but a strategy tells them what you are willing to give up to become it.

And a useful message carries that strategy to the person standing at the point of contact.

Because somewhere today, someone in your organization will face a decision your strategy sessions never anticipated.

They will make a choice. The only question is whether you have given them a strategy clear enough to use; as clear as chicken salad.

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

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Good stories always begin with someone who wants something.

The hero needs to defeat a villain, save the family farm, win someone’s heart, defuse a bomb, or fight for survival.

This gives the story direction and a purpose. Will the hero get what they want—or not?

There’s a reason for the audience to lean in, to look further, to continue to engage. There’s tension.

The problem for many of our brands in agriculture is that our story begins with us and centers on what we want. We’re the heroes of our story.

“We launched this business in 2012 (or 1956 or 1837), so you should buy our thing.”

“Here’s another little entry in the little story of me. Buy now.”

It doesn’t invite our customers into a story about them; it forces them to sit through ours.

Your customers aren't looking for a company story where they're given a supporting role.

They must be the main character.

Not because your customer is uniquely self-centered, but because each of us experiences life from inside our own story.

We see the world through our own circumstances, problems, ambitions, fears, and desires. The action naturally turns on the future we are trying to create.

Your customer is no different.

• They want to finish planting before the rain.

• They want to protect the crop they have spent all season growing.

• They want to make a difficult decision with greater confidence.

• They want to build a farm worth handing to the next generation.

• They want more control over their time, their operation, and their future.

Our job is not to make customers care more about our story. Our job is to understand the story they are already living and show them how we can help them get where they want to go.

That means that when we go to tell our story, the first question in our strategy cannot be:

What can we sell?

OR

How do we get the word out?

It has to be:

What does our customer want?

• Not what should they want.

• Not what would be convenient for us to sell them.

• Not what our technology is capable of doing.

What do they already want badly enough to change what they are doing now?

That is where a good company story begins. Not with your founding date, not with your product. With a customer who wants something.

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

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There’s a dangerous messaging myth in agtech.

It’s quietly costing companies millions—and no one’s talking about it.

The myth goes like this:

“We just need to get the word out.”

It sounds harmless. Ambitious, even. But underneath it lies a deadly assumption:

• That the message already matters.

• That people are already listening.

• That the problem you solve is already understood.

In agtech, none of these things are true.

The result? Teams scramble. They hire agencies. They chase clicks, impressions, and followers. They tweak taglines. They spend tens of thousands on brand guides and creative briefs. They run Lightning Strikes that light up nobody’s radar. They sponsor trade show booths that get compliments, but not conversions.

And they wonder why nothing sticks.

The hard truth is that the market doesn’t get what you’re doing because you haven’t made it matter.

Until you do, every dollar spent on messaging is just noise…polished, pretty noise.

This isn’t just a marketing failure. It’s a category failure.

And you can’t solve a category failure with copywriting tricks. You need to change the narrative.

A Tale of Two Cities: Better-town vs. Different-ville

Let’s explore this idea with a story.

It’s a story of two towns. Facing the same crisis. With very different outcomes.

Bettertown was proud, proper, and disciplined. When a recession hit, and unemployment soared, the town council felt trapped between two bad options: do nothing or give handouts. Neither felt right, so they invented something they thought was “better.”

They created a relief program—but not just any relief program.

This one was designed to discourage dependence. If you wanted help, you had to prove your desperation. Applications were long. Interviews invasive. Relief officers could show up unannounced to inspect your fridge, budget, and home. The message was clear: help comes with shame.

They thought this would preserve character. Instead, it created resentment.

The unemployed were humiliated, and the employed were smug. Tensions rose, and trust fell. While the worst was narrowly avoided, the town lost something deeper—its sense of unity.

Different-ville took another approach.

They didn’t start with the problem. They started with a principle:

“Unemployment is like a house fire—an unpredictable disaster no one asks for.”

They reframed the situation entirely.

They called it insurance, not welfare. Every resident who’d contributed to the community—by working, paying taxes, or building—had earned the right to claim a payout during hardship. These weren’t handouts. They were claims on value already created.

And they celebrated it.

The first checks were handed out at a town-wide event. Flags. Speeches. Photos with the mayor. It was civic pride, not pity.

When a skeptical reporter asked the mayor, “Isn’t this just clever PR? Haven’t you just renamed welfare by calling it insurance”

The mayor replied:

“What do you mean, calling it insurance? It is insurance.”

Most of our companies are stuck in Better-town.

We build something useful, maybe even powerful. But instead of framing a new future, they describe features, specs, outputs, and capabilities. They assume people will connect the dots.

They don’t.

Because the industry is saturated with noise. And when your messaging echoes the status quo—even unintentionally—you reinforce the very mindset you're trying to change.

If Better-town teaches us anything, it’s this:

Your narrative doesn’t just influence perception. It defines reality.

You’re not selling “better.”
You’re not selling “innovation.”
You’re selling a new mental model, a new way to see what matters.

And that starts with language.

No one understood this better than Howard Schultz.

Schultz wasn’t always a billionaire coffee mogul. He was a kid from the Brooklyn projects.

When he was seven, he watched his father—an unskilled laborer—get injured and immediately fired without benefits or support. His dad collapsed on the couch, broken and bitter, unable to find work that gave him meaning.

That image haunted Schultz.

He didn’t just want a job. He wanted to do work that meant something.

Years later, as marketing director for a tiny coffee and tea company called Starbucks, Schultz visited Italy. What he found wasn’t just espresso—it was experience.

“The energy pulses all around you,” he said. “These places offered comfort, community, a sense of extended family.”

He watched baristas dance behind the counter, pressing espresso, steaming milk, and laughing with customers. It wasn’t a transaction. It was theater. It was ritual. It was human.

He didn’t come home wanting to import better beans. He came home determined to import a story.

At the time, Starbucks sold great coffee beans, but only to a niche elite. Schultz realized they weren’t scaling because they were trying to market a premium product without a premium story.

So he gave Starbucks one. He developed unique language around the brand.

• They began to serve coffee by the cup.

• They created an inviting, sensory-rich “Third Place.”

• They renamed the roles: servers became baristas; they were partners in the business.

• Drink sizes weren’t small/medium/large—they were Tall, Grande, Venti.

• They didn’t sell coffee with milk. They sold Caffè Lattes.

And just like that, the product stopped being a commodity. It became an experience.

A shift in language creates a change in thinking, which creates an adjustment in action, and leads to a transformation in outcome.

Read that again.

Starbucks didn’t win just because people thought the coffee was better.
They won because people thought they were better when holding a Starbucks cup.

Dunkin’ didn’t get that. In 2008, they ran a double-blind taste test and proudly announced that people preferred Dunkin’ coffee to Starbucks. They launched DunkinBeatsStarbucks.com and bragged about their win.

And yet, Starbucks today dwarfs Dunkin’.

Because coffee wasn’t the point.

The rise of Starbucks wasn't built on the whims of people tasting two unnamed coffees side by side and picking a winner. It was built on the context within which that coffee was enjoyed.

The same insight showed up at a university hospital in Michigan.

A team of researchers interviewed the cleaning staff.

Same job. Same pay. But half said their work was low-skilled and boring. The other half said it was deeply skilled and meaningful.

What was the difference between the two groups?

The language they used to describe their role.

• One group said, “It’s just cleaning. Like what you do at home.”

• The other referred to themselves as ambassadors—people who formed relationships with nurses, patients, and visitors to create an environment for healing.

Their job hadn’t changed. Their words had.

And because their words changed, their behavior toward their job did, too.

AgTech is full of legendary innovators.

• Engineers who’ve built machines that aim, adapt, and learn.

• Platforms and sensors that visualize every inch of every acre in real time.

• Tools that could fundamentally transform the economics of growing food, fuel, and fiber.

But what happens next?

They take this game-changing technology—and describe it as “a complete agronomy platform.”

They build systems that could redefine decision-making—and call it “next-gen precision.”

They release tools that remove friction, add intelligence, and give growers control, but they market them using the same bloated language as everyone else.

They look at incumbent solutions and the way customers talk about things today and assume they’re permanent. They assume they’re neutral. But they’re not.

It’s designed.

The language customers use was built by your competition.

And the minute you adopt it, you’re reinforcing their worldview. You’re anchoring your new story to someone else’s legacy. And you’re inviting customers to make side-by-side comparisons on their terms, not yours.

This is the subtle failure behind most agtech messaging:

• You build something new.

• You describe it like something old.

• And then you wonder why it feels like no one “gets it.”

The language doesn’t match the leap.

And because the language doesn’t match the leap, the market can’t feel the difference.

When that happens, all your innovation gets flattened. You become Better-town.

You end up reinforcing the category king instead of dethroning them.

Here are two real-time examples:

1. Verdant Robotics

Their current messaging?

“Precision you can see. Results you can trust.”
“The future isn’t spraying. It’s aiming.”

Now let’s translate that for a skeptical grower:

“You do spraying? So does Deere.”
“You aim? So does See & Spray.”

To be clear—Verdant’s tech might be extraordinary. It’s not just spraying. Their machine is tractor-mounted, plant-level, multi-tasking, and well-suited for specialty crops. But none of that matters if the message sounds like an echo.

Verdant is using language Deere already owns.

And in the mind of the customer, that means Verdant is the imitation. Not the originator.

A Mental Rule of Thumb: When a challenger borrows the king’s language, the king always wins.

2. CropX

They say:

“Sustainable and successful farming.”
“The Complete Digital Agronomy Platform.”

Try saying that out loud to a retailer or grower and watch their eyes glaze over.

Why?

Because “sustainable” and “successful” have become white noise. Everyone from Bayer to the USDA has flooded the zone with those terms.

“Complete platform” is so common it means nothing. Worse, it raises questions: What does “complete” mean? Is it modular? Do I lose control?

These aren’t answers. They’re sophisticated word salads of ambiguity.

And when your message is vague, your product gets lumped into the “maybe” pile.

This all comes back to one of the core laws from Ries & Trout:

Marketing is not a battle of products. It’s a battle of perceptions.

And the most powerful perception in any market is a single word or phrase.

• Volvo owns “safety.”

• Climate FieldView owns “field visibility.”

• BMW owns “performance.”

• SwarmFarm Robotics owns “integrated autonomy.”

• FedEx owns “overnight.”

• Google owns “search.”

• Zoom owns “video calls.”

• John Deere owns “precision.”

When you hear the word or phrase, you think of the brand.
When you hear the brand, you think of the word or phrase.

What does Verdant own?
What word belongs to CropX?

If you can’t answer that instantly, neither can your customers.

That’s a messaging problem. But more importantly—it’s a category problem.

You don’t just need a new campaign. You need a new category.

This is the part where most teams panic.

They realize their message isn’t working. So they double down on tactics. They spend more money, try new channels, refresh the website, swap one generic phrase for another. They chase clicks. They A/B test headlines. They hand it all off to a creative agency and hope for the best.

But what they’re facing isn’t a creative problem. It’s a category problem.

Most agtech messaging fails not because the product is weak, but because the frame is wrong.

You’re playing someone else’s game.

• The language you're using? Inherited.

• The positioning you're reinforcing? Already claimed.

• The problem you're solving? Never clearly defined.

You’re polishing a story that isn’t yours.

