Wellington
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It is often said thatfarmers need to get closer to consumers.
And while it is possible, and some marketers have set up the facility to, for a bar code (or QRcode) to show exactly where a piece of meat came from, even though that’s good it’s not reallythe point.
Sure, often the marketer will be telling a story associated with the meat’s provenance.
However, my argument is that within the huge quantity of meat sold around the world, the bravebattle of such tiny efforts is worthy but not enough.
The reason that farmers want to get closer to consumers is because then you’re NOT commodity.It means you ARE differentiated.
This is an argument that if we give ourselves a helicopter view of what we produce, and much moreimportantly how we produce, then we automatically link consumers with our farmers (and we shouldstart at the consumer – the fact we can produce something doesn’t mean a thing).
By naming that method (pasture Harmonies), which after all can only be carried out on-farm, wechange the mental relationship of the consumer to what they’re going to eat (or wear or put ontheir floors).
Imagine then, a pasture Harmonies co-brand quietly sitting alongside a marketer’s brand.
Immediately (because we’d be telling the pH story in many different ways) a consumer would havethe ultimate validation of it being the way they’d farm if they farmed themselves.
A consumer could, easily, imagine themselves to be that farmer.
At the moment, that’s much too much a bridge too far. A consumer can’t be sure how ‘our’produce is made. There’s nothing like an ‘Intel Inside’ guarantee. (They can’t with otherprotein production methods either, but one thing we would be trying to show/prove is that we’renot feedlot, not ‘industrial’).
And finally, want to know the best thing about naming our story, and enabling consumers to getcloser to farmers?
We don’t have to make anything up. It’s all true. What we’d be doing is owning responsiblepastoralism and providing a means for that consumer to feel good about their choice.
We’d be linking consumers’ hearts with farmers’.
Or would we?