Bid to help world’s farmers

Dublin-based digital marketing company Brandtone is setting its sights on tackling one of the world’s biggest issues and helping its clients improve their bottom line at the same time.

The company which markets household brand names such as Pepsi, Unilever and Kellogg’s has partnered with Swiss agribusiness Syngenta in a bid to increase the efficiency of farmers in poorer nations and improve the world’s food security.

The pilot programme sees small farmers who buy Syngenta seeds, chemical inputs and other agri products given the opportunity to sign up via their smartphones to the service.

It’s another of Brandtone’s marketing ideas which uses customer’s personal data to their clients’ advantage, delivering a 12% increase in sales in this instance, but with a bigger goal in sight too.

As Brandtone chief executive Donald Fitzmaurice put it: an opportunity to do good and do well at the same time.

“Having registered the farmers what we’re continuing to do is support these farmers on their journey.

"Syngenta continuously educate them on the uses of the more advanced chemical inputs and seeds, they provide them with alerts about threats to the crop in terms of disease or weather or whatever it might be and also provide them with alerts about market prices so they can buy and sell a crop at the best time,” Mr Fitzmaurice said.

“Driving mobile investment is key to sustainably increasing the output of smallholder farmers across the globe and key to solving one of the most critical problems that we face on this planet which will be feeding 9 billion people in approximately 35 years time.”

The trial which was conducted in China is another example of the Dublin firm’s focus on Asia as a growing market.

The deal built upon an existing tie-up between Brandtone and the London-headquartered company which counts the likes of Lynx, Surf and Dove among its brands.

In September, Brandtone signed a multi-million euro deal with consumer goods company Unilever to market its products in south east Asian countries like Thailand and Vietnam.

Earlier in the year, the Enterprise Ireland-supported company had another reason to celebrate when it closed an €18.5m funding round led by US-based Ares Capital.