And here’s the hard truth: You can’t out-message a broken frame. You have to build a new one.

Which is why companies that win don’t just compete.

They don’t launch into existing categories and hope to be picked. They design new ones.

Let’s look at the story of Tesla in a way you may not have heard it before.

Most people think Tesla won because it had better features: longer range, fast acceleration, Autopilot, over-the-air updates, and luxury branding.

And all of those helped.

But features didn’t make Tesla inevitable. Category framing did.

When Tesla entered the market, it didn’t position itself as a better car. It positioned itself as different, a fusion of technology, performance, sustainability, and autonomy.

• They attracted a tribe of superconsumers—tech-forward early adopters who wanted to be part of a revolution, not just a new commute.

• It gave those early fans language they could evangelize: zero emissions, ludicrous mode, full self-driving.

• It turned owners into missionaries—people who gave demo rides, posted YouTube walkarounds, and dragged their neighbors into the future.

Tesla didn’t ride the automotive funnel. It built a category flywheel.

And that flywheel worked because Tesla didn’t just build a car. It built a story people wanted to share.

That’s why the company that wins isn’t the one that shouts louder—it’s the one that speaks differently.

You have to speak a new language—and back it up with a product, a philosophy, and a future that feels categorically different.

• You’re not selling “data analytics.”
  You’re selling a new model for decision-making.

• You’re not selling “robotic application.”
  You’re selling autonomy your agronomist can trust.

• You’re not selling “biological nitrogen.”
  You’re selling freedom from fossil fuel dependence.

When you name the category and make it feel obvious in hindsight, you’re not fighting for attention. You’re pulling your best-fit customers into a new worldview—and giving them the tools to spread it.

That’s the power of designing a category instead of just pushing a message.

Build your flywheel, not just a funnel.

Funnels are transactional.
Flywheels are transformational.

Funnels involve pushing people through a pre-defined path, while flywheels involve pulling people into a belief system and letting them accelerate it themselves.

In agtech—where trust matters more than clicks, and word-of-mouth carries more weight than retargeting—you don’t just need a funnel.

You need a flywheel.

Here’s how to build one:

Step 1: Frame the Problem with a POV

Don’t start with your product. Start with your lens.

What’s broken in the world? What truth isn’t being told? What false assumption is everyone else still selling?

You need a story that snaps your audience awake—something they feel but haven’t heard clearly articulated.

“Data isn’t your problem. Decision paralysis is.”
“Your ROI isn’t tanking because of inputs—it’s because of inconsistency.”
“You’re not late on autonomy. You’re early on control.”

A great POV doesn’t just explain your product.
It reorients your audience’s worldview.

It doesn’t say, “Here’s what we do.”
It says, “Here’s what’s wrong and here’s the future we’re building instead.”

Step 2: Attract Superconsumers with Magnetic Language

Superconsumers don’t follow features. They follow identity.

They want to be part of something early, something smart, something that gives them a language the rest of the world hasn’t caught up to yet.

We’re not talking about taglines here. We’re talking about tools for evangelism—phrases your customers can repeat to signal who they are and what they believe.

When you give Superconsumers something to say, you give them something to spread. And they will.

Step 3: Equip Supers to Make More Supers

One Superconsumer is helpful. But two Supers talking to each other? That’s a movement.

When your best-fit customers share stories, compare results, and riff on what they’ve discovered, they stop being buyers. They become builders of your belief system.

Your job is to create the space for that to happen.

Give them:

• Field trials they can share with neighbors

• Community groups where your customers can gather

• Recognition, status, and sneak peeks

• Simple, spreadable stories they can tell at the coffee shop

In ag, nothing moves faster than a grower with a real result and a neighbor who listens.

If they feel like insiders—like part of something smart and early—they’ll bring others along for the journey.

You're not building a sales channel. You're building a belief circle.

Step 4: Convert Curiosity into Conviction

You don’t close the deal with a feature list. You convert by creating conviction.

That looks like:

• A demo that shatters their assumptions

• A field day that lets them see it with their own eyes

• A customer story that matches their size, crop, or season

• A simple framework or category checklist that lets them self-identify

These are the moments where your buyer stops saying, “That’s interesting.”
And starts saying, “That’s me.”

Identity, not information, drives adoption.

Step 5: Scale Through Word of Mouth & Feedback Loops

If you’ve followed the process thus far, your message isn’t just clear. It’s compounding.

Now track it:

• Who refers others?

• What stories get shared?

• What phrases are sticky?

• What’s still confusing?

Every insight gets recycled into product, marketing, sales, and onboarding.
That’s how your category gets sharper—and more magnetic—over time.

Remember: A funnel ends when the sale is made. A flywheel accelerates when belief takes hold.

Your job isn’t to push harder. It’s to remove friction, clarify meaning, and let your customers finish the story.

Every breakthrough starts with the same spark:

• A problem no one has solved.

• A possibility no one has imagined.

• A future that feels just out of reach—until someone dares to name it.

But naming it means doing something most companies won’t:

• Rejecting the old frame.

• Refusing the inherited language.

• And resisting the pressure to sound “credible” by sounding like everyone else.

That’s the quiet tragedy of most agricultural marketing. It plays by the rules of the incumbents. It speaks with borrowed words. It dilutes difference in pursuit of approval.

And so great companies disappear into Better-town.

But the ones who break through speak differently. They frame clearly. They build flywheels, not funnels.

They don’t chase customers. They attract believers. They don’t push products. They pull people into a new paradigm.

This isn’t about clever copy. It’s about category courage.

• The courage to tell the truth.

• To name the problem others won’t.

• To build a future only you can deliver.

• And to create language that helps people see it—clearly, confidently, and for the very first time.

So, if you’re tired of shouting into the void...
If you’re tired of trade show compliments and empty pipelines...
If you’re ready to stop pushing and start pulling demand…

Then don’t “get the word out.”

Design the category. Build the flywheel. And give the market a story worth repeating.

Because when you own the story, you own the future.

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

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The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) used to have a unique device for testing the strength of windshields on airplanes. The device is a gun that launches a dead chicken at a plane's windshield at approximately the speed the plane flies.

The theory is that if the windshield doesn't crack from the carcass impact, it'll survive an actual collision with a bird during flight.

Legend has it that the British were very interested in this and wanted to test a windshield on a brand-new, high-speed train they were developing.

They borrowed FAA's chicken launcher, loaded the chicken, and fired.

The ballistic chicken shattered the windshield, broke the engineer's chair, and embedded itself in the back wall of the engine's cab. The British were stunned and asked the FAA to recheck the test to see if everything was done correctly.

The FAA reviewed the test thoroughly and had one recommendation:

"Use a thawed chicken."

The Need For New Frameworks in Agriculture

Agriculture is not facing a lack of new products, but a lack of new frameworks.

These are what Warren Buffett’s business partner Charlie Munger calls “latticeworks on which to hang your ideas.”

In other words, the operating system or thinking your customer should use to get the best results from your product.

Over the past few decades, hundreds of agricultural products have been released to the industry. Many of which have been incredible technologies that were extremely hard to make.

Yet adoption has been slow at best.

Some say this lack of adoption is due to technical difficulties and the inability to translate hype into change. Some people blame the industry, saying it is opposed to change.

I believe the problem with adoption is that we have created new technologies that rely on old frameworks.

- “Agriculture needs a digital transformation.”

- “We’re disrupting the agriculture industry.”

We don’t need your digital transformation, and we don’t need your disruption. Both of these approaches mean slapping a new coat of paint on an old and broken system.

We need you to bring us new frameworks with which to view and overcome the problems we face.

If you don’t tell your customers how to deploy your product or how they can succeed using it, then you will have built an expensive paperweight, a great piece of software that no one uses - a frozen chicken.

Be different, and build new frameworks.

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

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Alex Batchelor has told a fascinating story about the British postal service, Royal Mail.

While serving as the organization’s Marketing Director between 2005 and 2008, he says that Royal Mail invested millions of pounds improving mail delivery service across the United Kingdom.

The assumption seemed obvious. Better service would create happier customers.

But when they surveyed customers afterward, they found almost no correlation between the quality of delivery in an area and customer satisfaction.

The data didn’t make any sense, so they kept digging.

Eventually they discovered that the strongest predictor of whether customers liked Royal Mail was whether or not they liked their mailman.

General Charles C. Krulak would have understood exactly what was happening.

In 1999, he introduced the idea of the “strategic corporal.”

Modern battlefields, he argued, had become so complex and visible that the actions of a single junior Marine could shape how the entire mission was perceived.

“In many cases,” Krulak wrote, “the individual Marine will be the most conspicuous symbol of American foreign policy.”

Royal Mail had a strategic corporal; it was the mailman.

In fact, every organization has strategic corporals.

They aren’t necessarily executives. They’re the people closest to the customer.

• The dealer.

• The receptionist.

• The customer service representative.

• The technician.

• The person running the parts counter.

• The delivery driver.

• The salesperson.

The people whose actions quietly answer the question:

“Who is this company?”

We spend a lot of time talking about brand affinity, ensuring that our customers like us.

We look at brands like Nike or Starbucks and ask, “How do we get that level of brand value?”

So we redesign the website or the logo or play with our colors to evoke some more likeability.

• “We have to make sure we have the right crops pictured on the site.”

• “Add some green to the logo.”

These are totally reasonable considerations, but they miss the broader point.

• Your brand is not just the logo.

• Your brand is not just the color palette.

• Your brand is not just the crop photography.

• Your brand is not just the words on your website.

Your brand is all of those things AND your customer’s personal experience with you.

You call yourself a service-driven organization, but when I call you with a problem, do you treat me with the loathing of a nasty bug who just interrupted your day or do you consider it an honor that one of your customers took the time to call you with a potential problem?

Marketing is storytelling, but it's not enough to write yourself some grandiose mission statement and slap a compelling story over the top of it.

“There, done.”

No. Storytelling (and as a result all marketing) is commitment. A commitment to keeping the promises we’ve made. A commitment to making the story we’re telling a true one.

One of the problems that we have in agriculture today is that a whole bunch of brands are riding the waves of a general sense of goodwill that has existed between them and their customers for decades without continually considering whether they are still earning it in the moments that matter most.

Because there is no amount of marketing that outweighs meaningful, personal experiences.

The customer does not separate the brand from the interaction. They don’t say:

“That was a disappointing interaction with an under-resourced local representative operating inside a complicated enterprise system.”

They think:

“That’s what this brand thinks of me.”

And that is the most important equation in brand marketing.

Not just “What do customers think of us?

But, “What do customers think we think of them?”

It’s a two-way street.

A brand is not just a set of associations in the customer’s mind. It is also a set of assumptions the customer makes about the company’s mind.

• Do they understand me?

• Do they respect my time?

• Do they see me as capable?

• Do they care if I win?

• Are they on my side?

Or do they think we see them as captive? As interchangeable? As annoying? A source of margin?

The question every brand should be asking themselves in ag is:

"What are we teaching customers about what we think about them?"

If you want to succeed in the modern landscape, marketing cannot just be a department that owns the brand, it has to become a mindset that is distributed across every level of your organization because the brand lives (and dies) with the people closest to the customer.

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

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In the fall of 1982, Bob Metcalfe and his team at 3Com released the EtherLink, a network interface card that remotely connected personal computers. The problem was that there weren’t many personal computers in use at the time. IBM had only released its first PC the previous year.

