At myAgro we are always trying to come up with new ways to market the program to our farmers. We’ve used all kinds of communication tools: film screenings, flyers, a radio program, farmer-to-farmer marketing, promotions, and more.In Senegal, one of the newest mass marketing methods we’re testing is a USB marketing program.
The idea behind the USB marketing program is to replicate the effects of radio marketing. We were looking for a way to reach large audiences and share our message in a coherent and consistent way. While we couldn’t offer a radio program in the region, the USB program is intended to fill that void while fitting in with the current habits and resources of our farmers.
We found that pretty much all of our villages have small battery-powered radios that the farmers listen to on a regular basis. While the radios are generally too small to play CDs or cassettes, most of them do have a USB port. From this discovery, the USB program was born. Our translator-turned-marketing-agent now regularly conducts interviews with farmers, staff, and other resource people (see the photo above of our translator conducting an interview with one of our farmers at his home!).
We conduct these interviews in our two dominant local languages and then mix up the interviews with information about the program and popular local music. These mixes are then saved on USB disks and distributed to our villages every two weeks. Resource people in the villages then play the programs at set times or make them available for others to borrow and listen to. So far, the USB marketing seems to be taking off. One of our agents noted that after the first program was diffused at a women’s meeting in one of his villages, the women were so interested that they cleaned him out of all of his flyers about myAgro immediately afterwards! We are excited to be bringing reliable information regularly to our farmers, in their local language, in a fun and interesting new way.
