Farmers are legendary for insisting that not only do
they not read ads, they don t learn about new products
from ads, and they never, ever make decisions based
on ads.
At the same time, points out Brian Denys, business
manager for BASF in Canada, marketing surveys
consistently show that when an advertising program is
well designed, the messages sink in.
The gap could be because companies and farmers
look differently at the purpose of advertising.
Farmers think advertisers want every farmer across
Read Also
Riding the tariff rollercoaster
Farmers are accustomed to roller-coaster years. But the current geopolitical windstorm is something else entirely. On his cattle operation near…
the instant they see an ad. Companies meanwhile,
have much narrower goals. They simply want farmers
to pick up the ad campaign s key messages.
That uptake lays the groundwork for regional
dealers to make their own sales pitches, either by
driving up the laneway with a freebie that builds on
the ad, or simply by building on the ad awareness by
hanging some brand signs above their counters or
pasting some decals on the sides of their trucks.
To Denys and his team, the key messages were clear.
1: kixor is fast; 2: kixor is broad spectrum; 3: kixor
makes your farm management more sustainable. In the
West, too, these messages must be absorbed within a
chemfallow applications even better.
The positioning also meets two other traditional
branding demands. It differentiates kixor from anything
else on the market and, says Denys, it conveys
the brand promise, i. e. the result that the customer
can depend on getting from the product.
Around the time BASF decided to go ahead with
kixor in Canada in 2004, it also began a search for
names. An early choice was made to have different
names in different Canadian markets, largely because
the use patterns would be so different.
Ordinarily, searching for names can be a complex,
time-consuming quagmire, says Michael Schaad,
eastern business manager for the company. Names
can run afoul of local trademarks or they can mean
unfortunate things in different languages, or in different
BASF, however, has put together an international
list of names that it has pre-approved, essentially the
same way that many companies have acquired the
rights to website addresses that they may or may not
ever use. On that list, Schaad says, Heat jumped out.
The challenge then was how to convey the key
messages in an advertising image that would work for
Canadian farmers. The choice was the dragon an
image that BASF wants to own in western agriculture.
But look at the image again. True to the subtleties of
modern advertising, the dragon isn t simply flying
over the field. It s balanced on top of a high-performance,
high-efficiency sprayer (which happens to be
painted green) which is the kind of sprayer that high-performance,
BASF looked at five concepts from its Canadian
agency Quarry Integrated Communications, which
also does work for heavyweights including Research
in Motion, Bell and FedEx. Some of the Heat concepts
were bold, some were conservative. But, says Schaad,
the dragon was the easy pick.
The harder job was to pick the tagline, and for
this, as for the dragon image, BASF vetted its choice
with farm panels called focus groups across the West.
The result: For the ultimate burndown.
When farmers get telephone surveys this year,
they ll be asked if they saw the ads. Then
they ll be asked what they know about Heat.
If this year is like all others, farmers will say