So 3Com decided to give their early customers a trial offer: a three-node network that allowed three computers to connect and share things like software and a printer. It sounds simple now, but at the time, it was cutting-edge.

They offered the product for $3,000 and sold a lot of it. But shortly after, their customers came back to them and said, “It works just the way you promised it would. It’s just not useful.” They didn’t really understand why they should keep investing in this new technology.

In response, Bob Metcalfe invented what would become known as Metcalfe’s Law, which states that the power of a network goes up with the square of the number of people using it.

On the power of this idea, 3Com’s sales exploded, ushering in the beginning of networking.

The best ideas become more valuable when they’re shared.

Does yours?

Think about it - what did the first fax machine owner do with his fax machine? He shared it, of course.

And as a result, the piece of equipment he had in his office became exponentially more valuable.

Many companies in agriculture have a hard time with this. They ask the question, “How do we get the word out?”

• “How do we sell more seed?”

• “How do we find more buyers for our tech?”

• “How are we going to grow enough so that we get our next round of funding?”

• “How do I get my new project approved?”

So they lean on the “growth marketer” to blast more disruptive ads across social media. They hire the SEO expert to make sure they’re top of the list when someone hits search. They enlist the PR consultant, who promises feature stories and visibility (or, if needed, a few fabricated industry awards). And they bring in creative agencies to craft glossy, high-production ads.

All focused on getting the word out. To scream “look at me” louder than the next guy. They’re betting on more clicks, more eyeballs, more “engagement”—because they mistakenly believe that the game we call “marketing” is about shouting louder, not saying something worth hearing.

The reality is that most people in the world of agriculture believe that marketing is something you do to people, but the best marketers know that great marketing only happens when you do it with your customers.

The lie is the idea that you can control the narrative, that owning the budget or having a product to sell means that you get to decide what people think about it. But it doesn’t.

The right question to ask before you start marketing is, “does our customer win if they talk about what we do?”

Everything else is just noise.

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

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In the 1960s, a young copywriter named Joel Raphaelson was working at the famed ad agency Ogilvy & Mather.

He was surrounded by Madison Avenue’s best, in a business built on a simple belief: say it louder, say it often, say you're better.

But Raphaelson noticed something strange. People didn’t buy the brand they thought was better. They bought the one they were more certain wasn’t bad.

Customers weren’t optimizing for superiority, as most people assumed they were. They were frequently minimizing the chance of regret.

In agriculture, we’ve been trained to chase performance—yield bumps, ROI per acre, and biological breakthroughs. New traits, new tools, new tech.

But while companies compete to prove they’re better, most customers are asking something simpler:

What is the liklelihood that this fails?

Because by the time someone encounters your brand or offer, it’s rarely their first attempt to solve the problem. They’ve already tried to grow. Tried to spend smarter. Tried to make technology work on their farm. And underneath every “maybe next year” is a quiet, unspoken fear:

What if this doesn’t work and I look like an idiot?

What if I spend $10,000 and it fails? What if I recommend this to a colleague and it backfires? What if my neighbor sees me using it and I can’t prove it made a difference?

Certainty isn’t just rational. It’s emotional, too. And the moment your product makes someone feel exposed, even if it’s technically “better,” you’ve lost the ability to charge a premium for your brand.

Raphaelson’s insight exposes the foundation of trust. People don’t buy what’s best; they buy what feels like it has the least downside.

Suppose I were to ask you to play a simple game of chance.

In this game, each player starts with $100. Every round, you flip a coin. If it lands on heads, you gain 50%. If it lands on tails, you lose 40%. Would you agree to play this game?

Most people, I think, look at this written on paper and say, "of course I would play that game."

On average, after all, you should gain 5% every time you flip the coin. But when the physicists Ole Peters and Alexander Adamou ran the simulation with four players a few years ago, they discovered something strange.

The average outcome per round was, in fact, positive across the entire group. But the more rounds each individual played, the more likely they were to lose money. When Peters and Adamou modeled the game, they tracked four players flipping coins over multiple rounds. Each started with $100.

• Player One flipped heads twice. First $100 became $150, then $225. A win.

• Player Two flipped heads, then tails. $100 grew to $150, then dropped to $90.

• Player Three flipped tails first, then heads. Same: $100 to $60 to $90.

• Player Four flipped tails twice. $100 to $60, then down to $36. He now needed three straight heads just to get back to where he started.

The group average after two rounds was $110.25. Up 10.25%.

But three of the four individuals had lost money.

This is an example of what mathematicians call a non-ergodic system, one in which the average of the group does not reflect what happens to the individual over time.

In real life, you don’t get to reset after a bad round. Losses compound. One bad outcome changes the next set of decisions. And over time, the consequences of volatility stack higher than the promise of upside.

Agriculture is a non-ergodic system.

Every decision builds on the one before it. One bad season can erase five good ones. One underperforming product, one recommendation that backfires, one year of betting wrong, and suddenly your strategy isn’t about optimizing anymore. It’s about recovering.

Our customers are not trying to optimize for better performance; they’re trying to protect against downside.

Yet most ag marketing still pitches to the average. The average yield increase. The average ROI. The average performance across trials.

And then when our customers don’t react to this type of message, we call them irrational. We shake our heads about how silly they are not to follow our carefully crafted economic models, but ergodicity and the cautionary tale of Mark Sanchez shows us that they are not irrational at all.

For some reason, this is a very difficult lesson for brands to learn.

We have a very rigid and limited definition of what it means to “prove value.”

We measure upside. We forecast averages. We assume the customer sees what we see when we show them trial data and charts that climb up and to the right.

Why do we treat the fear of downside like irrational behavior, instead of seeing it as the most rational response to living inside a system where volatility compounds, and trust is hard to recover?

And what would change if we started marketing, not to the average outcome, but to the individual who’s still recovering from the last unfortunate coin toss?

Because across agriculture, that’s exactly who we’re selling to.

• The grower who watched last year’s “proven” seed underperform.

• The retailer that trusted a data set that didn’t translate to their region.

• The agtech customer who still has to justify a failed rollout.

• The borrower who has been burned before.

They don’t need more upside. They need someone who understands the cost of being wrong.

Start by flipping the script.

Don’t begin with what you want to say. Start by listening.

Ask your customer:

1. What do you currently believe about this decision?

2. What past experience led you to believe that?

3. What risk are you trying to avoid by choosing the path you’re already on?

And then stop. Don’t argue. Don’t correct. Just listen. Because beneath every “no” is a moment they’re trying not to repeat. A bad coin toss they’d rather forget.

Then invite them to hear your perspective. Ask them to hold their reactions until you finish. Encourage them to jot down any thoughts or questions as you speak.

Walk them through your message. And afterward, ask:

1. What did you actually hear?

2. What mattered most to you and why?

3. What, if anything, might you do differently now?

4. Did anything surprise you, good or bad?

5. And how did this message make you feel?
   

The brands that will win the future of agriculture aren’t just the ones with the best products. They’re the ones who know that the real competition isn’t another brand, it’s the lack of certainty around working with you.

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

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Too many companies treat storytelling as the final step in product development.

The engineers build. The product team ships. Then marketing is handed the assignment of “getting the word out.”

They mistakenly believe their product story is an afterthought, a tale to be spun once the product is built and ready to ship.

“We need a better story!”

But the story determines whether the product matters in the first place.

When growth stalls, we tend to diagnose a distribution problem. We hire more salespeople. Spend more on advertising. Buy another CRM. Attend more trade shows.

But there’s a revealing statistic hiding in plain sight.

Roughly 40–60% of B2B buying journeys end in no decision.

The customer doesn’t choose a competitor; they choose to do nothing.

The problem isn’t that your product lost, it’s that your story never gave people a reason to change.

• There’s no compelling explanation of why the current way is broken.

• No picture of a future worth pursuing.

• No clear cost of standing still.

We’re just holding our product waiting for it to be compared against every other product.

But your customers don’t buy technology because it’s technically better. They buy when they believe a different future is possible.

That’s why storytelling isn’t marketing. Story is strategy.

Start with a point of view. Start by helping customers see something they couldn’t see before.

Build a future people want to belong to. Then build the product that makes that future possible.

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

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The single greatest context shift anyone has ever pulled off in American politics happened in Kansas City, Missouri, on October 21st, 1984.

That night, Walter Mondale and Ronald Reagan met for the final presidential debate before the election. Everything was on the line. Reagan had stumbled in the first debate. He looked old; he sounded tired.

For the first time, voters began to wonder whether the presidency had passed him by. Whether the man who had once exuded confidence and clarity was now too slow, too frail, too far past his prime to lead for four more years.

Commentators pounced, and the polls tightened. Reagan's age, once a quiet undercurrent, became the central question of the race. At 73, he was the oldest president in American history.

Was he still sharp enough to lead?

Heading into Kansas City, Reagan’s advisors told him he needed to address the problem head-on. He needed to convince the American people that he still had what it took to lead. They wanted to script talking points and test poll answers to gauge public opinion. The president simply told them, “I’ve got it.”

The lights came up. The questions started. And then, just twenty minutes in, it happened.

Henry Trewhitt of the Baltimore Sun asked Reagan directly whether age would affect his ability to serve. It was the moment his critics had been waiting for…a chance to watch him falter again. To see if the weight of 73 years would finally show.

Instead, Reagan smiled.

“Not at all, Mr. Trewhitt,” he said. “And I want you to know that I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.”

The room erupted in laughter. Even Mondale joined in. The entire issue vanished with a single line.

Two weeks later, Reagan won 49 of the 50 states. Only Mondale’s home state of Minnesota remained blue.

In the world of agricultural marketing, we spend an incredible amount of time trying to change people’s minds, trying to get them to “think different.”

We try to figure out how to position our new seed genetics so they don’t just sound like more of the same. We struggle to explain the value of our innovative agtech when it passes under scrutiny. We tweak messaging for crop protection products, hoping someone notices that this formulation really is different. And ag retailers push to be seen as trusted advisors, not just the place that sells inputs a few cents cheaper.

The problem quickly becomes clear. We’re trying to change minds in a market that’s already made up its mind.

So we double down. We add more proof points. More data. More testimonials. We build another deck. Launch another campaign. Train the sales team to "tell the story" better.

But it rarely works. Because it’s not that growers or retailers don’t understand us. It’s that we’re speaking inside a frame that no longer fits the way they make decisions.

We assume this is a messaging problem. A product problem. A proof problem.

But the real problem isn’t clarity. It’s context.

If you’re positioned as "just another crop protection product," it doesn’t matter how much better your formulation is. If your agtech platform is seen as "yet another app from corporate," or potentially worse at the moment “another tech company coming in to ‘disrupt’ agriculture,” no feature set will fix that. If your retail brand is still framed as a price-taker, being “trusted” won’t move the needle.

You’re trying to win inside someone else’s frame.

And you don’t win inside someone else’s frame.

You break it.

You can spend years and a fortune trying to change a thousand minds.

Or you can shift one context…and change what those minds see.

In ag marketing today, we have the choice to either speak louder with a message that most people don’t want to hear, or speak smarter with language that helps them see the problem differently, feel the risk more clearly, or believe in a new possibility they hadn’t yet considered.

