As soon as you understand that for Jim Wispinski, getting transferred out of his sales position in Edmonton and into a Toronto office in his company’s human resources department wasn’t a detour, a whole lot more about the president and CEO of DowAgroSciences Canada comes into focus.
Marketing isn’t something that a company does, Wispinski believes. It’s what a company is.
In other words, you build a business from the ground up in order to go to market, and at the end of the day, you can track your performance with just two things: the success of the people who work for you, and the success of the people who buy from you.
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Similarly, if you’re going to differentiate — and Wispinski is more than convinced that differentiation is crucial to business success — that differentiation needs to be based on values that you can put into words and that permeate the whole business. It can’t be based just on the buzz you might generate with some of your products.
Increasingly, these are topics that resonate with more farmers across Canada as they find their own operations getting more complex, and as they’re faced too with growing pressures to get more deliberate in how they position their farms with buyers.
A decade or so ago, all the big chemical and genetics companies seemed look-alike, even if their program details varied. Today, they’re focused on getting unique, and Wispinski makes it clear that he thinks Dow AgroSciences is leading the change.
“We’re creating differentiation,” Wispinksi tells me across the table in the tiny meeting room at the company’s eastern research farm in St. Marys, Ont. “Our competition is good — very good — but we’re not looking for spikes. We’re looking for continual improvement, continual differentiation.”
Wispinski talks softly. His words are pitched louder than his volume. Yet if he expects you to listen, that’s more a compliment than a challenge, since listening is a skill that he has honed and prizes highly in himself.
His job now is to turn the theory into reality, and he makes no secret of the fact that he feels he chose the right company. Wispinski grew up on a farm near Two Hills, Alta., an hour east of Edmonton. He went to the University of Alberta, and although he worked a summer for Elanco (soon to be part of Dow-Elanco), he did his degree in agricultural engineering and launched his career in the farm machinery sector.
Within a couple years, he gravitated from machinery design and maintenance to sales, and then, remembering the people he’d worked with at Elanco, he made the move to ag chem, starting as a sales territory based out of Edmonton.
Next was the move to human resources in Toronto, which ended with him becoming HR manager for Dow Elanco, followed by his posting as district sales manager for Saskatchewn, then as national sales director in 1977, and finally as marketing director and his current position as president of DowAgroSciences Canada.
For giant Dow Chemical, its agricultural division has been one of the few bright spots in the last two years. Hammered by the collapse of a massive multibillion dollar project with Kuwait, and then stymied by a difficult takeover of Rohm & Haas, Dow Chemical has struggled through the global recession simply to retain its investment status.
Those struggles may hasten Dow’s divestment of its ag business. CEO Andrew Liveris told investors recently that he is looking for a buyer for Dow Agro-Sciences, one of the few assets Dow may be able to sell at a good price during a difficult economic climate.
Dow has faced sagging markets in each of its geographic regions and in all but two of its business units. Only its agricultural and its hydrocarbon units have posted positive numbers, and only agriculture has been on a tear, breaking a steady stream of sales and profit records.
And within agriculture, Canada is a star performer, fuelled by its Nexera, high-omega-9 canola and, to a lesser extent, growth in the eastern corn market and in chemical sales.
In Canada, Dow AgroSciences is actively growing, climbing to 135 employees earlier this year. “Agriculture has been a great industry to be in,” Wispinski says, then quickly reinforces his message, “we’ve grown beyond expectation, beyond industry growth rates.”
Nor is that growth going to plateau any time soon, Wispinski says. He points to the relocation and expansion of DowAgro’s global canola research centre from the company’s Indianopolis headquarters to Saskatoon, doubling the its staff and tripling its plots.
This isn’t just a sign of Canada’s importance in canola production, Wispinski says. It’s also a sign that Indianapolis recognizes that the Canadian ag business has got the people part of its business figured out, attracting skilled employees and supporting them in high-functioning teams. In agri-science businesses, where competition for the best brains is intense, Wispinski says it’s a huge step.
“ What We Want To Know Is How Do Our Customers Rate Us On Trust.”
— Jim Wispinski
Now, it’s being duplicated. Dow Agro-Sciences has boosted the full-time staff at its Mycogen corn breeding centre in St. Marys, Ont., to five up from two just three years ago, and it has increased seasonal staffing too, leading to three times more corn plots. Growth across the company will continue, Wispinski says. “Will we see further growth? Absolutely.”
In part, Wispinski says, that’s because of Dow AgroScience’s balanced strategy, integrating expertise in ag chemcials, genetic traits and traditional breeding. For instance, in addition to its Nexera canola technology, Dow’s Herculex insect resistance is a key player with Monsanto’s GMO traits in SmartStax, a new eight-gene integrated insect and herbicide resistance package widely expected to dominate much of the world’s corn market for the next decade.
At the same time, Dow AgroScience continues buying U.S. seed companies to expand its market share, which in turn will help it drive more dollars into variety breedings. Plus, the company continues to bring new ag chemicals to market, including new herbicides and insecticides.
All that research and development, however, must make sense at the customer level. Marketing isn’t only about branding the individual products as they come out of the research pipeline, Wispinski says. It’s about building the long-term customer relationships that he says are crucial across virtually all of agriculture.
As a result, an essential part of Dow’s marketing program is an intensive multi-prong effort to collect feedback from its customers, especially its “strategic customers” who are identified as farms where Dow needs to win. “There are lots of ways to look at customer feedback,” Wispinski says. “What we want to know is how do our customers rate us on trust. Are we differentiated based on how we deliver on our promises?”
The long-term goal is an even simpler metric. It’s customer loyalty.
Getting there means that marketing must start at the company’s very core. “What makes up our brand is the human element,” Wispinski explains. “It’s the people.”
With his background in human resources, Wispinski shifts the talk to the crucial importance of corporate culture, to the value of teams, to the benefits of open communication, to supporting employees while giving them the freedom to capitalize on their strengths.
Before it starts to sound like something you’d see in the self-help aisle, Wispinski makes sure he reels it back in. Corporate culture isn’t an exercise in feel-goodism. “What is our corporate culture?” Wispinski says. “It’s being passionate, it’s being customer centred, it’s teamwork, and it’s also working hard, it’s productivity, it’s getting results.
“Our customers expect results from our products, and from our people.”
To execute on that marketing strategey, Dow AgroScience has set out guiding principles that outline standards for how to respond to customers, how to communicate with them, and what kinds of leadership to build on. Then, customer-facing employees are measured on how they perform against those principles, not just on sales.
Wispinski in turn gets measured every year on his people leadership. “Success starts with setting the right discovery targets,” Wispinski says. “It starts with a very disciplined approach to research and to product development, but in the end it means building an organization that helps your customers become more successful because you know them and deliver to their needs so well.
“Dow AgroSciences isn’t the largest company, but I’ve got to tell you, we’re feeling great.” CG
