Paradowski is honored to have the opportunity to extend its agricultural expertise — honed for four decades — as well as its full team of strategists, art directors, writers, developers, analysts, media experts, videographers and digital experts to vie for the opportunity to further represent the Bayer brands. Furthermore, we have established an office and full-time presence at Bayer's global headquarters. We now span six cities and two countries. Starting Oct. 1, 2019, we will have a full-time Paradowski account manager living in Cologne and working as a global liaison at Bayer across all our Bayer accounts. Through our full response — uploaded to Ariba and downloadable from this website — we intend to demonstrate our ability to partner with Bayer to bring the best brand thinking and skill to achieve the most effective and efficient partnership.
Right now, the communication examples for the five relevant crop protection products (Velum, Luna, Alion, Movento and Sivanto) are primarily focused on standard features and benefits language.
Based on these materials, and anecdotal evidence, it appears that the communication strategy for these products has been focused on building equity in the product brands, and not in the parent brand, Bayer.
In short, the communication and marketing strategies for the horticulture crop protection portfolio encourage Pest Control Advisers (PCAs), retailers and growers to see each brand as an island unto itself, and not part of a larger value proposition.
For instance, the Alion brand touts its four key benefits (“longer-lasting, broad-spectrum control, unique chemistry and more profits”), but says nothing about the motivation or values of the company that manufactures it.
Growers need and want products that work. And of course safety, efficacy and suitability are critical for getting the approval of a PCA or similar specialist. But in most instances there will be multiple products that could work for insect, weed or fungal pressure on horticulture crops.
The deciding factor in those instances will involve subtle emotional cues about brand loyalty, trust and a desire to give business to companies growers believe have their best interests at heart. It’s an immutable law of purchase decisions: When all else is equal, we like to do business with brands that share our values.
There’s a big difference between short-term, superficial goals and long-term, personal goals.
When weeds are stealing water from, say, a grove of almond trees, the grower is going to need help suppressing those weeds. And yes, Alion (to pick one example) can help address that need. But that is a fairly short-term and superficial need.
Underneath, most growers have much more profound and personal goals, and are dealing with far more complicated issues. They want to produce a product they can be proud of. They want answers for consumers who are demanding more transparency and sustainability in growers’ supply chains.
The key to achieving an ideal communication strategy is to adopt values-based language that drives emotional connections without abandoning the features-and-benefits language that helps PCAs, retailers and growers rationalize their decisions.
Horticulture growers are smart and disciplined businesspeople, but they are first and foremost people. Which means they are not purely rational. They make emotional decisions and then search for facts, figures and benefits that support their emotional decision.
Great brand building means tying the functional benefits of our crop protection products to a perspective that is unique to Bayer, so positive equity is built not just in individual product brands, but also in the parent brand.
The Crop Science division has recently announced three big transformational commitments:
The creative strategy for the horticulture portfolio will need to show how its five product brands are part of the solution. This will require extrapolating long-term environmental and social value from product efficacy claims. It will, in short, require us to clearly communicate why we make our crop protection products, not just what they do.
We know that for our brand cluster, our scope definitely includes content development and digital creative. The Paradowski approach to digital brand experiences is tried and true. Here are a few people and processes you can expect to meet along this journey.
Our digital sharpshooters form a cross-functional leadership team for all things digital strategy and experience disciplines.
The team — comprised of account management, content strategy, development and design — becomes imbedded in any cross-digital/creative project to ensure nothing gets lost in experiential translation.
This team holds the entire agency responsible for adherence to ever-changing strategy and technology writing standards, processes and best practices.
Audiences have options when it comes to organizations worthy of both their investment and loyalty. So why should they choose you? Your content and digital properties should make your products not just the obvious choice, but the only one. Here’s how.
The best digital content and web experiences have something in common: They’re beautiful.
Not just because of the emotional impact aesthetics have on a user (we’ll get to that), but because a website is the single most accessible articulation of a brand. And first impressions are critical, because we know that visitors make brand judgements within seconds.
Design is the first thing users evaluate because we are all visual learners. People process images 60,000 times faster than text, and 90 percent of what’s transmitted to the human brain is visual.
We’re not only driven by aesthetics. There’s also that darned amygdala.
As one of the most primitive areas in our human brains, we might assume that its raw emotions and knee-jerk instincts are easily overlooked, or at least overcome. But as it turns out, our emotions are critical to higher-order decision making.
