Multimedia Campaign
The Challenge:
Being a newer grain marketing company among established giants, G3 needed to spread awareness and make a name for itself despite not having the marketing budget competitors enjoy. G3 had to be positioned as a disruptor—bold, fresh, and forward-thinking.
The target audience was progressive farmer producers in Western Canada, aged 35 to 55, who focus on profit and efficiency, with medium (2,500 to 5,000 acres) and large (5,000+ acres) farms. Their primary driver is doing what’s best for their business, and they are growth oriented. Primary geography targeted was within 100 kilometres of current G3 elevators.
The goals for the campaign were to increase trial initiations with G3 for new customers and to increase G3’s wallet share for current customers. Through region-specific targeting, this direction remained the same throughout the year, with core marketing months identified as March to May and August to October.
Since placing ads in major ag media wasn’t strategic enough, 6P Marketing pushed to use tactics where geo-targeting was possible, which was vital due to the limited marketing budget.
The 6P Solution:
With G3’s tagline of “Forward, we grow” in mind, 6P Marketing devised an outer-space theme, with grain elevators depicted as space-shuttle launching stations. We saw G3 as the NASA of the grain marketing industry. The campaign tagline became “Go beyond conventional, with innovation brought down to earth,” and copy on all communications was used to discuss the three proof points that were deemed differentiators for G3 and the biggest benefits to customers: speed and innovation, state-of-the-art facilities, and customer experience.
G3’s visuals employed surreal elements to communicate its forward-thinking vision and innovation, as well as its speed and state-of-the-art facilities. Starry backgrounds over grain fields were featured heavily, and other celestial elements were included where possible. This concept was bold, stood out from all other competitor campaigns, and spoke to the target audience’s progressive nature and search for a better way of doing things.
The Outcome:
Over the five years of working with G3, each year it has met it’s grain origination targets. Competing with competitors that are generations old, in an extremely short period of time, G3 has secured its place within the top three grain marketing companies in Canada. Marketing is now focused on increasing margin and increasing the adoption of its hybrid customer service solutions.
