Welcome to the Maine Farmcast. I am one of your cohosts today, Dr. Colt Knight, associate extension professor and state livestock specialist for the University of Maine Cooperative Extension. And once again, I am joined by lovely cohost, Dr. Glenda Pereira, assistant extension professor and assistant professor of the School of Food, Agriculture, and Animal Science. And Glenda, tell us who we have for a guest today.

So we have an easy title, as we mentioned. We keep it simple. Today's guest has a simple title. As folks have noticed, in extension, it's complicated. But we have, Dr. Erin Percival Carter, and, she is an associate professor of marketing.

That's it, folks. That's it. A lot of a a lot more than just that, but that's the title. That's enough. That keeps me busy.

Yeah. Yeah. And, she has a wealth of knowledge, in marketing and, amongst other things. I sometimes even think of you, Erin, as having this, like, socioeconomic expertise because I just always learn so much from you about, the other end of things. So Colt and I always focus on getting the and you do too because you're a farmer as well.

Getting the animals to market, getting the or getting the product somewhere because, as we've had you talk about your fiber work, so you do hand spinning. But, today, we're gonna talk about the other end. How do we get this product somewhere to our customers and make a profit potentially, from it? So thanks again for being on the Maine Farmcast. Yeah.

Happy to be here. So tell us a little bit just briefly about your background in this, and how you got started in marketing.

Yeah. So I was 4-H and FFA kid growing up and showed livestock and did the whole thing in Wyoming. I was also a DECA kid, which is the, like, business competition organization for kids, like, right around high school. Right. Yeah.

There's, like, DECA, FBLA, and there's overlap, right, with FFA. There's, like, ag sales competitions and you're talking about the business side of things. But, DECA's a different organization

that's I think just I like purely business be in DECA because they needed like another team member to do a competition.

Probably. And like if you were a 4-H or an FFA kid, you're probably pretty polished by the time you get to high school, you have good public speaking, expertise and like that shows in class. And so, yeah, I think those four H and FFA kids get kind of recognized and poached for other public speaking things that are not ag related by the time you get to high school and these other organizations open up. So, candidly, I think that's what happened. And as an aside, that's also where I met my husband who is not a farmer ag kid, but we met in DECA and I turned him into a farm guy over time.

But I joined DECA and competed in these, you know, like business competitions for kids. And then when it was time to go to college and figure out what I was gonna do originally, you know, I thought, I thought that I wanted to do some kind of equine science or some kind of like equine business thing.

Another horse person, Colt. A horse person.

I mean, like way back, I decided I wanted to be a vet, which I know is a common experience. And I shadow a vet thing. I saw, like blood in a medical context and was like, nope, this is not for me. And that was that was that. So I knew vet was off the table.

I thought maybe some kind of equine management thing. But candidly, I think I just knew I was like a working class kid and I was gonna need to have flexibility when it came time to find a job. And I, knew that I was gonna need to, like, have a degree that would a good financial return or the odds of having a good financial return. So I decided to go with with a business degree and a marketing degree and, assumed I would have the flexibility then to, like, pick a job that I liked and then always intended to come back to some kind of livestock whether it was, you know, poultry or sheep or horses or whatever kind of made sense where life took me and hopefully just have the money to be able to have like the hobby, livestock raising and, exhibiting experience. So anyway, got an undergraduate degree in marketing, worked for a little while and then decided I wanted to go back to school and get a PhD, because I really liked research and wanted to see what that was going to be like.

I don't think I knew what a PhD was completely, I before I started don't know, man. Like It's sometimes this black box, and you're just like.

I'm just rolling with the punches.

I think professors kids, which there are a lot of, who, like, go get PhDs, maybe do have some kind of understanding of what they're getting themselves into. But I was certainly not that, so I didn't know.

It's been my experience in animal science most of the well, up until here recently, I'd say the previous generation, they all got PhDs because their parents were still running the farm or a ranch and they needed another career path.

Yeah.

And then nowadays it seems like graduate school is where our animal science kids are getting their experience and entering the industry. So that's there's not a lot of us left anymore that have like practical experience that grew up in the lifestyle and then went on to to study it.

Yeah. That's interesting. Yeah. I hadn't heard that.

Yeah. But but so sorry. I cut you off. You were saying you you went to get your PhD in marketing.

