Are You Crowd Sourcing Your Ideas? [Academy]

Over the years crowd sourcing has been an effective way of helping people or businesses that have special financial needs. The strategy involves asking people from all over the world for monetary donations so those in need can get back on their feet after a big loss.

But crowd sourcing is not new. It’s been a popular and effective strategy for the past 50 years in the seed business too, but not for financial reasons. The crowd sourcing I’m talking about is centered around obtaining marketing ideas from the crowd of other companies in the industry, including competitors on how to sell more seed. Virtually every company would keep their eyes on competitions to see how they marketed their seed and if successful, plan to use that marketing strategy the next year. The investigations went all the way from marketing programs to how much other companies were going to charge farmers for their seed.

Crowd sourcing to get new ideas helped a lot of seed companies stay in business over the years, and not just the ones that didn’t have their own marketing departments. As a seed company prepared for a new sales year, they would look at what other companies were doing and borrow their ideas. There were years, for example, when virtually every company was offering free trips to customers if they bought a certain amount of seed. In other years almost every company offered a unit of seed free for every unit they purchased. Companies used tools, household appliances, pickup trucks, farm tractors, grain bins and more to get farmers to buy their seed. Borrowing ideas from competitors, which back then would have been called, “pilfering” or stealing, was the primary way many companies came up with their marketing strategies.  Very few had their own unique ways of going to market...