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Syngenta crop protection asked for help launching their new post-emergent herbicide, Acuron GT.

Challenge

During the pandemic, we conducted online focus groups in hopes to understand what Midwest famers were looking for out of their crop protection. In all of our hours of focus groups, we couldn’t seem to crack what made Acuron GT so special. Sure, the yield benefits were there. The new active ingredients were impressive. But the longer we talked with growers, the more we realized that the incremental strides in product performance wasn’t what they were talking about when considering their crop protection plan. Growers needed something beyond the typical performance campaign in order to consider a new product.

Strategy

Instead of trying to understand growers through a Zoom call, we set out to South Dakota to meet growers in their territory. We did site visits to understand the product, but what really sparked our strategy was a conversation we overheard on our way from one site to the next.

In April 2020 the US government declassified UFO videos, and standing around an old Ford F-150 with soybean farmers, you bet that was a big topic of conversation!

In all of our conversations with growers, we heard again and again that our product performed unlike anything they had ever seen before — the UFO conversation was the bridge that we needed, to show growers that beyond the typical performance gains, Acuron GT was literally out of this world.

Creative Solution

We used farmers obsession with extraterrestrial folklore and the new government UFO videos as inspiration, to create an origin story for the product that was literally out of this world.