‘In marketing a commodity, can we just brand and succeed?’

Q: We were happy to read in last week’s column that you welcome questions from students. We’re graduating students of agribusiness but we’re only in a “minor league” agricultural school in the country.

There are four of us in our group who want to innovate in staple crops as basic as rice. Our professors have not discouraged us but neither have they been encouraging. In rice, we’d like to do something that SL Agritech Corp. has been able to do with their “Doña Maria Jasponica” brand of top-quality rice.

In our brainstorming, we often ask but got no answer: “In marketing a commodity like rice, can we just brand and succeed?”

We’ve searched online and in libraries to learn how SL Agritech did it.  We even tried visiting the company hoping we could interview its product development team to find out their product innovation model. We were ready to give up when one of our group mates suggested our writing to your column. If you know the story of SL Agritech, please share via your column so we can learn and then copy and who knows, a few years from now we may succeed to be another SL Agritech and come out with our own top-rated brand of rice.

A: We want to be honest with you. We don’t know the success story of SL Agritech. We know even much less about their product innovation system.  So why are we devoting a column on your question?

It’s because we know of a technique that can come close, and sometimes come amazingly very close to the truth.

We’ll show first the results of applying this technique to the Doña Maria case and then explain what the technique is all about and how to correctly apply it. We teach this technique in one of the sessions of our “Continuous Product Innovating” seminar. Participants have given us highly satisfied post-seminar feedback about its application.

According to this technique, here’s how SL Agritech innovated in rice and as a result developed and successfully marketed Doña Maria Jasponica.

To start with, SL product developers must have come to realize that the rice market segment where consumers would welcome a new but high-value rice brand is with the upper-class consumers.

Five senses

Having probably talked to some of these consumers about their rice-eating experience, the SL ProductDev people soon found how discriminating in taste these consumers were. They narrated their five-senses-based experience in eating good rice brands or what one or two or more brands lacked in one or two of the five senses.

It was these existing as well as missing sensory qualities in the consumer rice-eating experience that the SL ProductDev experts utilized as stimulus materials for completing the product concept in Doña Maria Jasponica.

That product concept consisted of five “sensory signatures” embedded in the brand. There were two “T-senses” signatures, namely, “taste” and “touch,” and three “S-senses” signatures which are “smell,” “sight,” and “sound.” Thus, Doña Maria Jasponica is positioned this way:

In taste impression as “delicious … goodness enveloped in each bite,” and best-tasting rice in the Philippines … probably the whole world.”

In touch or feel impression as having “soft texture.”

In smell or aroma as “naturally fragrant” and having the “wonderful aroma of Jasmine rice.”

In sight or look impression as having the “Japanese rice quality.”

And in sound impression as something you can “listen to the goodness of its taste with your every bite.”

Because these sensory values came from what consumers say they in most cases found missing in the available top-quality rice brands, delivering them all and well in Doña Maria resonated with the target consumer segment. So how did we learn that it was those sensory values that counted to the target consumers?

It’s obvious that we did not interview the innovator and ProductDev people of SL Agritech to find out. That’s only to be expected.

No innovating entrepreneur in his or her right mind will tell you his or her trade secret. But nevertheless we found out. How?

We resorted to what archaeologists called the method of “deconstruction.”  From as few “artifacts” as a tooth and a fragment of a bone, in deconstruction the archaeologist can figure out the mouth, the face, the neck and the entire body of the dinosaur that owned those two tiny artifacts. It’s a technique of re-analyzing the past to see what it could, or even what it should have been. That’s essentially what we did to approximate Doña Maria Jasponica’s innovative product concept.

What “artifacts” proved useful to our deconstruction? They’re all the materials about the Doña Maria rice from its website, its package’s product description, its advertising and merchandising items, its product literature, and similar other “artifacts.”

But how did we make sense out of those scattered “evidence” and fragments of “tooth” and “bones?” We resorted to a model, a theory of consumer product value building.

Specifically, we invoke Martin Lindstrom’s Brand Sense model to give some internally consistent and meaningful shape to the “artifacts” that our deconstruction method gathered and analyzed. It is the combination of these two, deconstruction and consumer model selection, that constitutes the wholeness of this continuous product innovating technique. Try it now. It’s easy, inexpensive and it works!

Keep your questions coming. Send them to us at [email protected] or [email protected]. God bless!