An Approach to Promoting Your Market.

by Tom Roberts, February 2015

Where we should be putting our promotional energies to encourage buying locally?

Many promotional activities undertaken to promote small scale agriculture are focused on the stories of the producers—what their lives are like, how they grow things, and the range of products they produce. While telling this part of the story is important, it sometimes seems that it’s the only tool in our kit to  encourage local buying. Partly this is due to the fact that we who are small scale local producers know most about the production side of things. Production side stories are plentiful and easy for us to tell.

I submit, however, that focusing primarily on the producers’ stories is due to a holdover from the poisonous Reagan-era dogma that emphasized only the supply-side in economics, believing that the demand side could be safely ignored. What we actually need to be doing is to enhance our explanations of the demand side of the local economy: telling the story of what it is that attracts the local buyer to buying local. This is not a single story and so cannot be told from a single point of view. Those of us in the direct sales segment of the local economy are in a unique position to be able to observe and relate stories from the shoppers’ point of view.

The stories of shoppers are indeed manifold and diverse. While we direct sales producers can categorize and paraphrase the stories, we must remember that they are not, in general, our stories, however much we appear in them as players.  The stories of shoppers belong to our shoppers, and our best tactic can be to collect and disperse them to others, to spread them among the potential buying public.

This means using the (mostly) unpolished and unedited words of shoppers, a practice that will best transmit their authenticity to the ears of others. What we would be doing is essentially magnifying word-of-mouth, the number one method of promotion.

The ways this is done need not be artless and robotic. For example a series of micro-videos on the theme of “shopping at the farmers’ market” could include 45 second segments introduced with a title screen explaining its specific subject and professional voice-over reading the title. If the title of this segment were “finding and making friends at the farmers’ market”, the video would show a series of perhaps a dozen scenes where shoppers were meeting and talking in groups at various markets, while the voiceover would consist of real shoppers voices saying how they liked to come shopping with a friend, liked meeting folks they know but rarely otherwise get to see, how markets provide such a relaxed shopping environment, and so forth.

Other segments might be

“Abandon fluorescent shopping—shop outdoors”,

“It’s really only fresh when it’s in season”,

“Ask the grower how it was grown”,

“Get advice from the experts, the folks who are doing it for a living”,

“How to shop on a shoestring budget”,

“Find the growers who match your personality, your budget and your tastes”,

“Art done with veggies”,

“Kids learn math, veggie identification, and shopping skills”,

and so on. Each of these titles probably suggests to you various scenes at market that would be appropriate to illustrate the subject.

The point is that these could be produced fairly inexpensively, could use crowd sourcing for audio and video segments, and would be short enough that they could get easily shared on social media or even put into a low budget rotation on commercial media.

The effectiveness of such an approach derives from the fact you are using the experience of one shopper to connect with a wide audience of potential shoppers. And it is the experiences that shoppers have at market, every bit as much as much as the foods they find there, that generate the repeat shoppers.

From the US Postal Service, on the back of their sheets of Farmers’ Market stamps:

“The sight of stalls piled high with locally grown food, the smell of flowers and freshly baked bread, the sound of conversations between friends and new acquaintances—farmers’ markets are so much more than just places to buy fruits and vegetables. In addition to supporting small farms and artisans, boosting local economies, and providing fresh seasonal food, farmers’ markets are considered by many to be the new town square. They offer, as they did in the past, a gathering place for diverse groups of neighbors to meet and mingle and to share news, recipes, and stories—in short to create a new sense of community.”

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