The trial data was strong and the purchase happens elsewhere
A product and marketing leadership team at a crop inputs business had built its positioning on agronomic performance, meaning how the product performs in the field. The trial results behind that were strong. Nobody had checked whether that was the question growers were asking. A grower buys against a season, a cash position and a distributor who stocks some products and not others. Performance rarely decides on its own.
The obvious route to an answer runs through the distributors who sell it, and research run that way inherits the channel’s own view of why things sell. That view is useful and not independent. Grower behavior varies enormously by crop, acreage and region, so a handful of conversations would produce anecdotes rather than something a positioning decision could rest on.
We surveyed the growers rather than the channel
We built the survey with the marketing team and fielded it to growers directly, so the answers were independent of the relationship that sells the product. Former agronomists helped shape the questions so they used the words growers use, which is where surveys in this sector most often come apart. Pricing questions ran alongside the positioning questions, because growers make those two decisions together rather than separately.
Respondents were screened by crop, acreage band and region, because that is where the variation lives, and the panel was assembled independently of any distributor relationship. Former agronomists then read the results against the seasonal context a grower is buying in. Every participant cleared our compliance framework.
Positioning now rests on what growers actually weigh
The survey set out what growers weigh when they choose an input, and how much that differs by crop and by scale. Agronomic performance mattered, and it sat behind considerations the team had been treating as secondary. The business changed its message and moved commercial effort to where the survey said the decision is made.
The questionnaire was kept rather than thrown away. The business can field the same questions again next season and read the movement, instead of starting the work from scratch.