Yep. Went to get a PhD in marketing and I am on I'm a consumer behavior researcher, is what we call it marketing. That just means I do experiments primarily. So I study how people think, people are often more familiar with like thinking of a psychology researcher or thinking of a behavioral economist.

I do that kind of work but I do that work in a business school, trying to understand yeah how people think and react and make judgments and decisions but in kind of a marketplace context. But I've always been interested in, and have, you know, a background in and a love for thinking about agriculture and particularly thinking about, well, how do you make an agricultural endeavor work if you can't play the commodity game? Right? Like the typical way, at least in Wyoming where I'm from, where you would advise an ag producer would be like, well, you gotta get your cost of production down and you've gotta scale as quickly as possible and you've gotta find like your path to a commodity buyer and that'll be the only way that you can make this work. And, that that's not a path that makes sense for a lot of people and a lot of the marketing advice that people get when they're trying to carve some kind of other path.

I was then, you know, seeing some of that and trying to rectify that with the way that we teach marketing in a business school and I just found myself thinking like, I feel like there's a real disconnect here in the, way that we talk about marketing and the kind of resources and training that we provide to these. Often I'll say smaller, but what I really mean is non commodity, right? Like folks who are gonna try to go to some kind of market and charge a price premium, charge something above that commodity price. How do you advise that person? Which that's all of marketing.

Right? Like, technically, people market commodities, but they're not the students who are sitting in my classroom. So I'm almost never teaching someone, here's how you should think about going and competing in a business sense assuming that your product is interchangeable with every other product on the market. Like, that's just kind of antithetical to marketing. Like, don't hire a marketing person if that's what you're doing.

Hire someone who's really good at operations who can drive your cost of production down because you have no control over the price that you're gonna be receiving at the end of that process.

Yeah. Yeah. Do you think so you're not originally from Maine. As you mentioned, you're from Wyoming. And so did your work evolve as you learn more about Maine and farming in Maine in general?

And is that what's driven your research questions predominantly? And tell us a little bit more about that because I'm always interested in learning, and I think you specifically, you know, there's what we call, like, basic research, which we have a question. We we try to, you know, get more data for the question. But then a lot of folks merge the two. Here are the people in my community.

And at some point in my career, maybe it is when you become tenured, you're like, now I can start integrating more of, what I say, like, more applied where you have knowledge of your community and you're answering questions to then provide them with information directly to them, which an extension is obviously what our role is. But some oftentimes, the basic research side of things doesn't always allow because that's not where the money is. So I'm just curious, what has been your path to and how have you changed your research? Or maybe you didn't change your research goals and, objectives.

Yeah. So I think to the first part of your question, like, how has moving to Maine changed like the way that I think about these things and how interested or like where my interests lie. It's kind of hard for me to track that honestly because, when I interviewed for the job here, I told people look I've never been to Maine before, but I have a lot of affection for and like feel like I have a connection to Maine because I wrote my undergraduate honors thesis on this like very, off topic, like academic topic. But one of the examples that I used in that paper was MOFGA actually. So weirdly, I was this kid in Wyoming like kind of comparing the way that I saw markets for agricultural products structured in Wyoming with this like very, very different example, which was MOFGA, like just the example of, you know, it's got this longer, very different history.

It's like a little bit more kind of, like organic focused and more diversified. And let's like compare the evolution of those two approaches and see kind of where that's led people. And that was all at an undergraduate level. So none of that was polished and it's still not polished as I'm talking about it now. Right?

But like I've, been interested in some of the differences between what agriculture looked like in those two places. And then we moved here and we were so excited to be here and I immediately bought you know the animals that we could muster in the time and with the infrastructure that we had when we bought our place and went to all of the fairs and I was like man like I really do notice that there is this like real diversity even in the fairs here compared to where I was from. And then slowly as we tried to, build out our own operation I did start to realize, that like my knowledge didn't transfer. Like I've put up fence for a long time. I can't put, I still can't put up a fence in Maine.

It I can't do it. You need heavy equipment to put up a fence in Maine. And then you look to see, well, what would it cost to put up a fence, and what would that fence look like? And, all of a sudden I feel like I I know nothing and it's gonna be orders of magnitude more expensive and more complicated.

Call Colt.