And that shift doesn’t happen through more explanation. It happens through reframing.

Because what moves people isn’t logic; it’s perception. What earns trust isn’t data; it’s resonance. And what creates action isn’t persuasion; it’s belief.

If you want to change the outcome, don’t start with the message. Start with the lens.

Because the human brain isn’t a calculator, it’s something much more complicated.

The Psychologist Jonathan Haidt has famously described the human brain as a rider sitting atop an elephant.

The rider is our conscious, logical reasoning, the part of us that thinks it’s in control. But the elephant? That’s our unconscious intuition. And it’s the one actually doing the steering.

Ask someone why they bought a particular product, switched to a different agronomist, or left a trusted brand, and the rider will give you a perfectly rational answer: “It was a better ROI,” “We wanted more data visibility,” “They had a better program.”

But that’s just post-rationalization. The elephant had already made up its mind.

The decision was emotional. Contextual. Subconscious. And if we want to change outcomes, we have to stop selling to the rider and start framing for the elephant.

That’s what Reagan did. He didn’t out-argue Mondale. He didn’t win the facts. He won the frame and made the facts irrelevant.

Legendary marketers do the same.

Because when you understand that decisions aren’t made through linear logic, you start to see that most progress doesn’t follow a straight line either.

The most effective strategies, like the most effective stories, don’t work because they force clarity.

They work because they create momentum. Not by pushing harder, but by shifting the terrain entirely.

That’s the idea behind what author John Kay calls “obliquity.”

In complex systems, where outcomes are shaped by uncertainty, emotion, and feedback loops, the most direct path to success is almost never a straight line.

• Oceanographers didn’t discover the shortest route from the Atlantic to the Pacific; it was found by conquistadors chasing gold.

• The happiest people in the world don’t spend their days trying to be happy.

• And the most profitable companies in the world? They aren’t the ones obsessed with maximizing profit. They’re the ones pursuing something deeper…solving a meaningful problem, building a legendary product, changing an industry.

“Obliquity,” Kay writes, “is characteristic of systems that are complex, imperfectly understood, and change their nature as we engage with them.”

If that doesn’t describe modern agriculture, we don’t know what does.

The industry is full of second and third-order effects. What works on one farm fails on the next. Weather shifts, soil profiles, and management styles turn every acre into a unique system. We operate with partial information, emotional context, and limited time.

You can’t brute-force your way into influence in a system like that. You can’t just show up with a better product and expect adoption.

Because in agriculture, value isn’t just created. It’s contextualized. And unless you shift the context, even the best ideas will stall.

The fastest way to relevance isn’t shouting louder. It’s shifting the frame. The brands that win don’t hammer their message into a crowded market. They change the way the market sees the problem. And once that happens, the solution becomes obvious.

We don’t need better pitches. We need better frames.

And the most effective way to engineer that frame is through category design.

Category design isn’t about clever slogans, taglines, or product positioning. It’s about defining the problem in a way that makes your solution not just appealing, but inevitable.

It’s not branding. It’s not messaging. It’s not differentiation. It’s upstream of all of that. It’s the decision to compete on terms you create.

Legendary companies don’t try to be better in someone else’s category.
They build a new category that renders the old one obsolete.

• Airbnb didn’t say it was cheaper than hotels. It said, “Belong Anywhere.” It didn’t sell lodging. It sold identity.

• Tesla didn’t sell electric vehicles. It sold a revolution. Performance, autonomy, and tech in a frame that made gas engines look like yesterday’s news.

• Guinness turned the problem, how long it takes to pour, into a mark of pride: “Good things come to those who wait.”

• Stella Artois didn’t justify its high price. It embraced it: “Reassuringly expensive.”

• Patagonia didn’t just sell gear. It sold a cause. You weren’t buying a jacket. You were joining a movement.

These brands didn’t shout louder. They shifted the lens. They created a movement.

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They defined the problem differently, and as a result, changed what people wanted in the first place.

They didn’t fight for market share. They designed a new market altogether.

And in agriculture, the same opportunity is sitting in front of us.

Category design isn’t magic. It’s methodology.

And the simplest way to practice it is to use the framework “Frame It. Name It. Claim It.”

This is how you shift the context of the conversation, on purpose. This is how you stop chasing attention and start commanding it. This is how you turn a better product into a different one.

1. Frame It — Define the problem on your terms

Every category shift starts with a reframed problem. Not “How do we market this better?” but “What’s the real enemy here?”

The company that frames the problem owns the customer’s attention. Not because they have the best solution, but because they helped define what needs solving.

Don’t say: “This seed offers higher yield under stress.”
Frame it as: “Most genetics are optimized for test plots. Ours are built for the unpredictable, uneven, low-performing acres that make or break your field average.”

I’ve never heard a farmer talk about yields under 240 bushels here in the Corn Belt. But the national average is 177.

That gap isn’t just agronomic, it’s also psychological. It’s the result of a category built around best-case scenarios instead of real-world performance.

Framing the problem differently means telling the truth others won’t: that success isn’t found in the top-end number on the plot sign…it’s found in how your seed performs where the field is thin, the water’s short, or the soil is poor.

Because the acres that drag you down are the ones that determine your average. And if you want to win more acres, start by framing the problem that actually exists there.

Here’s another example:

Don’t say: “Our platform integrates data more cleanly.”
Frame it as: “Data fragmentation is costing you clarity, coordination, and control.”

The goal of framing is to make the old way look incomplete, so your new way feels like progress.

2. Name It — Give your category a handle

People don’t remember products. They remember categories.

That’s why the grocery aisle says “Dairy”, not “Kemps.”

It’s why we ask, “What kind of restaurant do you want to go to?” Not “Which restaurant?”

We’re looking for the category first, the brand second.

Once you’ve framed the problem, you need to name the new solution in a way that sticks. A way that spreads. A way that makes people say, “Oh, you mean like X.”

A great name gives your category edges. It creates contrast. It puts language in your customer’s mouth that reinforces the story you’re telling before you even show up to tell it.

3. Claim It — Position yourself as the leader

Once you’ve framed the problem and named the new category, you need to claim the space as yours.

This isn’t about saying “we’re the best.” It’s about saying, “We started this. We lead this. Everyone else is just catching up.”

You don’t compete on features…you compete on insight.

You don’t validate your category…you evangelize it.

You show up at conferences, on farm tours, and in every customer conversation, not just selling a product but delivering a worldview. A way of seeing the future. A new model for success.

Frame It. Name It. Claim It. is how you stop fighting over the scraps of the old market and start owning the upside of a new one.

Because the company that defines the problem is the one that defines the value. And the one that defines the value is the one that wins the market.

Reagan didn’t win the debate because he had a better answer. He won because he changed the context of the question.

You can do the same.

Ready to shift the frame in your market?

We created a simple worksheet to help your team apply this framework right now.

Download your copy of the “Frame It. Name It. Claim It.” Template.

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The single most dominant performance in the history of professional basketball took place on March 2nd, 1962 in Hershey, Pennsylvania. That evening, as four thousand fans looked on, Wilt Chamberlain scored 100 points in one game. It had never been done before and probably never will be done again.

Chamberlain played for the Philadelphia Warriors. In the 1961-62 NBA season, he averaged more than 50 points per game - a record that will never be broken. He was a player ahead of his time, an unstoppable 7'1," 275-pound big man built like an oak tree who moved with the grace of an Olympic track star. Wilt Chamberlain was, both literally and figuratively, a larger-than-life character.

On the night he scored 100 points, Chamberlain shot 36 of 63 from the field, pulled down 25 rebounds, and most incredibly, made 28 of his 32 free throws.

This last stat is surprising because when Chamberlain entered the NBA, he was only making 40% of his foul shots—terrible by any standard. For comparison, Shaquille O'Neal, universally considered one of the worst free-throw shooters of the modern era, shot 52.7%.

But in his record-breaking 1961-62 season, he finally had enough. Chamberlain changed the way he shot free throws, shooting underhand. Instead of releasing the ball up by his forehead, he held it between his knees and flicked it toward the basket. Suddenly, he became an average free-throw shooter, hitting over 60% of his foul shots. On the historic night in Hershey, Pennsylvania, he was a great free-throw shooter, shooting 87%. But then something happened; he stopped. He went back to releasing the ball from his forehead and returned to being a terrible free-throw shooter.

Chamberlain would later comment on shooting underhand, saying, “I felt silly, like a sissy.”

He continued, “I know I was wrong. I know some of the best foul shooters in history shot that way. Even now, the best one in the NBA, Rick Barry, shoots underhand. I just couldn’t do it.”

In business and life, we like to think that the best ideas win the day because they are empirically superior.

Particularly in agriculture, there’s a common assumption that decisions are made logically. We like to believe that customers, when presented with the right data, will choose the best option. This is the rational view of human behavior—what behavioral economist Richard Thaler calls a “Spock-like” mentality, where people are seen as purely logical beings who weigh facts and make the best choice. But Wilt Chamberlain’s story shows us something different.

He had all the data. He knew the underhand shot was more effective. Yet, he rejected it because it didn’t fit with how he wanted to be perceived. This same dynamic plays out in business every day. Companies assume that if they present the best product or show a superior ROI, customers will make the rational choice. But, as Thaler and other behavioral economists have pointed out, there’s more going on in the mind’s of our customers than just pure rational calculation.

Kumar Galhotra, the COO of Ford, has famously observed that, “Carmaking is 100,000 rational decisions in search of one emotional one.” All the careful engineering and research that goes into building a car ultimately leads to that single moment when a customer makes an emotional decision to buy. Maybe they buy because their neighbor just bought this brand of car, maybe they like the color red, or silver, or black. Maybe it has the right number of cupholders for family roadtrips. Whatever the case, customers are most likely not buying based on the gear ratios, the drivetrain, or the suspension geometry. These are the things you spend most of your time on if you’re building a car, but they have almost no value if they do not culminate in an emotional connection that makes the customer feel like this car is a reflection of who they are and what they want out of life.

And of course this dynamic isn’t limited to the auto industry. The same is true if you’re building a business in seed, chemistry, iron, or agronomy.

Yet, for some reason we keep forcing technical details, like our version of exhaust backpressure or brake system engineering for our product, down our customer’s throat.

“Now make the obvious decision!” we shout. But they don’t care about your meticulous transmission tuning or the car’s torsional rigidity. What they really want is for their neighbor to think they’re smart and successful. They want the status that comes with owning that specific color and style. They crave the connection from the experiences they’ll have with the people they love in that car. All your technical specs? Just noise.

We think if we bombard customers with enough data, they’ll make the logical choice. But data, ROI, and features need to be part of a bigger emotional story. In fact, presenting ROI at any point in the sales process correlates with a 27% drop in close rates. Why? Because facts alone don’t create conviction. Emotion does. People don’t make decisions by coldly analyzing data—they make them based on how your solution fits into their lives emotionally.

Purchasing decisions don’t happen on paper—they happen in the mind, where emotions and perceptions hold more weight than numbers.

Customers don’t just buy products—they buy stories. They buy solutions that fit into their lives, into their identity. If you can tell a compelling story that connects your product to how customers see themselves, you’ll engage them emotionally. And that’s the difference between being a vendor and being a brand they love.

