With the “Farm to Fork” movement on the heels of agribusiness, many marketers and companies in the food system are realizing the increasing importance of listening to consumer opinion.

While many agriculture-based companies do not sell product directly to the general public, this issue isn’t one ag marketers and execs should take lightly. Each step of the food system affects the end-user’s product, so it is essential to understand consumer concerns, habits and opinions.

As a strategy to address consumer concerns about today’s agricultural practices and the “Farm to Fork” movement, we’re seeing the successful integration of consumer outreach programs into the overall communications plan.

Outreach campaign delivery varies, but it’s obvious that consumer-facing locations, such as grocery stores, offer advantages to these campaigns. And it’s not just any consumers these outreach campaigns typically look for. Oftentimes—based on several research studies—the target audience is mothers with young children, because they are traditionally the household’s decision makers for groceries.

But do you think these consumer outreach programs are on target with the mother’s agenda?

A majority (69 percent) of grocery shoppers are female; however, a recent study found that number of males has been increasing—in fact, more than 50 percent over the past decade. Capitalizing on this trend are several grocers, including Walmart and Target, who are now phasing in “man aisles” to appeal to the emerging male shopping demographic. This trend seems to be slowly becoming apparent over time, but it is one that deserves attention.

While the target audience may vary through consumer outreach campaigns, there is one rule that all marketers should abide by: taking the time to monitor the industry. In addition to listening to your audience, monitoring the (food/ag) industry is the best way to uncover opportunities, consumer behavior shifts and most importantly, the opinions and interests of the audience you’re targeting. Over time, consumer outreach strategies and monitoring the industry will allow us as ag communicators to collectively address consumer concerns and hesitations about agriculture and the food system.

This year’s National Agriculture Day, organized by the Agriculture Council of America, was held on March 8th as a day to “recognize and celebrate the abundance provided by agriculture.” Perhaps a celebration for some, and yet a reminder to many more. Only a few weeks back, campus organizations like the University of Wisconsin-Madison Collegiate Farm Bureau organized their own Ag Day, officially dubbed ‘Ag Day on Campus.’ The objective behind the day wasn’t only to celebrate agriculture, but to remind students on campus where their food came from and who provided it.

Photo courtesy of the UW-Madison Collegiate Farm Bureau

Their first ‘Ag Day on Campus’ last spring was of relatively the same manner: gather sponsorships, create a Facebook event, invite everyone and their brother, design a t-shirt, create some flyers, chalk the sidewalk with some messages (i.e., Thank a Farmer), put a tractor in the middle of campus, and hand out string cheese. A few, fairly simple activities, however, they made a huge difference, for a few reasons:

• FREE FOOD–and string cheese being a prime example of what dairy farmers produce.
• They weren’t selling anything or asking to change beliefs. Unlike the man at the other end of the sidewalk.
• There was a genuine excitement about the group, with an obvious passion for what they do.

Over the course of two hours, the group had handed out more than 2,000 flyers and string cheese samples. They also made pins saying, “Ask me about American Agriculture” to create more opportunities for discussion on what the American Farmer contributes. Their creative temporary tattoos and thought-provoking bumper stickers helped spur additional ideas of reaching out to their peers. In addition to using a variety of social media tactics on their Facebook Page and Twitter handle, they even looked to other organizations like I Love Farmers to help drive awareness.

Their ability to connect with the peers was phenomenal—the student newspaper had shout-outs to the group, generating additional media coverage, but also promoting “Thank a Farmer.” The group acquired many new social media followers to connect with in the future, and at the very least, 2,000 people were thinking of the dairy farmer that produced the piece of string cheese they were enjoying on their usual walk to class that day.

This post was not only to applaud these student groups who are striving to make a difference for agriculture, but to remind ourselves as ag marketing and communication professionals to take a second look at our strategy, to reconsider if we’re actually making that connection with our audience. Could we possibly do it better?