Well, Colt, if you would like to come advise us on how to put up a fence, it simply is not gonna look like my

Fencing is way more difficult in Maine than anywhere I've ever lived in my entire life. Yeah. And the frost line is so crucial here. Yes. I lived in Wyoming for a year.

I don't ever remember frost heave being a problem there like it is here.

No. And, like, you just measure and you're like, I would like a hole here. I would like to dig a hole here. I will, have things equally spaced. I will use the, like, stock equipment and tighten up my wires and that'll be it.

And I will have a fence and it'll be a hard day's work. And at the end of the day, there will be a straight equally spaced, difficult fence. And here, I still don't have an answer for that. So anyway, things are just like more difficult in ways that I didn't appreciate and that make me feel naive and then also make me understand at a deeper level this, like, cost of production issue and the real need for people to have frank advice about you can't compete with commodity producers unless you can. And if you can, then by all means, compete with commodity producers.

But, like, I don't know how anyone is gonna compete with commodity producer, prices with livestock. Right. In Maine.

Not up here.

Maybe with potatoes, maybe with blueberry wild blueberries. Well, like, that's not even a commodity market. Right? It's kind of like inherently differentiated as a product. But, I think from my perspective and I'm a marketing professor, so I'm biased and I want to make everything a marketing problem.

But, you can't in Maine, it just simply will cost more to produce livestock in Maine.

Yeah.

And so if you start with that as a premise, no matter how disappointing that is to people and like, look, man, I share the disappointment sometimes because I would like to just be good at raising animals and have that be its own reward. You start with that as the premise, then I think people will start to buy in a little bit that, well, there's a marketing problem at the root of this. I'm gonna need to figure out how to justify that price premium or accept that I will never make money at this. And that failing to make money at it doesn't mean you're not a good farmer. Right.

It means you've opted out of doing the marketing thing and and you just simply can't compete with commodity producers with, industries that have built up around them and just different different cost bases for production.

Yeah. No. I I think you you hit the nail on the head there because, we, you know, joke about how everything takes twice as long and costs twice as more to get into Maine alone. Right? You talk about like all of the grain that we utilize here in the state of Maine to feed our animals.

I just took delivery on a new boar pig and shipping cost as much as the pig.

Oh, my my flock of sheep is very similar, if not the same.

Yeah. Right. So transportation costs alone, right, is prohibitive to some folks. And so you're right saying, you know, your cost of production is gonna be inherently what it is, and you're just gonna have to bite the bullet on that. So how do you, I guess, advise folks or what have you found in all of the research that you've you've done and and talk us through some of that, you know, that that's your premise, but go off from here.

Right? And like you said, there's May some folks figured it out. They've found the equation or the market, in which they're able to be profitable, but, it takes time. And, it's not gonna be overnight and not everybody's gonna figure it out.

Yeah. So I would say the like on on the academic research side, most of the academic research that I'm doing is just not going to be useful to individual producers because it's that more like, kind of basic research. Basic meaning like we're looking at one process that's gonna generalize to all of human decision making and that's just frankly like not helpful to most producers. But, the obnoxious thing that I tell all of my marketing students is that if they're going to graduate as a marketing major at the University of Maine, they're gonna have a really tough time doing that without taking at least one and probably two or three classes with me because we just don't have that many faculty. And I want them to hear two things in my voice for the rest of their professional lives at least.

And those two things are, the answer to every question in marketing is it depends, which is obnoxious, and I admit up top that that's obnoxious. That's follow-up question.

That's extension. That's always the answer.

Exactly. So the follow-up and, like, bit of that is not just like, okay, it depends, but it depends on what. And it almost certainly depends on the target market. Who is your target market? Because you're not competing for every single customer.

And that's, I think a really important thing for ag producers to understand because you're gonna be trying to charge this price premium and the person who is willing to pay a premium for whatever it is that you are producing is probably not going to be the person who you speak to most frequently. Right? Like if you're hanging out with other hobby producers who are also stretching their personal budget to try and run a farm that's having a hard time being profitable, They're probably trying to save money other places or like maybe they raise the same animals as you so they're not gonna be your customer. You're you're gonna need to go find like where are the pockets of people which is all that a target market is, whether that's like a psychological kind of pocket of people who exist online in some kind of online community or literally like a zip code, or people who shop at a particular kind of store or frequent a particular farmer's market. You need to find the pocket of people who might be, if you convince them, willing to pay a premium for your product.

