Perspective and Insight on Connection, Communication and Brand Awareness

There is no substitute for effective communication. In business, communication has always been the vehicle for information and connectedness. In this week’s CoffeeTalk, we sat down with a few of the folks helping to “drive” the communication behind AGI’s brands through out-of-the-box strategy and outreach.

Robin Walters, director of marketing for the SureTrack brand, Agi Schafer-Kreiser, director of public relations and marketing for Farmobile, and Tina Wood, marketing manager for AGI’s North America farm brands, all share that their goal, both collectively and as independent AGI brands, is to find the best solution for a farmer’s operation – a feat that keeps these ladies and the teams they lead running full speed ahead.

“One of the things that I really love about my job is that no two days are the same. We never hit a walking speed; we have an in-house marketing team that allows us to touch all aspects of marketing from content creation to planning and strategizing all the way through supporting our dealers. We really do it all,” Wood says of her role in leading 20 different farm brands across North America.

Bridging the communication gap between AGI’s farm brands is the common denominator that keeps all of the brands and strategy on-target to serve both the extensive AGI dealer network across the U.S. and Canada, as well as the direct customers of the brands.

“We try to find efficiencies in our marketing strategies,” Wood says of the fluid communication within the marketing group, adding that the team’s marketing efforts also support the dealer network.

Walters agrees and says that while she has been in agriculture for more than 20 years, agriculture technology has been the most exciting opportunity she has been a part of, noting the rapid evolution within the industry and what it means for farmers to become more efficient and, in-turn, more profitable.

“The opportunities that exist are expanding day after day, and those opportunities reach our growers, our commercial customers…the entire commodity value-chain. We’re getting those operations connected within one platform that’s easier to use,” she says.

Connectedness isn’t all the SureTrack team is bringing to the farm. With the acquisition of their longtime ag tech partner, Farmobile, AGI has equipped farmers with the opportunity to “harvest” the data from every acre they farm. With unparalleled interoperability amongst their fleet of equipment or their ag retailer’s fleet of equipment, farmers can make both real-time and long-term management decisions.

Farmobile’s Shafer-Kreiser says that the technologies AGI brands bring to a farming operation carry huge opportunities to the advancement of the digital acre story for both the farmer and the ag retailer. But there is still work to be done in bridging the gap between data collection and actionable management opportunity.

“Farmers are collecting a lot of data from the precision agriculture solutions they have, but, oftentimes, they can’t do much with it after it’s collected, or they can’t access it [when and where they need to] because it’s not in a standardized format. The SureTrack system is really focusing on changing all of that,” she says. “It’s our job [in marketing] to make sure that our customers understand that they can get a full data set from the field to the machine, into the bin, and beyond.”

These are big conversations, with a lot of moving parts, working to find solutions for farming operations where no two are exactly alike. The best communication vehicles, the AGI marketing team has found, meet farmers where they are: in the combine cab, at a trade show, on the receiving end of a telephone call or across the kitchen table.

To hear more of the conversation and learn how the AGI marketing team is connecting the communication dots on the farm, visit the AGI SureTrack Community page.