Yesterday was a busy day and today proves to be equally as busy with lots of running around and some things that I really need/want to get done on the farm. So, with that in mind I thought I would just throw out a quick hit blog post today. Actually, what I thought I would do is share a website that I learned about on the first day of our "Grow Your Small Market Farm Workshop". Our teacher said that she would try and pass along good sites and this one looks like a winner.The site is called the, "Agricultural Marketing Resources Center", or AgMRC for short. To steal a line from the website, "The Agricultural Marketing Resource Center is an electronic, national resource for producers interested in value-added agriculture". I must admit that I have stumbled across this site in the past, but never spent much time exploring it. This week I have looked at it a little bit and it looks like a great place to go for information.
One cool link I found right away on the front page was to an article about conducting local market research. If you are direct marketing I suggest you check it out.
So, that is my contribution for the day ... But, I would love to hear what some of your favorite ag related research sites are!
1 comment:
I've always had the thought that the best type of market research is to look at what other successful (and sometimes unsuccessful) direct marketers are doing. If another direct marketer has been able to sell their product for a while, then they have usually worked out most of the "bugs" (pricing, types of products, variety, uniqueness, etc.), and if you look close enough it should be possible to deduce (and/or improve) some of their thought processes.
But, the main obstacle with this idea is accurately determining whether or not someone else's business is actually successful or profitable.
Related to this idea, would it be better to produce a product first and then find a market, or find a market first before producing a product? Or, is the best course a combination of both ideas, slowly exposing a customer base to a wide variety of products and then expanding the more popular product areas?
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