So find that target market, like define that target market and don't get discouraged if your neighbor or the first three people who walk by your booth at the farmer's market or the craft fair or wherever it is say, oh, I would never pay that. They might not be your customer, that's fine. You need to understand your market and kind of take that in and hope that you find the people who might be willing to. I'm not saying persevere forever, but you might get some negative reactions. And if that person doesn't seem like the kind of person who you're trying to sell to, like no sweat off your back, just try to shake that off, which easier said than done.

Right.

So that's, I think, the first thing.

Would you say this is part of their business plan? Or how do you how do folks think about that? Because like you said, it can get very discouraging. Right? I've talked to 10 people today, and not one person is interested in my product or has bought my product.

But that person the that audience is there. And so how do you stay motivated and on target? Is is it just part of your business plan and you're like, nope. I know that this person is who. I'm just here to, you know, get my word out.

Yeah. When I when I work with producers, I find that there's like two main marketing plans. The Field of Dreams strategy of if I build it, they will come, which never works. And then the other one cohort want to find some kind of color by numbers.

Yeah.

They're like, I'm going to find someone on the Internet and then I want to copy what they do, which doesn't work either because that person is, you know, hundreds of miles away or thousands of miles away and probably not telling you everything on their their pretty YouTube video. And then it's very rare that I find folks that have an actual marketing strategy when I work with producers.

Yeah. And I think a big part of that is, and Glenda and I talked about this last time, I frankly don't remember if we recorded it or not, but most people don't get into farming because they love marketing. Understand why people don't necessarily wanna do that. And, I mean, like, have marketing experience and I don't really like putting on my marketing hat when it comes to, like, the agricultural side of the stuff that we produce as part of our our, like, family farm situation. And I think some of that is agriculture is so personal and it's so close to you and your labor and the things that you think are important that then having to feel like you need to go sell to people and they're not convinced can feel like a really personal attack.

And you know, so I'll cite some literature just so I look a little bit like an academic but we do have literature on that when you look at like entrepreneurial ventures where it's like we do need to think about the psychology of entrepreneurs a little bit different from other managers because it is so close to them. And if you're running a farm you're an entrepreneur, right? At least I suppose if you're trying to make some kind of profit or make that make that operation sustainable. But I would say I have seen the same thing as as Colt this like, well if I'm just a really good farmer then that will lead to some kind of financial reward and I won't have to do the marketing piece. And I think that's really unlikely to work unless you get really, really, really lucky and there are a bunch of forces around you that kind of force it into a successful marketing plan.

I would not bank on that. And then to the, like, I'll just look to see what someone else is doing and then emulate that. I mean, they did it, they did it already. They did it first. So why would you try to go to market market and say, you should pay a premium for my product, but it's an approximation of what someone else was already doing pretty successfully.

I would say, you know, take a few steps back and, like you probably don't want me to do like an entire lecture here. But the second thing that I tell my students, I want them to graduate with and hear in my voice forever is write a positioning statement. So, write a positioning statement, which is literally just like a fill in the blank kind of Mad Lib style thing where you say, okay, here's my target market, here's my product, here's kind of the category of things that I think I'm competing within. And as agricultural producers, people are, often really pushed to think like, well, you're competing against other people producing the same commodity as you are. But that's not the case if you're selling at a farmer's market.

Right? If I'm a consumer at the farmer's market, I've got $40. I know I'm gonna buy kind of like staple veggies. And then I kind of know that I have like $10 that I'm gonna spend on something fun and that might be flours and it might be like a new kind of cheese or it might be like some weird squash or maybe they're roasting peppers that week. And I'm like, oh yeah, I want fire roasted peppers.

But in that case, those producers who are producing something that's like not the staple at the market, kind of my fun buy for that week, they're competing against each other and that's partly a function of me as a target customer. That's partly a function of like the fact that I am a customer in that particular environment, the farmer's market. But that like category decision really, really matters. So who do you think you're competing against? And then the last two pieces of that are, okay, given the first three pieces, which are target market product, the category that you're competing within, what's your point of difference?