Time recently published an article on the rise in popularity of Quinoa, the gluten-free superfood (not a grain as commonly thought; it’s actually a cousin of the beet) that defiantly grows in unfavorable environments such as the Bolivian high plains.

For countless decades, quinoa was little more than subsistence fare for the only people who lived so remotely, native Indians. Now, thanks to some pop culture propaganda—like Christopher McDougall’s Born to Run—quinoa is a must on the menu of the most en vogue restaurants. It’s no surprise that quinoa’s market price has risen as well. In fact, quinoa fetches three times what it did in 2006. The result is an economic boom in what has historically been the poorest part of Bolivia, South America’s poorest country. Farmers now have tractors; their families are expanding their homes. More people can afford to advance their educations.

It’s hard to find fault when such modest people suddenly come into money and better their lives and enrich their communities. But since the stakes have been raised, so have local land disputes over areas that had long been farmed amicably. Other land once utilized for grazing llama herds has been overtaken to grow quinoa, causing the sale of llamas and a deficit of the fertilizer that enriched the soil, which is also in danger of overuse.

And what happens when the agricultural spotlight leaves quinoa and shines elsewhere? When the market readjusts and prices fall back towards Earth, will quinoa growers have shown enough financial and social discipline to deal with their new-old normal?

Enjoy it while it lasts and save your money, quinoa growers. The clock has started; your fifteen minutes of fame are ticking away.

I ran across some intriguing advice the other day about sprucing up your social media for the summer that I think is worth passing along to fellow agrimarketers. Just like cluttered offices and garages become difficult to navigate, social media content can easily become messy or outdated, so check out these tips from foxbusiness.com’s small business center to keep your efforts on task:

Don’t forget about Pinterest as a business tool. “According to a recent study by social media inbox developer Marketmesuite, 65% of businesses who entered their site’s URL into PinMe, the company’s latest tool for tracking Pinterest usage, their site’s content had already been pinned.”

Update RSS posting and auto-tweets. A huge amount of content posted on Pinterest, Facebook and Twitter is sourced from somebody else’s Web site, Tweets, feeds or posts. Experts suggest you add some simple messaging at the beginning of your feeds to ensure that your brand is carried across the Web and doesn’t get lost with the first URL shortener.

Tap into the potential of Facebook Timeline. Current marketing tactics may no longer work as well as they did in the past with Facebook’s new timeline layout. So be sure to update apps and custom pages and add a cover photo, if you haven’t already done so, to enhance the look of your company’s—or client’s—page.

Use LinkedIn’s updated company pages. This update has been available for a while, but be sure to take advantage of the opportunity to add vital information like services, skills and specialties. Add engagement activities to your mix, too, so that it is part of your ongoing social media strategy.

Change with the season. Discard the dregs of winter and focus on the freshness of the season with a new look.

Have fun sprucing things up!

Recently, Kashi, a leader in the consumer packaged goods natural foods movement, struck a chord with a natural and organic food grocer, causing consumers to hit the “digital streets” in anger about a misleading marketing claim.

The controversy went viral last week when the owner of the Green Grocer store in Portsmouth, R.I., posted a note on his shelf to explain to customers that he wouldn’t sell the cereal because he recently found out the brand used genetically engineered, non-organic ingredients in its “Natural” cereal.

While the word “Natural” isn’t regulated by the FDA, claims on Kashi’s packaging and its website have outraged fans who are still posting disgruntled comments on the brand’s Facebook Page. However, instead of ignoring or deleting these opinions as many other brands have done in the past, Kashi listened to its upset customers and issued a transparent response:

For all brands in the food system, this is a lesson in the need to listen to what consumers are saying about your brand online. In Kashi’s case, their strategic listening program and well-thought-out response will more than likely pay off over time as the practice of listening makes a brand’s engagement with fans more authentic and impactful, resulting in greater brand loyalty.

In a world where today’s consumers are able to easily voice opinions through social media channels, one thing remains certain for ag and food system marketers: When consumers talk, you need to listen.