It’s not about offering a slightly better solution—it’s about creating a story that makes your product feel like the answer customers didn’t even know they were searching for. The companies that thrive are the ones that aren’t just selling products—they’re creating emotional experiences.

The art of the marketer is to propagate the value of the emotional decision in the customer's mind until it is all they can see. All those rational decisions—the product development, the data gathering—only matter if they serve that emotional connection. It's not about making incremental improvements to your product; it's about shaping the narrative in a way that emotionally connects with customers and makes the decision feel inevitable.

To truly connect with customers, you have to reframe how they see their problem—not just sell them a better solution. People don’t want just an improved version of what already exists—they want a new way of thinking about their challenges. It’s not enough to outdo the competition on product specs. You need to make your product feel like the only one that fits into the story running through their mind.

Successful companies don’t compete on features alone—they shift the conversation, allowing customers to see their world differently. It’s about helping customers understand why the way they’ve always done things isn’t enough. When you shift their perspective, you create an emotional connection to your product or your service.

• Apple shifted from promoting MP3 players to selling the idea of "1,000 songs in your pocket."

• Airbnb flipped the narrative by offering travelers the chance to "live like a local."

• Avis turned being second in the market into an emotional promise with "We try harder."

• Guinness transformed its long pour time into an asset with "Good things come to those who wait."

• Nike connected with customers by selling empowerment through "Just Do It."

• John Deere built trust through tradition and reliability with "Nothing Runs Like a Deere."

The key is to go beyond the specifications, the ROI, and the technical superiority. People don’t just buy products—they buy stories that align with how they see themselves and the world. They buy solutions that not only solve problems but also reinforce their identity, their aspirations, and the experiences they seek.

In the same way that Wilt Chamberlain chose not to continue shooting underhand despite knowing it was the better method, customers don’t always make decisions based on data. They are driven by emotions, perceptions, and connections.

To win in any industry—whether in cars, agronomy, or technology—you must shift the conversation from logic to emotion. You must tell a story that your customers can see themselves in. And when they do, you will have not just a buyer but a believer, a customer who feels connected to your brand because you helped them understand that their world could be different—and better—with your solution.

That’s when the magic happens, when products become experiences, and transactions turn into lasting relationships.

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

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Years ago, I was sent to the International Banana Congress under circumstances that made the trip feel like a mild form of punishment.

A teammate had fallen ill the day before the show, so the assignment landed in my lap on a Sunday afternoon—Mother's Day, no less, a detail that did little to improve the mood at home.

By evening, I was at the airport, where the departure board had developed that all-too-familiar habit of changing times without changing destinations. One delay became two. The flight finally left. Then came the rental-car shuttle, the paperwork, the drive through unfamiliar streets, until sometime well after dark, I pushed through the revolving door of the hotel carrying a fatigue that belongs only to air travel.

Hotel check-ins are almost liturgical in their sameness. A credit card. A driver’s license. A keyboard tapping somewhere behind the desk. Are they typing War and Peace or getting me my key card? The exchange requires so little attention that neither participant seems fully present.

Then, to my surprise, the woman behind the counter disappeared below the desk. She came back holding two warm chocolate-chip cookies.

“Enjoy your stay.”

I couldn’t tell you what the room looked like. I don’t remember the lobby or the breakfast, but I remember the cookies because they were unexpected.

In his book, The Experience Machine, Andy Clark argues that the brain is constantly trying to predict what will happen next.

Perception isn’t simply seeing the world as it is. It’s the brain’s best guess about what’s coming, continuously updated as reality unfolds.

Most of those guesses are good enough, which is why ordinary life feels so seamless. The elevator arrives. The hotel clerk asks for an ID. The key card works. The room looks like every other room.

But every now and then, our predictions are wrong, and that’s when we pay attention.

In predictive processing, these moments are called prediction errors. Reality doesn’t match the brain’s model, so the brain has to stop, update, and learn. Those moments are more likely to become disproportionately memorable.

This is true whether the surprise is good or bad.

You remember the restaurant that lost your reservation. The airline that upgraded your seat. The teacher who believed in you before anyone else did. The handwritten note tucked inside the package. The unexpected phone call.

We don’t remember life as a continuous recording. We remember the moments that broke the pattern.

But in business, we spend enormous amounts of time and money trying to eliminate surprise. We standardize processes, optimize workflows, reduce variance, write scripts, create checklists, and measure consistency.

All of that matters. Customers deserve reliability and consistency. That is what it means to run a professional organization.

But there is also a danger in rote reliability that we frequently fail to acknowledge:

Invisibility.

• Nobody walks out of a hotel thinking, They successfully gave me the room I reserved.

• Nobody tells a friend that the elevator worked.

• Nobody writes a five-star review because the key card opened the door.

Those things disappear into the background because they happened exactly as expected.

The cookies at the DoubleTree didn’t. To the hotel, they were a process. To me, in that moment, they felt like a gift.

Relative to almost everything else the hotel spent money on, they cost very little. Yet years later, they are the only part of that stay I can still describe in detail.

This is the strange economics of memory. Small, unexpected moments often create more lasting value than large, expected investments.

Scott Cook, the founder of Intuit, has a phrase that has become part of the company’s culture.

Savor the Surprise.

Customers remember what surprises them.

They knew, or thought they knew, what was about to happen, then something better happened.

Our job as leaders is not to ignore this surprise, but to treat it like a clue we can inspect, analyze, and act upon.

This is where most people get stuck.

We hear an idea like this and assume the choice is between reliability and surprise, consistency and delight, operational discipline and human feeling. But that is the wrong tradeoff.

• A warm cookie would not redeem a dirty room.

• A handwritten note does not fix a broken product.

• A clever email does not excuse software that does not work.

Surprise without reliability feels manipulative, like a company trying to distract you from the basics it failed to deliver. Reliability is the floor, but it does not create the memory.

Once we reach a certain level of reliability, the reliable parts of the experience disappear into the customer’s expectations.

The room is ready. The invoice is accurate. The delivery arrives. The recommendation is sound. The software loads. The sales rep follows up.

These things matter enormously, but when they happen correctly, they often go unnoticed.

Most companies respond to this by investing even more in the expected parts of the experience.

• A nicer lobby.

• A better dashboard.

• A faster workflow.

• A more polished brochure.

• Another feature.

• Another automated touchpoint.

But people do not tell stories about average experiences. They tell the stories that interrupt the normal pattern.

A good surprise does not say, “Look at us.” It says, “We see you.”

So, how do you design a positive prediction error?

How might we savor the surprises in our businesses?

1. Start with the existing script.

The hotel guest expects check-in tedium. The farmer expects a sales pitch. The software user expects another dashboard. The dealer expects a generic follow-up email. The conference attendee expects a badge, a tote bag, and a booth conversation that sounds almost exactly like the last booth conversation.

Before you can create a meaningful surprise, you have to understand what the customer assumes will happen next.

• What is the expected sequence?

• What does the customer think this interaction is going to feel like?

• Where have they learned to lower their expectations?

• Where are they already bracing for friction?

That is the first discipline, to map your audience’s expectations.

2. The second is to look for the emotional low points.

Look for the places where the customer is tired, confused, anxious, rushed, skeptical, embarrassed, under pressure, or waiting. These are the moments when most businesses become procedural.

The form must be filled out. The ticket must be routed. The meeting must be scheduled. The script must be followed.

But these are also the moments when a small act of attention carries unusual weight.

The DoubleTree cookies worked because they landed at the low point of the experience. I was not in the mood to be impressed. I was in the mood to get through the transaction and go to bed. That is why the gesture registered. It arrived where the normal script had trained me to expect nothing.

3. The third step is to add a small positive violation.

Ask yourself, “What could we do here that is useful, human, and unexpected?

A note. A call. A heads-up. A small gift. A saved step. A remembered detail. A proactive fix. A useful insight delivered before the customer knows to ask for it.

The best version is often embarrassingly simple.

The surprise does not have to be grand; it has to be specific.

4. The fourth step is to make it native to the business.

A good surprise feels like it belongs.

It grows naturally out of the promise the business already makes.

This is where many companies get it wrong. They import gestures from somewhere else and wonder why they feel hollow. They confuse surprise with novelty. But novelty wears off quickly. A meaningful surprise is rooted in the customer’s context. It says, we understand the job you are trying to do, the pressure you are under, and the moment you are in.

Again, “we see you.”

5. The fifth step is to budget for human attention.

The discipline is not simply to automate delight. It is to build an organization where people are allowed, expected, and trained to notice.

Notice the low point, the assumption, the frustration, the opening.

Notice the small moment when the expected script can be broken in a way that feels generous rather than gimmicky.

You do not begin by asking, “How do we delight customers?”

That question is too vague. It usually leads to theater.

You begin by asking:

• What does the customer expect to happen here?

• Where is that expectation emotionally loaded?

• And what could we do, in this moment, that would be useful, human, and just unexpected enough to be remembered?

The experiences we remember are rarely the biggest, most expensive, or most carefully engineered. Often, they are the moments when the world departs from the script just enough to make us feel awake again.

And in a world where so much of customer experience has been standardized, automated, measured, scripted, optimized, and sanded smooth, the smallest human gesture can become the thing that lasts.

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

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Many years ago, a British shoe company sent two salesmen to Africa to assess the market. The first salesman wired home, “There is no opportunity here. Nobody wears shoes.”

The second wired back, “There is enormous opportunity here. Nobody wears shoes.”

The difference wasn’t just optimism; it was category thinking.

The first salesman looked for existing demand while the second imagined creating it. The first saw a market that did not exist. The second saw a category waiting to be designed.

That is the difference between most companies and the companies that change markets.

Most companies ask, “Where is the demand we can capture?”

Category designers want to know, “What demand should exist that does not yet?”

Those are completely different games, and most companies are playing the wrong one.

The next thing to realize is that your marketing channels aren’t broken.

LinkedIn isn’t broken. Email isn’t broken. Trade shows aren’t broken. Google isn’t broken. Your CRM isn’t broken (and neither was your last one).

Most marketing channels work exactly as they are supposed to.

The problem usually isn’t where you are talking; it is more often what you are saying. And more importantly, it is the market frame you are saying it inside of.

Most companies use marketing channels to chase existing demand.

1. They find people already shopping.

2. They interrupt them.

3. They compare themselves to competitors.

4. Then they beg to be chosen.

• “We’re 5x faster.”

• “Our platform is best in class.”

• “The competition gives you five readings per hour. We give you sixty.”

• “Our technology is more accurate.”

• “Our service is more robust.”

“PLEASE PICK US!”

This is competitive begging. It’s differentiation by volume. Who can shout the loudest? Who can build the longest feature list? Who can make the most impressive comparison chart? Who can cram the most proof points into a sales deck before the buyer mentally checks out?

And then, when nobody pays attention, we blame the channel. We blame the algorithm. We blame the trade show. We blame Google or Facebook or Farm Journal. We blame the customer.

But what if the market is ignoring you because you are saying the same thing as everyone else, inside a category your customer already thinks they understand?

Most companies market products and brands. The best companies market categories.

They teach the market a new way to think, they name the old way, they expose its flaws, they make the status quo feel expensive, risky, outdated, or incomplete.

Then they introduce a new category as the obvious path forward. The product matters, of course it matters, but the product is not where demand begins.