“Without emotion, we are biologically incapable of making decisions. Logic is often the last step in the process. The conscious intellectual brain steps in to produce a rational backstory to justify impulses generated in the murky corners of the unconscious mind.”
Beautiful design isn’t worth much if it’s not also useful. Put simply, UX refers to the practice of simplifying complexity.
Users today, especially digital natives, want to be delivered directly to the content they're looking for. And they want to be delighted in the process. With context for why users come to a site and what they hope to accomplish there, we can provide better access and a more enjoyable interaction from start to finish.
We’re tempted to give users all the options.
Here’s the problem: Too many choices create fatigue and even a negative experience. Nielson Norman Group (NN/g), the self-proclaimed (and oft-credited) “World Leaders in Research-Based User Experience,” point out another peril of too many options in a published article. Once a decision has finally, exhaustively, been made, we’re left with “a nagging feeling that [we] missed something important.”
The types of relevant content vary by audience. The precise image of beauty varies depending on who you’re targeting. But according to a joint study by Harvard, the University of Maryland and the University of Colorado one thing is true for all of us.
We’ll work with stakeholders to define your users’ goals and develop a plan that guides them to the primary digital content types they’ll be looking for, as quickly and intuitively as possible.
The horticulture products are part of a greater Bayer portfolio and must engage audiences in such a way as to align with the overarching Bayer story and brand. With so many meaningful and important narratives, the trick becomes framing and presenting them in a way that reaches the right audiences with the right tools.
While your product webpages are your digital calling cards, they don’t exist in a vacuum. Your web presence is just one of many ways your audiences will interact with your brand online and “in the real world."
Your content and digital assets should reflect your commitment to being best in class. Working together, these pieces can effectively elevate your products and thus the overarching brand in the marketplace and to your end customers. Moreover, these pieces can also demonstrate the world-changing commitments Bayer has made.
Providing rich and relevant content can intuitively amplify your reach through social media platforms, increase visibility and improve search — all by simply being repurposed across channels.
In short, populating the digital ecosystem with top-tier content positions the Bayer horticulture products as tools for today, as well as a vital investments in tomorrow — but only if all the digital touchpoints fully and seamlessly interacts with the larger media landscape.
Beyond the emotional, brand-building benefits of storytelling, there’s another advantage to making content that elevates and integrates your products’ role in Bayer’s world-changing initiatives.
Assets and copy from new content sources can extend to:
What's the Paradowski secret sauce? If you ask our team, you'll hear that every one of us is really a designer — despite what our business cards might say. Because we don't just design websites, content management systems or user interfaces; we design experiences.
More specifically, we design award-winning experiences for clients who share our passion. Partnerships include T-REX and Geosaurus, Laumeier Sculpture Park, The Sheldon Concert Hall, Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, Bayer, The Climate Corporation, Bayer Crop Science and Bayer Vegetable Seeds.
Speaking of experience, we have it in spades when it comes to simplifying content, tidying unwieldy resources and turning web traffic into foot traffic. It’s one reason we think you should select us to partner with you on the Bayer horticulture work.
Great. We built a website—we mean, an experience—where you can find out more about the agency, our work and all the people who make it.
We submit our response, this site, our case studies and our videos with great enthusiasm and excitement for this potential partnership. Our company sincerely appreciates your consideration of our perspective and our approach for this endeavor. We believe we have provided you with a response that not only demonstrates our unique qualifications for the objectives outlined in your RFP but also provides some preliminary strategic and creative thoughts based upon the materials you kindly provided as well as some initial research we undertook.
2017 marked our company’s 40th year in business. Over that period of time, we’ve been fortunate enough to build brands regionally, nationally and globally. We’ve worked across a wide variety of categories, and our depth of experience in agriculture is long-standing and is featured in the case studies provided in our response. Over the past few years, we’ve been recognized as one of the fastest growing agencies in the Midwest. In 2015, St. Louis Business Journal recognized our company as the fastest growing business of any category in St. Louis.
We’ve done this by building incredibly strong relationships with our clients. At the core of those relationships is a partnership that stretches far beyond marketing objectives. They are based on the belief that Paradowski is a partner who delivers brand teams, boards of directors, and customers an amazing experience, regardless of circumstance. We are committed to the success of our clients’ goals, and that commitment has created multiple client relationships that span over 20 years.
It’s our sincere hope we are given the opportunity to do the same for you. We look forward to the opportunity to demonstrate this in the second phase of your RFP process.
Thank you!
