May 13, 2022

Agri commodity marketing via advocacy

Product Focus

Often times we read why being product focused is beneficial for a company in serving customers. But, what exactly is being product focused?

We often hear stories that how hard it is for physical products to find their adoption compared to digital products. This is mostly in case of new product development. But, what about the ones that are available but still face the same problem.

All agri-commodities are suspect to the phenomenon of having end consumers who are not product aware. Quality is porous that it transforms from region to region. Demographics, economic strata and culture dictate the quality parameters.

When we were thinking about building advocacy for the graded(standardisation) produce at Subjimandi.app. Grade is classification of produce basing on the physiological characteristics among possible range. Grade is often convoluted with quality in trade terms which like we mentioned is as subjective as defining beauty, it lies in the eyes of the beholder, buyer in our case.

We always took inspiration from the NECC’s ad campaign on promoting Egg which took the route of generating awareness to consumers about the benefits of egg and its nutritional value.

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Origin Story

NECC was a co-operative society started by the poultry farmers. It’s founder and first chairman happens to be Dr. BV Rao of VH Group. It owns the famous brand Venky’s chicken. Also the owners of Blackburn Rovers, an english football club.

Dr. Rao, who after studying poultry farming started his poultry business around 1970s. He took it upon himself in 1980s when the egg prices crashed to start a co-op and not let traders alone dictate the price. Thus began NECC (National Egg Co-ordination commitee) to provide fair renumerative prices to all poultry farmers. Dr BV Rao started this with some clear objectives and most important of them all was educating the end consumer to increase overall egg consumption(see point 12 in the picture).

Advocacy Oriented

Advertising took the form of this Ad with the tag line, Sunday ho ya monday roz khao ande.

The prominence of this advertisement campaign led to the bustling poultry industry that we currently see. Anand Halve writes at Financial express about the challenges that this campaign overcame.

Inadequate knowledge: There was a surprising lack of knowledge about the nutritional value of eggs. While there was a belief that eggs were rich in protein, the other nutrients provided by eggs: vitamins, mineral, micronutrients etc, were not known.

Lack of variety: Food is not just about nutrition and health; it is actually about taste and enjoyment! Unfortunately, people only thought of boiled eggs, omelettes or fried eggs when they thought of eggs. And these dishes were considered too boring to be consumed very often.

Absence of perceived need: Most women believed that they were already giving their families meals that were nutritionally balanced. In such a situation they saw little need to supplement their diet with eggs.

And they systematically took it upon themselves through multiple campaigns to educate the end consumers and generate steady demand as Dr BV Rao envisioned.

The idea of the exercise was to provide a steady demand for eggs, to support the poultry farmers. The campaign objective thus became: Promote all-year consumption of eggs.

Anand Halve was the one who penned the catach phrase that every 90s kid witnessed with Sachin Tendulkar telling us to eat eggs.

It made such a significant affect that many vegetarian families who had notions against egg started consuming it. Himani Chanda from print covered how it broke stereotypes.

Also, a lot of Indians believed, and possibly still do, that one shouldn’t eat eggs in summer as they are “unhealthy” and can cause indigestion. Health experts have repeatedly denied these claims. Many people still don’t eat egg on certain auspicious days of the week. So, in a way, these pro-egg campaigns were also trying to break these long-held taboos.

The high-decibel ads screaming the nutritional value of eggs eventually started having an impact on Indian parents. “In the south, parents are very serious about the mental development of their child along with the physical development. My father wanted me to be academically successful. I was a teenager when the first campaign was launched (around 1983-84). It was the first time I was served a boiled egg with a hope that I will do well for myself in life,” Bhavani Giddu said.

The success of being product focused, educating end consumers and increasing its demand led to a steady growth of poultry industry. It also led to creation of multiple types of eggs that differentiated themselves on quality.

Today, consumers are aware and indulge in eggs which are 10x more expensive than the standard ones from back in the day. NECC still provides market base price for all farmers to refer and benchmark.

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Produce Marketplaces

This was a long winding way of saying that until agri-output supply chains cater to consumers exclusively, the produce knowledge will not be relayed.

Currently, every stakeholders in the agri-output supply chain is focused on price alone where as the eventual price of produce never appreciates in consumers mind. If tomato or onion have sudden spike or dip in prices, its always the lowest price that consumers remember and associate as true value of produce.

Subjimandi.app was grading and sorting (standardising) produce at the farmer's location and selling it to the grocery retailers in cities. Thus bringing common standards and vocabulary to disover single price for each type of produce.

For example, The price of onion didn't change between the farmer and retailer. The cost of getting the onion from farmer to retailer was the added cost to onion for retailer. This was fulfilled by Pipehaul . Providing a marketplace for them to transact was the sole reason Subjimandi.app started.

Halted Mid-way

Selling standardised produce ensured we had a service level differentiation to farmers and value addition to retailers.

Yet both the stakeholders viewed us with a lens of cost optimisation over other benefits. Retailers never used the standardisation value proposition to sell to their own customers. Though they valued our standardisation, they never increased the value of produce in consumer's mind share.

What we changed for retailers is the option to buy what they need from sourcing region in terms of produce standards instead of what they get in their local Mandi.

Our journey was cut short and we documented the reasons over here. But the initial success was enough to substantiate the need to focus on educating the end consumer.

Unless there is a collaborative approach towards defining the standards from all operators serving different stakeholders in agri-produce supply chains. Every win become ephemeral by the next season. The deviation in prices due to seasonality of produce will wipe you out sooner than later. (vegetables have more than 26% deviation in price across the season).

The volatility of prices show the urgent need to address this at an awareness level in how consumers value a produce. If we don't, we will never be able to generate or predict steady demand and provide normalised prices for produce to each farmer.

Let me leave you with a meme of my behaviour as an operator who ran a produce marketplace.

It was, is and will always be about “grade” when it comes to Subjimandi.app. Being produce focused ensured that we could weather the volatility to a certain limit and create a differentiation on produce when price was the only metric which dictated trade.

Signing Off Loudly,

Vivek VS, Buy grade wise only.