Demand begins when the customer starts to see their world differently. Before someone buys your product, they have to buy your explanation of the world.

They have to believe, “The way we are doing this now is no longer good enough.”

There is an old line often attributed to Einstein:

“If I had an hour to solve a problem, I’d spend fifty-five minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions.”

Most companies do the opposite, they spend fifty-five minutes talking about their product. And five minutes thinking about the customer’s problem.

Then they wonder why the market doesn’t care what they have to say. Customers rarely resist solutions to problems they urgently believe they have. They resist products that solve problems they have not yet learned to care about.

If your customer does not feel the weight of the problem, they will never appreciate the brilliance of your solution.

No one cares how sophisticated your technology is if they do not first understand why it matters. No one wakes up hoping to buy another platform. No one wakes up wishing for another dashboard. No one wants another product demo, another trial, another pilot, another spec sheet, or another “next-generation solution.”

Your customers want:

• Fewer headaches.

• Less uncertainty.

• More confidence.

• Better outcomes.

• A better future.

Our job is not simply to explain your product or build a brand, our job is to help the market see their problem in a new way. Then help them understand that our category solves it.

Most of our marketing departments are built for demand capture.

Category leaders build for demand creation.

Demand capture finds people who are already shopping and convinces them you are better. This is sold as SEO, AEO, public relations, advertising, and attending events.

Demand creation teaches people why they should be shopping in the first place.

That is a much higher-order job.

It requires a point of view, an enemy, and for the company to make a sacrifice. It requires saying who you are for and who you are not for. It requires the courage to stop sounding like the rest of the market and start leading it.

The greatest marketers do not merely enter markets, they condition them. They prime the market to believe something new. They build language that customers can repeat. They give people a way to describe a problem they have felt but could not yet name.

And once customers can name the problem, they can start looking for a solution.

Too many companies in agriculture are trapped inside categories they did not design.

They blindly accept the current frame, the competitor’s language, the analyst’s labels, and the existing shelf space.

Then they spend years trying to prove they are better inside a game someone else created.

That is an exhausting way to build a company.

Because when customers compare you to what they already know, when you don’t provide them another axis in their comparison, they usually default to the simplest questions.

• Who is cheaper?

• Who has more features?

• Who has the least risk?

• Who have I heard of before?

• Who is everyone else using?

That is how great products get dragged into commodity fights and new products fail to launch. They are trapped in the wrong frame.

A better product inside the wrong category will often lose to a worse product inside a clearer one.

There are countless products in agriculture today that genuinely improve a farmer’s operation.

Many of them will still fail.

Not for want of good engineering or weak science or the stubbornness of farmers. Not even because “the market is not ready.”

They will fail because their creators assume demand instead of creating it. They launch products before they build belief. They market solutions before customers feel the problem. They explain features before they define the category. They compete inside someone else’s mental model instead of creating a new one.

And when adoption is slow, they will reach for the usual explanations.

• “Farmers are slow to change.”

• “The sales cycle is long.”

• “Ag is relationship-driven.”

• “The channel is hard.”

• “All we need is more awareness.”

Maybe, but maybe the real issue is simpler.

Customers do not adopt categories they do not understand. They do not champion movements they cannot describe. They do not pay premiums for products they perceive as interchangeable. And they do not change behavior for a solution to a problem they have not yet been taught to value.

One of the fastest ways to destroy a category is to make it for everyone.

This is where many companies lose their edge. They start with a sharp insight, a specific customer, a painful problem, a differentiated point of view.

Then fear creeps in.

What about this segment? What about that retailer? What about this geography? What about this use case? What about this investor narrative? What about this competitor’s feature?

So they broaden the message, soften the claim, add more benefits, chase more customers.

They expand the positioning until it becomes vague enough that nobody can disagree with it. Unfortunately, it’s also so vague that nobody cares.

In trying to appeal to everyone, they become essential to no one. Category designers do the opposite. They choose.

• They choose the customer.

• They choose the problem.

• They choose the enemy.

• They choose the future they are trying to create.

And because they choose, the market can finally understand what they stand for.

Stop marketing your product as if the market already understands why it matters.

Stop assuming demand exists just because the problem is real. Stop blaming your channels for carrying a message the market does not care about.

Your marketing channels are not broken, but your category might be.

Market the category, market the new way, market the shift from the old world to the new one.

Because channels do not create demand, categories do.

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

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In the 1950’s, driving a motorcycle carried a reputation. They were loud, dangerous, rebellious, and a little threatening.

Respectable people did not ride motorcycles.

Then Soichiro Honda asked a different question.

Instead of asking the same question everyone else in the tiny motorcycle category was asking, “How do we build a better motorcycle for motorcycle people?”

He asked, “What would a motorcycle have to become for ordinary people to ride one?”

That question changed the category.

And it led Honda to build the Super Cub. A small, simple, clean, inexpensive, and easy-to-ride motorcycle. It was purposefully not built for the young man who wanted to look dangerous. It was built for the man in the street, his wife, and his kids.

Then Honda talked about it differently.

They did not limit the story to motorcycle trade journals read by gearheads. Ads ran in mainstream outlets like Life and Time. The campaign showed celebrities and normal, everyday people riding Hondas through the streets, smiling.

The line they used was brilliant:

“You meet the nicest people on a Honda.”

In one sentence, Honda changed the meaning of the machine. That is what category designers do.

Category designers do not win by finding better answers to the old question.

We change the question.

Manoj Bhargava, the creator of 5-Hour Energy, did not ask, “How do we make a better energy drink to compete with Monster and Red Bull?”

That mindset assumed energy came in a large, refrigerated can.

He asked, “Just because I’m tired, does that mean I’m thirsty?”

That led him to create the energy shot category.

Similarly, Airbnb did not ask, “How do we build a better hotel?”

That question would have trapped them inside the existing lodging category, where the assumptions were room service, front desks, lobbies, on-site dining, loyalty points, and standardized experiences.

Airbnb asked, “What if travelers want to live like locals?”

That helped change the category from hospitality to community-driven hospitality.

This is exactly what Steve Jobs did at Apple. Everyone in the valley at the time was asking, “What can technology do?”

But Jobs asked, “What does it feel like when you use this technology?”

Agriculture needs more of this kind of thinking.

Too many of our companies are still asking existing-category questions.

• How do we make a bigger machine that gets more done?

• How do we build a better platform?

• How do we give agronomists and farmers more data?

• How do we sell more seed?

• How do we convince farmers to adopt this technology?

Those are not bad questions, but they carry heavy assumptions. And the assumption inside the question determines the category you build.

• If you ask, “How do we make a bigger, more efficient machine?” you will probably build a bigger machine.

• If you ask, “How do we build a better platform?” you will probably build more features.

• If you ask, “How do we give agronomists more data?” you will probably create another dashboard.

• If you ask, “How do we sell more seed?” you will probably talk more about plot wins, traits, discounts (price), and yield.

• If you ask, “How do we convince farmers to adopt tech?” you will probably treat farmers as the problem.

But category designers do not accept the old question as fixed, they find the assumption inside it and then they rewrite the question. They add a third access to the comparison.

• What if productivity doesn’t have to mean bigger equipment?

• What if agronomy doesn’t need more data, but earlier clarity for action?

• What if seed selling is not about moving more bags, but helping a farmer make a higher-confidence decision?

• What if farmers are not slow to adopt, but we are slow to redesign the category around how they actually decide?

It’s not about finding a cleverer answer to the same old questions. The job is to find the assumption buried inside the question and the courage and patience to ask a better one.

Change the question, change the category. Change the category, change the future.

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In 2005, direct-response copywriter named Blair Warren released a 13-page report called The One Sentence Persuasion Course.

As the title suggests, the entire 8,500-word report revolves around a single sentence:

“People will do anything for those who encourage their dreams, justify their failures, allay their fears, confirm their suspicions, and help them throw rocks at their enemies.”

One well-known marketing company even promises that mastering Warren’s ideas will get people to “do your bidding.”

C.S. Lewis once observed that, “what you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing: it also depends on what sort of person you are.”

I think that’s exactly what’s happening here.

Some people have come to think of marketing as something that is done to our audience. It’s a manipulation, a shortcut, a theft of attention.

I don’t think Warren was describing how to manipulate people.

I think he was describing what empathy looks like.

The things that his sentence describe got there before you did. We all have dreams, failures, fears, suspicions, and yes, even enemies.

The job of the marketer isn’t to create them. It’s to notice them.

We often imagine persuasion as arm-twisting or casting a spell on someone long enough to pick their pocket.

But persuasion isn’t something we do to people at all. It’s something people experience when they feel understood. It is the result of alignment.

And long-term customer relationships aren’t coerced from an audience, they emerge from trust.

Effective marketing in agriculture hinges on empathy and service.

The best marketers have stopped asking, “How do I get people to buy this?”

But instead, they are posing the question, “Who does my customer want to become?”

The best marketers don’t manufacture desire; they recognize it. They don’t invent problems, they give language to them. They don’t interrupt people’s stories, they enter them.

Because the goal of marketing was never to get people to do your bidding. Yuck.

The goal is to understand people well enough to build something they’re grateful exists.

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Everybody wants to be seen.

Everybody wants someone to care about their work, swipe right on their dating profile, support their cause, buy their product, or believe what they believe.

Everybody wants to be heard.

Everybody wants to be understood. To be proven right. To matter. We all have hopes we’d like others to embrace, mistakes we’d rather they forget, and fears we’d prefer they never discover.

And because we want to be seen so badly, we rush.

• We rush to advertise. “Buy our product.” “Book a demo.” “Now available.”

• We rush to educate. “Here’s the science.” “Here’s the trial data.” “Let me show you how it works.”

• We rush to explain. “The market just doesn’t get it.” “If farmers understood the technology, they’d buy it.”

We spend enormous time, energy, and money trying to attract attention.

But before we can be seen, we must first learn to see.

In 1916, Robert Updegraff published a short business fable called Obvious Adams. It tells the story of the most sought-after executive in American business.

Updegraff’s character isn’t charismatic or especially brilliant. He’s specifically called out as “ordinary” multiple times throughout the book.

His extraordinary ability was in noticing things that everyone else had stopped seeing.

One afternoon, Adams, the book’s main character, was asked to solve a mystery.

His client, a retail chain, had two stores in the same city. One of them was thriving. The other was steadily losing money. The company’s executives had turned themselves inside out debating promotions, advertising campaigns, and sales strategies. Nothing had worked

So they called Adams. He took the train to the city and spent two days doing something remarkably simple.

He watched.

Standing across the street, he noticed that most pedestrians never really saw the struggling store. Their attention was fixed on the traffic signal ahead. They walked past the entrance without realizing it was there.

The sales problem wasn’t due to the advertising or the product. The problem was that people couldn’t see the store.

Adams attended to the problem long enough for the solution to disclose itself.

We tend to think of attention as something we pay.

We spend our childhood being told to pay attention. We spend our adulthood trying to purchase everyone else's.

We buy billboards, television commercials, Google Ads, trade show booths, sponsorships, podcasts, LinkedIn campaigns, and every other imaginable way of persuading someone to look our way for a moment.

But the lesson of Obvious Adams is that attention isn’t something you can purchase; it’s something you need to practice.

Somewhere along the way, we’ve collectively forgotten that the first discipline of attention isn't being noticed—it's noticing.

