Testing Marketing Strategies

myAgro recently launched an internal strategy to focus our marketing and staff trainings on what we call the 4 C’s: Competition, Comprehension, Confidence and Competence. All our marketing and staff trainings in the weeks leading up to the payment deadline address one or more of these issues.

Villages across West Africa are often linked by marriages and what’s called cousinage, or “joking cousins” in English. As a result, strangers can find a relationship by tracing back family connections to a common point on the family tree. myAgro field agents regularly depend on this cultural trait to build relationships with their farmers and support their outreach efforts. Taking into account the strength of village cohesion thanks to inter-familial ties, and tapping into the spirit of friendly competition, myAgro’s Senegal team recently launched a new marketing strategy: a spin on the typical fundraising thermometer.

Using images of a thermometer, our field agents are now able to visually show farmers the progress their village as a whole has made towards their layaway goals and compare it to other village thermometers.

This is sparking some healthy and lively competition, particularly since most farmers have family in competing villages. Farmers are making layaway payments more frequently to raise their thermometer’s level and they are telling their friends to do the same. Last week, the chief of Ndoga Babacar was unimpressed with his villages’ progress and said, “After seeing this [thermometer], I am going to encourage my farmers to rally to surpass our neighboring villages!”

Besides motivating farmers to make additional layaway payments, the thermometers also serve the practical purpose of showing farmers how far each village has left to go to reach the layaway goals that they established at the beginning of the year with myAgro.

According to our preliminary results, this “competition” marketing effort has reaffirmed how visual images, like thermometers, can help turn something large and theoretical into a fun and actionable game. It also helps unite farmers in a village to work towards their common goal of increasing their agricultural yields and income.

myAgro dedicates significant time and effort into exploring what outreach and training techniques work best with our farmers. Our trials normally start at the myAgro store we own and operate. They are evaluated by reviewing the change in layaway payments each week compared to sales in other villages. The strategies that prove effective are then scaled-up from our store to all the stores and villages where we work. Stay tuned in the coming weeks for more posts about the training and marketing strategies we are testing and the results we are seeing from our efforts.