What's the one thing that makes you different compared to all of the other people competing in that category? And that needs to be a thing that matters to your target customer. And then the very last piece of that is, okay, well what's the reason to believe? Because marketing is cheap talk and lots of people will say lots of things about what they produce. So what's the best story that you could tell your target customer to make them believe that you're doing something different and valuable to them?

And that's I know not like the most elegant explanation of marketing but I do think it's the most elegant and now you go do something with this explanation of marketing that helps people to think strategically in the way that we try to teach, like a more general marketing student. And it's really different from the advice that sometimes I see people give which is like, well just go tell your story, you know, like go on Instagram and tell your story. And if you tell me to tell my story, I'm gonna be like, look at my cute kids, like look at, me doing chores, look at like the way that this is a lifestyle choice for me. None of that makes you want to like spend more on a fleece or, buy breeding stock from like my kids are real cute and I love them very much. They say nothing about like the quality of my product and why you should choose me over any other farmer in Maine.

But I do think that I could tell you something about what makes the product I am producing better and why that would be, superior for a customer and that's not saying anything in particular about my operation at all. I think that is true of the vast, vast majority, like 90 plus percent of producers in Maine. But if you just ask them to tell their story, they're gonna make it like a personal narrative and not a targeted marketing strategy where you're saying, okay, am I telling a message that communicates what makes me special as a product in a way that benefits my target market? And then you push on that a little bit more and like marketing strategy falls out of those statements, right? So as you're trying to figure out, well, what message do I wanna send to people, and how am I going to communicate that message?

You start to go, well, should I do Facebook or should I do X or should I do Instagram or should I do TikTok? And people sometimes will like panic and just make accounts on all of them and then say I'm overwhelmed and throw their hands up in the air and it's like, take a breath, take a minute. Who's your target customer? Where are they hanging out? Because this is a very different person spending time on TikTok than reading their local paper than spending time on Facebook than spending time on Instagram.

And the benefit today is you can go on chat or any of the Yeah. Yeah. It's now so easy to just look it up and say, at this age whatever. This age group, right, is who I'm targeting. And they're like, these people spend time on x platform.

Yeah. And then go to that place. Go to the place where your target customer is hanging out. Create content that communicates a story about not necessarily you unless you think that you are truly the thing that is making what you're producing more valuable, but that's probably not the case unless you wanna be like an Instagram influencer in which case, yeah, that's exactly what you need to do. Come up with the best story and by story I don't mean like fiction or like lie, I just mean narrative that communicates what makes your product special and then you develop content that communicates that thing, right?

And so, that leads you to a really different marketing strategy and it might not be fun, you might not wanna do marketing but your marketing is way more likely to lead to some kind of return or at least some kind of valuable information about whether or not a target customer that will pay the price you need them to pay given a higher cost of production to make things begin to pencil out, whether or not that's possible or likely as opposed to these kind of like shotgun approaches. Like, I'm just gonna feel overwhelmed and try a lot of things and then get discouraged and kind of shut down.

Yeah. Yeah. Alright.

That's the hardest part, I think, for most of the folks I work with is just sticking with something because you got to create a plan and then you have to stick with it.

Yeah.

And, not just abandon it the first time the kids get sick or you get a strike from Facebook for doing something you're not supposed to do. Or I've I've I've had excuse me, sinuses are killing me.

It's that tough year.

It is about to explode. I have not been able to convince most folks just to stick with it. You know, you gotta have a plan in writing and stick with it.

Yeah. And I think that is the other thing is, often in agriculture, have these, I guess, maybe not in dairy. Dairy you've got product to sell every day. But in a lot of cases, you're kind of like producing, producing, producing, producing, and then you're like, now we need to sell. And so as you're doing all of the work of producing and you're making these investments of time and money and resources in marketing all across the year, it's easy to let those slide when it's not sales time.

And then sales time hits and you're like, okay, like now I'm gonna make a big marketing push for these three days and then you feel frustrated that it didn't work, but you didn't you didn't build a community. The algorithm that runs these platforms, if we're talking about online marketing or like social media, the algorithm doesn't know you. It doesn't know who your people are. It's not going to show your ads or your posts to anybody. And, those investments, all of that work in marketing, you do need to expect that there's gonna be a lag between the investment and the payoff.

