Farmers are some of the most loyal people when it comes to brands. When a farmer trusts a tractor, a bakkie, a seed, a fertilizer, a bank, an assurance company, a medical aid, or even a cellphone and communication network, he stays loyal. He stays for years, often for decades.
But today, most of us have become just numbers. Just a number in the bank. Just a number at almost every single company.Think about medical aid companies. When they started in the late 1990s, many farmers became members. After 30 years they are still paying, but they are still just a number. The same with mobile phone companies.
When they started in the late 1990s, some of these farmers and their wives got their cellphone numbers, and they still have the same numbers today, almost 30 years later. Yet they are still just a number to those companies.No thank you. No recognition. No loyalty back.
Many tractor and bakkie brands have entered South Africa in recent years, but if you look after your customers and treat your loyal farmers well, they will not even look at other brands.
The same happens with fertilizer, seed and diesel, and the same is true for banks. I seems like they are only interested in farmers who have large assets, a lot of cash, and huge farms. If you have banked with a bank for 40 years or more and they still cannot see your loyalty, then it is not worth staying with them. They have made huge amounts of money out of you, and you are still just a number to them.
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These farmers were the people who believed in those companies when they first started. They supported them in the beginning when nobody knew if they would make it. They paid their premiums every month, through droughts, through bad seasons, through difficult years.
They stayed when it would have been easy to leave.It is time that these companies start paying attention to the people who believed in them when they started. Loyalty must go both ways. If a farmer can be loyal to a brand for 30 years, then the brand should also be loyal to the farmer.In farming, loyalty means something. It is about trust, about relationship, about standing together. Companies who forget that will lose the very people who built them.
Loyalty means you stay faithful to someone or something even when you have other choices. It means you do not leave just because something new, cheaper or more trendy comes along.Loyalty is trust over time. It is about saying, I trust you, so I stay with you. It is also about support.
You support that person or that brand in good times and in bad times. And it is about commitment. You are not just there for today, you are there for the long run.For example, a farmer who buys the same brand of tractor for thirty years is loyal. He could have bought any other brand, but he stays because he trusts that brand.
Or a friend who stays with you when you are sick or struggling, not only when you are successful, that is loyalty.Loyalty in business should work both ways. If a customer has been loyal to a company for many years, the company should also be loyal to that customer in return.
It is time for all these huge companies to start giving back to the farmers and other people who have been loyal to them for more than 30 years and who believed in them when they started their new businesses.
It should not treat a thirty-year customer like just a number. Without loyalty everything is just a transaction, but with loyalty it becomes a real relationship.