In his book The Creative Act: A Way of Being, Rick Rubin articulates a related idea about building something important

“The awareness happens first,” he writes. “Analysis is a secondary function.”

In other words, before we can explain the world, we have to experience it. Before we can solve a problem, we have to see it clearly. Before we can persuade another person, we have to understand how they already see the world.

Awareness always precedes insight, and insight must always precede strategy.

Too much of our industry has reversed that order.

We begin with a strategy that we read in a blog, then we build the presentation to compel our audience to see it our way, and then we collect the data that proves our strategy is absolutely perfect.

Only then do we launch the campaign.

Is it any wonder most of the campaigns we produce fail to resonate?

Perhaps the problem isn't that farmers refuse to give us their attention. Perhaps we haven't first given them ours.

So what should we do?

We should slow down, spend more time in the field than in the boardroom, ask more questions than we answer, watch before we write, listen before we launch, and spend less time trying to be interesting and more time becoming interested.

Because that’s where the obvious solutions live.

The poet Malcolm Guite has observed that attention is the beginning of devotion. I suspect it's also the beginning of great marketing.

The companies that change the future of agriculture won't be the ones that demand the market's attention; they'll be the ones that first give it.

Because before we can be seen, we must first learn to see.

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There’s an old story about two salesmen sent to the same remote village. One sends a message back to headquarters:

“No opportunity here. No one wears shoes.”

The other sends back:

“Massive opportunity here. No one wears shoes!”

It’s a familiar parable, but it cuts to the heart of where we are as an industry.

The market feels bleak. Margins are tight. Growth is slow. Everyone’s being asked to do more with less. And when that happens, the default instinct is to hunker down—to optimize what’s already there, to capture whatever demand is still on the table.

To keep doing what we’ve always done, just with a little more efficiency.

But marketing’s job isn’t to polish what’s visible. It’s to frame what’s possible. To give customers a new lens they can’t unsee. To create the before and after moment that makes everything else obsolete.

If you’re building a marketing plan for next year (or adjusting ahead of the fall sales season), here are three questions to challenge you and your team.

1. Does our plan give us a shot at designing and dominating a category that matters?

Most marketing plans are built to support product launches, campaigns, and events. But the best companies don’t use marketing to support the business. They use it to build the business through customer relationships while defining the space they want to own.

This isn’t about “better.” Too much ag marketing is cluttered with comparative claims ending in "-er"—faster, stronger, cheaper. But “better” is always negotiable. “Different” isn’t.

Great marketing reframes the problem, designs a new solution, and builds the category around that solution. If your marketing doesn’t aim to redefine the playing field, it’s already a compromise.

2. Are we radically evangelizing our category point of view?

Once you’ve defined the problem you solve and the future you stand for, the next step isn’t just promotion…it’s evangelism.

Legendary companies don’t just market their products. They champion the category.

That starts with your CEO. Are you getting them on stage, on podcasts…out front?

Whether you’re a startup or a global giant, the CEO should be the lead storyteller for the category you’re building.

You also need an owned media strategy. Most companies treat media as if it belongs to someone else, relying on trade publications or PR hits. But great companies build their own channels, multiply their reach, and create gravitational pull around their ideas.

Ask yourself:

• Does our website boldly communicate a provocative point of view?

• Are we testing headlines, offers, copy, and platforms—not for incremental gains, but for cultural resonance?

• Are customers echoing our language back to us?

That’s how you know the POV is sticking. You’ve created what I call a ratchet effect: an experience or belief that tightens the bolt on perception, making your way of doing things feel inevitable.

Once it clicks, there’s no going back.

3. Where can we break the rules to unlock unexpected growth…fast?

Finally, revenue. Everyone wants it, and most marketers try to earn it the safe way. But the safe way is usually the most crowded and least likely to succeed.

The designer John Bielenberg calls it “thinking wrong.” The best marketers ask themselves, “What’s the opposite of what everyone else is doing?”

• In 2019, Domino’s launched a loyalty program that allowed customers to earn loyalty points for eating any pizza, not just their own. Is there a way for you to evangelize your entire category through radical generosity?

• Most bottled water brands market themselves as pure, clean, or pseudo-spiritual. Liquid Death went the other direction, selling water in a tallboy can with skulls, flames, and the tagline: “Murder Your Thirst.” Their branding feels more like a punk band than a wellness product, and they’ve grown into a cultural phenomenon, racking up fans, memes, and a $1.4B valuation.

• In the 1960s, Avis knew it couldn’t beat Hertz on size. So it flipped the script with the now-legendary line: “We’re #2. We try harder.” Rather than hide from being second place, Avis leaned into it, repositioning itself as the humble, hardworking alternative. How can you tell the truth that everyone else is hiding from?

In a market where most strategies are slight variations on the same playbook, doing something non-obvious is the only obvious move left.

Your marketing plan shouldn't aim to survive the quarter. It should aim to shift the ground under your feet.

• Design a category you can own.

• Evangelize a point of view others can’t ignore.

• Break the pattern to drive attention and action now.

If your competitors (and your own leadership team) don’t feel nervous reading your plan, it’s probably not radical enough.

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

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Rick Bennett is the creative genius behind my favorite Salesforce ad of all time…

”Stop Giving Your Lunch Money to Siebel.”

It ran in 2002. It’s still a great ad.

But even better was a lesson that Rick learned while working with Larry Ellison in the early days of Oracle. He still calls it “Ellison’s Law.”

“Ellison’s law states that you are not allowed to say anything that one of your competitors would say—whether in website, email, anywhere.”

Not on your website, not in your emails, not in your presentations.

Nowhere.

It’s simple, even a little brutal, and if you’ve spent any time in agricultural marketing you know it is nearly impossible.

Because most companies eventually convince themselves that the safest strategy is to sound just like everyone else, and the gravitational pull of that belief across organizations, big and small is extremely hard to battle against.

We’ve all been in this meeting.

The head of sales says, “guys, if we just drop our price, we will be able to sell way more of this product because we will finally be the cheapest.“

The CFO says “no way. You can’t do that. That’s a race to the bottom, you’ll destroy the margins we need in order to survive.”

And we all know that the problem with a race to the bottom is you might win. Or worse, you might come in second.

As Dan Kenneday famously quipped, “There is no strategic benefit to being the second cheapest in the marketplace.”

Finally someone, maybe the CEO trying to be a peacemaker or some consultant says, “All right, let’s raise the price. Because if we raise the price a few bucks, our margins will go up.”

But the head of marketing (hopefully) says, “no, you can’t do that. Our customers are not stupid. They are not going to pay extra for the same thing.”

And around and around it goes.

Eventually companies usually run over the CFO and drop the price, but it doesn’t work because price is almost never the real problem.

The only way to escape comparison is to become the only option, which naturally raises the question:

How do we become the only option?

First, stop being average.

In 2011, researchers at National Geographic generated a composite image of the world’s most statistically “typical” person by blending thousands of faces together.

Here’s what came out:

What they found was that average isn’t beautiful, it isn’t really even well-defined or especially interesting to look at. It’s just average.

In agriculture, we all claim to be “innovative,” we all claim to be “for the farmer,” we all claim to be “improving efficiencies,” we all claim to be “helping improve decisions,” we all claim to be your “trusted advisor.” And on and on…

The problem is that our customers have taken our word for it; They’ve heard us say again and again, “we’re all the same.” And now they believe us. We’ve told them that we’re all the same, and finally, they believe us.

People don’t spread average ideas.

They spread ideas remarkable enough to merit remark, something that gives them status.

People talk about products, companies, and movements that are different enough to interrupt the humdrum conversation of daily life.

If your customers won’t tell your story for you, your marketing eventually runs out of oxygen.

Ellison’s Law is all about categorical distinction. The ability to say “we’re this, not that.” The ability to say “we made this for you” instead of “you can choose anyone, because you know we're all really the same."

The moment your competitor can make the same claim, you’ve volunteered to be compared, and once you’re being compared, the conversation almost always devolves to price.

Because you’ve surrendered the last meaningful point of distinction.

So maybe the question we should be asking is:

“What can we become that our competitors can’t honestly say they are?”

Ellison’s Law isn’t really about copywriting, or even about conventional “marketing” at all; it’s about courage.

The courage to build a company with a point of view so distinct that your competitors can’t borrow your language without changing who they are.

That’s the goal. To become something so unmistakably different that comparison stops making sense.

The companies that will own the future of agriculture will be those whose marketers sound different because they are properly representing the organization they serve, not because they are more creative copywriters.

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In 1970, economist Albert Hirschman published a book called “Exit, Voice, and Loyalty.”

His argument was simple: when people become dissatisfied with an organization, a business, or even a country, they have three choices.

1. They can remain loyal.

2. They can use their voice and try to change it.

3. Or they can leave.

Exit. Voice. Loyalty.

Agriculture has become remarkably practiced at voice and loyalty.

We’ve built customer advisory boards, measured Net Promoter Scores, developed loyalty programs, rolled out new CRM systems, run annual surveys, and built account management teams.

We’ve spent millions learning how to listen, and we should.

A farmer who calls to complain about your agronomy recommendations hasn’t left yet. A retailer frustrated with your software is still investing energy in the relationship. Voice is often a sign that people still believe you can improve.

But somewhere along the way, many of us confused managing customers with leading them.

Customers don’t wake up hoping to be managed. They want to be shown a better way.

Voice and loyalty strengthen relationships within the existing system; leadership creates an opportunity to leave it.

That brings us to Hirschman’s third option.

Exit.

More specifically, what does it look like to build the opportunity for exit?

The companies that reshape industries rarely win by becoming better versions of what’s already there; they create a reason to leave the old way behind.

Innovators and startups don’t compete the way incumbents do. They can’t rely on Porter’s Five Forces. They don’t have any of that yet.

They change the conversation.

• Uber didn’t build a better taxi company.

• Airbnb didn’t build a better hotel.

They created an opportunity for customers to exit.

The next generation of leaders in agriculture will ask very different questions.

Manoj Bhargava, the founder of Five-Hour Energy, didn’t ask himself how to build a better energy drink.

He asked:

“Just because I’m tired, does that mean I’m thirsty?”

That single question created the energy shot, a category his company now dominates. That’s what category designers do.

They look at assumptions everyone else has accepted as permanent and they reject them.

Agriculture doesn’t need more companies asking how to build a better version of yesterday; we need more leaders asking:

What are we giving farmers permission to leave behind?

Because sometimes the most strategic decision you’ll ever make isn’t improving the category you’re in. It’s creating an option to exit.

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

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In the early 1970’s, Ilon Specht was working as a copywriter at the legendary Madison Avenue firm, McCann Erickson. The agency was working with a French company, L’Oréal, to help them break into the growing American hair-color market.

At the time, Clairol was the leader in the category, whose brand Nice ‘n Easy was the first at-home shampoo-in hair color. L’Oréal believed its new product, Preference, was better because it delivered a more natural color. Leadership had originally wanted to run a series of comparison ads proving that Preference was technologically superior to Nice ‘n Easy, but the campaign was killed at the last minute when it was discovered that the research had not been done in the United States. 

“We were four weeks before air date and we had nothing — nada,” said the account manager, Michael Sennott.