And if that's not gonna work for you, then I think that can be okay. You can just make an investment in selling in some different way but that's a like honest marketing strategy conversation that a producer needs to have with themselves. And if it's gonna rob you of all of the joy of what you got into agriculture for, then again try and find some different path, to make it work instead of instead of feeling frustrated that you can't get a really slapdash five different social media channels that you don't like or use personally strategy to work for you.

Yeah. Yeah. And there's differences too. I think you mentioned something when we were gearing up for this. There's differences in gender roles as well.

So if you're a woman, based business or a male based business, there's even some other strategies. I don't I know. Do we have some time to just briefly talk about some of those strategies or maybe that's going into depth and we need to take a step back as well? But I'm just curious to what else you found along the way that could potentially benefit the listener specifically here in the state of Maine.

Yeah. I would say so there are a lot of people who do research in this space and, I can't speak to all of it. Like gendered based research is not really my specialty, but I do have, a paper on consumer perceptions of men versus women as entrepreneurs. And one of the things that we found in that research that we frankly weren't looking for, was that people assume that women entrepreneurs have very, very early stage, entrepreneurial ventures. So we have a lot of ag examples in the study, in the studies that we've run and we actually use like a farmer's market and then a variety of different products that a person might be selling at a farmer's market as one of the context for one of these studies.

People assume that women entrepreneurs of these very, very early stage often like food based often selling at like a farmer's market fair, like trade show kind of, but open to the public situation that women entrepreneurs in those contexts are far less likely to be primary breadwinners in their family than men entrepreneurs, which, statistically is just like not the case. We're pretty close to equal with the number of, women in The US who are primary breadwinners for their family. Or at least we were like five years ago when I was writing this paper. I guess I haven't at census data, more recent census data, but it's pretty darn close. So that's not a great baseline assumption to have.

And what that causes consumers to do is to be more likely to make what we call in the paper costly concessions, to request costly concessions from women versus men entrepreneurs. So examples of that across a variety of different domains are things like, you know, asking for free samples or asking for a more expensive version of a product instead of a lesser quality version of a product. Those kinds of like you're not actually quite asking for a discount but you're kind of asking for a discount. Those we see very consistently. The like actually asking for a price discount is a much smaller effect but that is also showing up somewhat, frequently and that's always with women.

And at first we kind of got the effect and we were like, oh maybe people think that, women are doing this as more of a hobby. And it's not that people think it's a hobby than we thought maybe they think they're less competent and it's lower quality. It's not that they think it's less that it's a lower quality. It really does seem to be this like, well, at the end of the day like no one's family is going to suffer really if she makes a little bit of a concession here. So we're still doing research in that space, and there are other people who have like more concentrated research expertise on what those kind of like gendered dynamics look like.

But I think it's something to keep in mind certainly, particularly in agriculture where women producers are, I don't know about statistically less frequent, but certainly less like of the prototype that people expect to see. Yeah. When they think of when they think of a farmer.

Yeah. Yeah. So I'm curious, what do you advise for those women entrepreneurs to do right off the bat? Because if they know they're gonna be asked for or the the data shows they're likely to be asked for costly concession.

Yeah. I mean, some kind of a price break. We call it costly concessions. But yeah, whatever. Whatever.

Whatever people want

to How make can they out of get ahead of it, I guess, knowing that this might potentially and maybe they're seeing this already and now you're you you have data to back up some of what's been anecdotal. I didn't know this.

Yeah. So I that's the most important question and thank you for asking it and I regret to inform you that I have no good advice. Yeah. That's like data based, right?

Yeah.

So I can say one of the things we tried, which was we tried a, manipulation where we say this person, and these are all experimental studies, right? So we have complete control of all of the information. So, we ran a follow-up study where we either provided no information about the kind of household composition of the entrepreneur or in the kind of like about me section of a website. We included a little bit of information about like this person, you know, John or Jane, I don't think those are the names we use but they were fake names anyway, like gendered male name, gendered female the person who's the entrepreneur here lives with their three children as a single parent in XYZ and, you know, loves, I forget what it was, hiking or something, right? Like just kind of general about the entrepreneur language that you would see on a website like this.

