Marketing Farmers Products: A Webinar on Branding Models and Strategies

Background

The concept of Branding has been around for hundreds of years and likely much longer. What it means to brand something has broadened quite a bit since the word first came into use. Despite the changes, each of the older kinds of branding is still widely used today.

To date, distribution channels are far-reaching around the world, and consumers now have more choices than ever. Organizations and companies began to focus on building brand recognition for themselves rather than focusing exclusively on their products and services. Aside from the product or service itself, institutions have developed their identity as a brand by themselves. This allowed them to build loyalty that extended across product lines and gave their consumers a sense of belonging and personal meaning. Businesses began to focus on establishing long-term corporate identity rather than creating short advertisement campaigns. Advertising agencies grew into brand consultancies. From corporates, branding is now extended to non-profits, political groups, and even personalities or celebrities.

The emerging trends in digital communication, particularly the rise of the internet and social media and e-commerce platforms are driving the next stage of the evolution of branding. Unlike consumers of the past, internet-connected people of today are no longer satisfied with mere consumption–instead, they now want to participate. Social media brands like YouTube and Facebook rely on their users to help establish their value and how they are perceived by the public. Content sites like Amazon depend on reviewers to provide their most persuasive content. Although internet-based companies give up some of the control of their brand image, the loyalty from an actively participating customer base is unparalleled.

For farmer’s organizations and cooperatives, developing a brand and packaging it into something innovative that would create market demands, and establish traditional and new market linkages, will certainly help increase the income of farmers and their enterprises. However, while branding itself can be an ideal direction, farmers are also faced with numerous barriers such as uncoordinated production system to meet market demands, transportation and logistics limitations, non-availability of technologies and facilities for packaging, limited information and use of digital platforms, and increasing demand for geographic indication and standards for the production of health and safety foods.

Branding has increasingly become an important aspect of any business, large or small, wholesale or retail, corporate institutions, and even farmer’s organizations. Effective branding strategies are now key to addressing market competitiveness and changing consumer behaviors. All these concerns will be correlated to the webinar discussion on developing and creating brands for farmers’ organizations and cooperatives.

Examples of brands by family farmers and cooperatives:

Objectives

This webinar aims to:

1. Deepen understanding of concepts and needs for branding, packaging, and related concerns in promoting and marketing products of farmers’ organizations and agriculture cooperatives;
2. Provide an opportunity for learning from successful case studies on branding and packaging by other successful farmers’ organizations and agricultural cooperatives and help identify effective branding strategies that can be adopted or enhanced;
3. Help identify action points, policy recommendations, and other interventions and steps necessary or required to enhance the promotion and marketing of farmer’s products.

Organizers

The webinar is organized by the consortium Asian Farmers’ Association for Sustainable Rural Development (AFA) and La Via Campesina (LVC) through the ASEAN Farmers’ Organisation Support Programme (AFOSP) and Asia-Pacific Farmers Program (APFP) which is supported by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and the European Union (EU), and by the Collectif Strategies Alimentaires (CSA), which is implementing a Cooperative Development Program in Southeast Asia in partnership with AFA.

Language

This webinar will be in English.

Live streaming

This event will be streamed live through the Asia-Pacific Farmers’ Forum Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/AsiaPacificFarmers.

PROGRAM OF ACTIVITIES