The creative team locked themselves in a room, desperate for an idea. The original concept was for the woman in the ad to be sitting by the window in one of those grand, fake rooms with glamorous, wind-blown curtains that only exist in fragrance commercials.

Ilon Specht hated it.

“The woman was a complete object. I don’t even think she spoke,” she remembered. “They just didn’t get it. We were in there for hours.”

Frustrated, Specht stopped listening and started writing. Within five minutes, she had the commercial’s entire script—one that had nothing to do with features, formulas, or technology. Instead, it made a promise.

“I use the most expensive hair color in the world. Preference, by L’Oréal.

It’s not that I care about money. It’s that I care about my hair. It’s not just the color. I expect great color.

What’s worth more to me is the way my hair feels. Smooth and silky but with body. It feels good against my neck.

Actually, I don’t mind spending more for L’Oréal. Because I’m worth it.”

L’Oréal wasn’t just selling hair color anymore. They were selling self-worth.

The ad worked. Preference began stealing market share from Clairol. By the 1980s, it surpassed Nice ‘n Easy as the top-selling brand in the country. Eventually, L’Oréal made “Because I’m worth it” their official slogan.

It remains one of the most recognizable advertising lines in history.

The problem with most ag marketing is that instead of selling futures, we sell features.

Most of us focus on the what—the product, the ingredients, the technology, the performance data—but fail to tell our customers why it matters to them in a way that resonates. We fail to help them become who they want to be by using our product; instead, we selfishly insist that they use it because we say it’s best.

We say things like:

• “Higher yield potential.” (You and everyone else)

• "The most advanced sprayer nozzle design." (They don’t want a nozzle; they want fewer missed weeds and better coverage.)

• "A more efficient biological." (They don’t care about your microbe strain; they care about healthier soil and increased production.)

• "A trusted name in ag retail." (Everyone else is saying this too.)

• “More efficient nutrient uptake.” (What does that mean for me?)

• “Better ROI than the competition.” (Prove it.)

These are claims, not promises.

They don’t connect to the customer’s worldview. They don’t give them a reason to believe.

L’Oréal didn’t win by saying “Preference delivers a more natural color”—even though that was true.

They won by saying: “Because I’m worth it.”

Most marketing in our industry lacks a story that gives our customers something to be part of and fails to make a promise that breaks through the noise.

At the heart of every successful marketing campaign is a unique promise that matters.

A promise that transforms a purchase into a statement about who the customer is and who they want to become.

Here are some examples:

1. If you’re an independent agronomy shop…
   

   ❌ Don’t say: “We provide expert agronomic advice tailored to your farm.” (yawn)

   ✅ Say something like: “Good for the land. Great for your bottom line.”
   ✅ Or: “Healthy soil. Higher profits. No compromises.

   
   Agronomy is often seen as a game of trade-offs. Farmers fear that stewardship comes at the cost of yield or profit. Eliminate that fear, prove they can have both—and they’ll follow you.

   
   

2. If you’re a crop protection company…
   
   ❌ Don’t say: “Make Every Acre Count.”

   ❌ Don’t say: “Explore the limits of what’s possible on every acre.”

   ✅ Say something like: “You’re either protecting your yield—Or handing it over to disease. The choice is yours.”
   ✅ Or: “One pass. Proven control. No surprises come harvest.”

   ✅ Or: “The best farmers don’t wait. They win.”
   
   These aren’t just statements; they’re mental shortcuts that make the right decision feel obvious, urgent, and inevitable. And best of all, they sound different.
   

3. If you’re a cooperative…
   
   ❌ Don’t say: “Join ____ and gain access to innovative solutions." (Too vague)

   ❌ Don’t say: “Trusted service providers" (So is everyone else)

   ✅ Say something like: “A partner that thinks like a business. Because your farm is one.”

   ✅ Or: “The proven way to out-farm your neighbor.”

   ✅ Or: “The co-op built for farmers who demand more.

   
   Customers don’t just want another supplier - they want a competitive edge. They know that who they partner with can mean the difference between a good season and a record-breaking one. Remove doubt, prove the advantage, and they won’t just buy from you - they’ll fight to be part of what you offer.

4. If you’re an equipment provider…

   ❌ Don’t say: "Reliable and durable farm equipment for your operation."
   ❌ Don’t say: “Your Agriculture Company” (Vapid and empty of promise),
   ✅ Say something like: “If you wanted average, you’d drive something else.”

   ✅ Or: “Your tractor shouldn’t need a babysitter.”

   
   Don’t just make a claim—make a statement customers can’t ignore. Force a choice: stick with what’s familiar or upgrade to what actually works.

5. If you’re a software/imagery provider…

   ❌ Don’t say: “Our imagery helps you make better in-season decisions.”

   ❌ Don’t say: “The all-in-one digital farming solution.”

   ✅ Say something like: “Be your customer’s first call.”

   ✅ Or: “Stop donating your profits to guesswork.”
   
   Again, our goal is to force a decision—either customers embrace data-driven farming, or they admit they’re leaving money on the table. Turn your solution into the obvious, no-risk choice.

6. If you’re a seed seller…

   ❌ Don’t say: “Seed technology designed for your acres.”
   ❌ Don’t say: “Improved yield and quality requires better seed.”

   ✅ Say something like: “Your acres deserve better than ‘good enough’ seed.”

   ✅ Or: “The right hybrid. The right field. The right yield.”
   
   We must turn seed from a commodity into a competitive advantage. We can’t just say “better,” we need to force the customer to question if they’re settling for less.

Customers don’t just buy products. They buy a better future. They buy confidence, certainty, and the feeling of being in control.

Every great marketing story taps into what they’re truly looking for—not just the product, but the emotion behind the decision. We can sell:

• Shortcuts

• Success

• Curiosity

• Freedom

• Responsibility

• Miracles (remove tradeoffs)

• Money

• Desire

• Confidence

• Ease

• Pleasure

• Belonging

Find the emotion. Make the promise. Build your story around it. And you won’t just sell—you’ll create loyalty, shift mindsets, and turn customers into believers.

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

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A farmer and his son were taking their donkey into town to sell him.

As they walked along, they passed their neighbor…

“What a waste,” she said. “One of you ought to ride on the donkey.”

The farmer stopped and placed his son on the donkey’s back. Next, they walked past an older man working in his garden.

“How shameful,” he said. “Doesn’t your boy have any respect for his elders?”

Immediately the boy got off the donkey, and his father got on. They passed two schoolteachers.

One said to the other, “Look how mean that father is to his son. He is riding the donkey and makes the boy walk.”

The father reached down and lifted the boy, setting him in front. The donkey walked much slower now, carrying his heavy load.

They passed the blacksmith at the edge of town. He paused from his work, looked up, and scolded them...

“How cruel of you to overwork your donkey this way. The two of you are strong enough to carry him.”

Awkward as it was, the father and his son managed to pick up the donkey and carry him through the town.

They came to the man who was to buy the donkey. He laughed.

“I’m not going to buy a donkey that can’t even walk to the market.”

As they walked home with the donkey in tow, the father said to his son...

“Try to please everyone, and you'll end up pleasing no one.”

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Xerox vs. Apple

In December 1979, Steve Jobs and his early team at Apple were given two tours of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC).

Much has been said and written about this tour and its effect on the future success of Apple’s products…

Particularly the graphical user interface (GUI) of which Jobs said:

“…it was obvious to me that all computers would work like this someday.”

Unfortunately for Xerox, that technology stayed dormant in their research center and wasn’t commercialized until Apple vastly improved upon it and released the Macintosh…and eventually the iPhone.

If Xerox had the technology years before Apple, how did they get beat to market?

They got beat because Apple developed a unique point of view around the technology it developed and properly primed the market to align with that point of view.  

Alternatively, Xerox was busy chasing what its customers said they wanted.

Your customers can tell you many things, but they can’t tell you why you show up to work every day. They can’t tell you how you will make the future a better place to live. They can’t spoon-feed you a unique point of view that makes you a leader worth following.  

They can’t create your category for you; they can only tell you how to incrementally improve it once you’ve begun building.

More Than Faster Horses

Looking back, new technology seems as though it was inevitable, but that wasn’t true for the majority of people at the time.

Like Henry Ford said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

Instead, he brought us the automobile and changed the way we travel.

• In 1998, there was significant opposition to enterprise cloud computing. TODAY: 94% of enterprises use the cloud, thanks in part to the work of Salesforce.

• In 2008, most people thought Airbnb would fail - who wants to pay to stay at someone else's house? 

  TODAY: The company is valued at $113 billion.

• Sixteen years ago, the iPhone didn't exist, and no one shopped for a “smartphone.”

  TODAY: More than half of the homeless people in the U.S. own a smartphone.

Category Design: When “Customer-Centricity” Lets You Down

If you want to create a category and capture 76% of the financials in your market, then by definition you need to create something that does not yet exist. 

The problem is that most people can’t imagine a future they are not actively experiencing.

Your customers are most likely sprinting through their daily lives – busy with a million other priorities that have nothing to do with the problem you solve…

And here you come asking them what they’re looking for to solve this problem that they have not yet defined or prioritized.

In this scenario, you have guaranteed that the only feedback customers can give you is for incremental improvement.

• “Just make it faster.”

• “I just need more storage capacity.”

• “Make it better than company x. I hate company x.”

As a result, every department optimizes around perceived “customer-centricity.” The marketing team injects “faster, more, and better” into every communication; sales reads off of beautifully boring spec sheets, and product builds a product that is just good enough to edge out the competition.

Then we wonder why the customers don’t come knocking…

The problem is that you assumed the problem; you forgot to value yourself for the market.

You forgot to tell the story about why this problem is the problem they need to solve today and why you’re the company with the vision to help them do it.

Most companies make the dangerous assumption that their customer already cares about what they sell. They devalue their point of view and, consequently, their solution.

Stand for Something, Build Movements, and Win Markets with a Unique Point of View

The best marketing creates movements by aligning to or shifting an internal belief system that customers hold. It guides them from where they are today to where they could be tomorrow. 

When crafting a meaningful point of view for your target customers, don’t lead with information about you, don’t start with a regurgitation of your product roadmap.

Instead, start by answering the question, “what problems does our company or solution solve that couldn’t be solved without us?” 

Help the customer identify their place in your story; why should they care? What is happening in their life that you can tie back to your business?

How can you help contextualize your value proposition to capture attention and move customers where you want them to go?

Want your product idea to grow? Start designing the category that drives the change you want to see in your customer’s world. 

10 Questions to Ask When Developing Your Category

If you want to get started today, but don't know how, I suggest you get your leadership team in a room for a day and ask the following questions (preferably with someone who does not work full-time at your company, the neutrality helps):

1. What was the original insight that led you to create this company? 

2. Who do you envision buying this product or service? Who will use it? 

3. What’s the problem you think you can solve for your potential customers?

4. How does your product help the customer solve that problem? 

5. What does your tech do today and what could it do tomorrow?

6. Who is solving a similar - or adjacent problem that could be part of the “product ecosystem” for your customer?

7. Who else is trying to, or could try to, solve this problem? 

8. How will this change the way our customers do business? 

9. Do we have the right go-to-market that works best for our customer? Are we ready for direct sales? Are we organized to run ABM? 

10. What is our next funding event and how will that impact the category that we can build and own?

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