And we thought maybe if we make really, really explicit to people, that this is the sole adult in a household that we would at least moderate the effect and we did not moderate the effect. And that's one study, so we need more data than that but I can say we tried that one thing that we thought well this is pretty heavy handed surely this will work and it did not work. And some of the open ended comments there, you know, would speculate pretty openly because again, we thought this was really heavy handed. We thought that people would, react in that condition in the experiment in the way that we expected. And we thought we would then just be kind of like identifying more nuanced kind of like moral mechanisms.

And instead what we got in the open response, section was a lot of stuff about like, well, bet her parents support her or like, she's almost certainly getting like money from her children's, like father. Right. And kind of speculating about the financial money coming into a woman led household, with a woman as the only adult in household, that did not show up, when the entrepreneur was male. So I don't know. We had an idea.

We thought that would definitely work. It didn't work. If people have recommendations for what we should do in future studies, then I would love to receive those suggestions by email because it's an important question. I would like to answer it, but haven't had time.

Well, Erin, before we wrap up here, I would love to know if you've got general advice for farmers on how they can educate themselves better on marketing moving forward.

Honestly, I would say spend one afternoon looking into positioning statements and write one. I think that, most of the learn marketing for small farmers, materials and frankly, like most just like learn marketing quickly materials even if it's not agricultural, focused, don't get to thinking at like a strategy level. And I think that writing a positioning statement for your very particular operation, looking at it, thinking about who your target market is, thinking about what you think or what you would like to make your product different, that is time that's really, really well spent. And then you can go look at all of the other marketing resources and materials that are available but then just go back and kind of like consult your positioning statement and those are living documents. The other thing that I, I always tell students as I'm like forcing them to use positioning statements and write positioning statements in all of my classes is it's it's ugly, it's not supposed to look good.

This is not marketing language, it's not anything you're gonna put directly in an ad, it's a internal document that you go kind of consult with And if the activities that you're doing are inconsistent with the statement that means one of those things probably needs to change. Either your activities aren't accomplishing what your top level goal is or you need to revise your goal because things have evolved on the ground and now your strategy needs to adjust accordingly. But I think it's a good kind of like gut check to make sure that things are on course. So I would say they're not fun, and they're not beautiful and if you get to the end of it and you think like man this isn't beautiful like I couldn't run a radio ad and say this out loud and think that it would convince a customer. Great, that's not the point.

The point is it's an internal strategy document in one sentence for you. And then just like check back in with that at least maybe like once a month, and make sure that it feels like things are are kind of in place.

And keeping the records so you can check your data with what your goals are. Yeah. That seems to be another big issue I've seen with a lot of producers is either they don't keep records or if they keep records, they don't use their records to inform their decision making.

Yeah. And if you're doing I I know sometimes we jump to assuming that people's marketing is taking place on social media too quickly. But I will say in defense of social media marketing, which I'm not always defending, you do get a lot of free data. And one of the things that you might discover in that data is that maybe your target market isn't exactly who you thought it was, right? Over the course of you developing this content about what you think makes what you're producing really, really special, it did find the right market but it wasn't who you thought it was going to be, that's fine.

Like lean into that and take that free resource and then know a little bit better like, oh man it turns out like my best market are this group of people and so, now I can kind of move forward accordingly. So yeah, consult your own internal numbers, but then also go and use the numbers that are available to you if especially if you find yourself marketing online in a in a format that would provide you with that kind of data.

Yeah. I think something that you, we haven't said, but is farmers are so busy. And so using your time so efficiently, right, and putting your energy, especially if you're if you have a a market that you're charging a premium for. So your your target audience changed, run with that because that's where you're gonna make all of your money. And so spend all of your energy there because you only have so many hours in the day to market and do everything else.

So I guess just take advantage of that and focus focus your limited energy on it, I guess, is what I heard you say in a lot of what you've been mentioning.

And make it something that you like. You know? If you don't like face to camera, then don't do face to camera. Like if you would feel more comfortable wearing a GoPro and then you narrate over that later, then wear a GoPro and put narrate over it later. Right?

But I think I think find something that works for you, develop a strategy, write a positioning statement, go back and revisit that top level strategy. Those are super approachable. You could accomplish it with like one dedicated afternoon and I think it would make a a significant difference.

Well, thank you so much, Erin. This was fantastic. Thanks for having me. Yeah.

Appreciate you coming. And we

oh, go ahead Folks, you know the deal. Yeah.

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