After reaming 17 years of grain prices through his computer, and after pouring endlessly through the results, Richard Vyn knows one thing for sure. There’s no easy way to figure out exactly how good you are at marketing. Not even close.
“It’s difficult,” says Vyn. “I don’t know how better to say it. It’s just difficult.”
Yes, there’s lots of evidence to confirm that your marketing choices are among most important decisions you make all year. Yes, too, there’s abundant evidence that farmers struggle mightily with trying to figure out whether they’re good at making those choices. In survey after survey, roughly 85 per cent of farmers say they’re in the top 50 per cent of marketers — two numbers that just don’t add up.
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Vyn, an ag economist at the University of Guelph’s Ridgetown campus, has just finished a study to compare 10 different marketing strategies and how farmers would have fared from 1992 through 2008 if they had used them (
“It was a lot of numbers,” Vyn concedes. Even then, however, he is quick to point out that it really wasn’t as many numbers as he might have liked. In order to make ideal comparisons, he could have built in more scenarios, and he could have built in more flexibility for farmers with differrent on-farm storage capabilities.
The truth is, with even those extra numbers, he couldn’t produce an absolutely lock-tight answer to every conceivable farm situation.
On the other side of the Prairies at Calgary, Errol Anderson doesn’t have the answer either. Anderson is a commodity broker and author of PRO MARKET WIRE, as well as the book THE WEALTHY FARMER.
Far better, says Anderson, is to look at how you market. While it may be hard to define a good marketing program, it’s quite realistic to describe the traits of a good marketer.
Do you watch the neighbours?
It’s an old rule. When you can’t get the numbers you want, you use the numbers you can get. On the farm, that means watching the neighbours.
“It’s a reference point in an area where we’re hungry for reference points,” Vyn says. “Watching what the neighbours sold for gives you a way to judge whether you did as well.”
Except it isn’t that simple, Vyn says. So does Anderson. In fact, says Anderson, watching the neighbours too closely may be the first sign that you aren’t a good marketer.
Looking over the fence tends to get competitive, Anderson says. If there’s anything that marketers have learned in the last two decades, it’s that the best way to do poorly is to be always trying to hit a home run, selling all your crop at the market peak. “I can pretty much guarantee you that if you’re trying to sell at the top, you’re going to miss a lot of good opportunities,” Vyn says. “It doesn’t work.”
Equally bad, the competition with the neighbours is also like to cause no end of bottled-up frustration, making you despise the job that you should be wanting to sink more time into.
It’s also a good bet that the neighbours may be just as unsure about their marketing prowess as you are about yours. They may in fact be the last people you should be trying to chase. Maybe you should be looking even higher.
Even if they’re sophisticated marketers, it probably won’t pay to watch them too closely, Vyn says. Your objectives should be different from theirs, either because your financial ratios and your cash flow patterns are different, or because you’re
