From green paint court battles to self-driving tractors and the future of autonomous agriculture. Inside the strategy of selling work, not just equipment.
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In 1837, farmers on the prairie had a soil problem—it was thick and sticky. It clung to their plows, so they had to stop, scrape the blade clean and start again, and every stop cost time they didn’t have. John Deere built a polished, self-scouring steel plow, and the soil slid off. Farmers kept moving, and John Deere’s brand strategy took off.
Here’s what I want you to sit with. Those farmers weren’t shopping for steel. They wanted a field turned before the season got away from them. The plow was how they got there.
There was a person. A problem. Real demand. Then John Deere built a product—and a brand—to meet it.
I see founders run this sequence backward all the time in my production company. They fall in love with an idea, build it, then go hunting for someone to sell it to. Instead, flip the order—find the person first, learn what’s slowing them down, understand what it costs them and figure out what they’d pay to make it stop. Then build. That’s what John Deere did, and his brand strategy seemed to work out just fine.
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Brands have two questions to consider when it comes to their product
The buyer, looking from the outside in, asks: What am I really buying?
The founder, looking from the inside out, asks: What business are we really in?
The two overlap a lot. They aren’t the same question. The buyer cares about the result, and usually about what the purchase (of a brand) says about them. Does the brand reflect their own values or aspirations? The founder has to figure out how to create that result, deliver it again and again, and get paid enough to keep going.