Direct-To-Consumer Marketing
Tim Hammerich
News Reporter
The idea of growing a specialty crop to sell direct to consumers can mean more margin, but it also creates a new challenge: finding and converting the right customers. Traditional mass marketing can be expensive and ineffective for smaller operations, which is why Steve Sando of Rancho Gordo says farmers should rethink how they approach advertising altogether.
Sando… “ There's a marketing guy, Seth Godin, and he talks about there's the big wave. So if you want to be in on organic food, now you have to be huge, you have to spend millions of dollars in advertising and marketing and all this stuff. But then he talks about the tail of the wave, and the tail's really long, and you can actually make money appealing to your tribe rather than trying to chase the broader audience. So you want to do narrowcasting rather than broadcasting. You find your tribe and let them do your marketing for you. I love advertising, and I would love graphics, and I would have loved to have done more, but it never has worked–we’ve done it four or five times. So we don't do any Facebook advertising, we don't do Google AdWords, we do nothing. People use Rancho Gordo now for a Google AdWord to get people to their sites, but we've never done it.”
Sando says that building a loyal customer base has given Rancho Gordo free marketing through positive reviews, online presence, and word of mouth.
