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Jul. 21, 2010 Source: CommodityUPDATE news release The 160-character text message is causing a paradigm shift in the way farmers access market information, and how top agribusinesses communicate with grower customers. "Mobile is the fastest-growing segment of the marketing mix, and now agricultural companies are leveraging this direct channel to build relationships with top customers," says Joel Jaeger, president and founder of CommodityUPDATE, the leading provider of agricultural information to mobile phones. Jaeger and his two brothers created the concept that became CommodityUPDATE in 2006 to gain access to market information in the field. The brothers, who run farming operations in Colorado and Belize, soon realized a need for the offering beyond their own operations. They began cultivating a new mobile communications channel that would engage farmers like no other. "I remember the day we hit 500 subscribers," Jaeger says. "I was still working on the farm and trying to determine whether to continue with CommodityUPDATE. It was a crude form of market research, but I turned off the switch one day to see what would happen. The phone rang off the hook with farmers wanting to know where their market information was. We knew then the concept had potential." Today, producers receive CommodityUPDATE primarily through sponsored subscriptions. Companies leverage the channel to send supplemental messages, such as agronomic alerts, to growers. "Distilling information down to a compelling 160-character message is a discipline," Jaeger notes, "but a practice that offers real value to both farmers and the companies who sponsor the service." In fact, growers place unparalleled value on those CommodityUPDATE messages, according to survey data recently compiled by Millennium Research, Inc. in Minneapolis: • 91 percent of farmers indicated the information they receive is important or very important; roughly the same suggested they would recommend the service to another farmer • 80 percent correctly recalled the company that sponsors the CommodityUPDATE subscription, on an unaided basis • 65 percent felt "more connected" to the sponsoring company According to Jan Johnson of Millennium Research, the results foreshadow where the industry is headed: brief and direct to the farmer, with information of immediate value. "One of the most significant findings from the survey is that farmers remembered each of the SMS texts they received," she says. "On average, CommodityUPDATE subscribers receive 3.8 messages per day. Farmers surveyed recalled 3.6 messages, meaning they pay attention to each one." Plus, farmers correctly associated those texts with the sponsor or brand. "On average, 80 percent of end-users correctly identified the sponsor of the commodity market updates, and some sponsors enjoyed virtually 100 percent recall," she notes. "Typical unaided recall for an agricultural product from a market leader would be 30 percent in a similar study." Jaeger often gets asked, "What's next for mobile in agriculture?" "Right now, much of what we do is text based; not because we're in love with text per se, but because SMS is the most pervasive in terms of usage and availability among the majority of growers, and given limited bandwidth and smartphone penetration in farm country," he says. "As the mobile channel evolves, we will build on our baseline offering and stick to our founding principles: do right by the farmer, go to the phone, and deliver the service in conjunction with the finest people and organizations in the world." |
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