Monsanto Company

Current Marketing Strategy

The Monsanto Corporation is an agricultural company that is split into four different categories: agricultural seed, vegetable seeds, weed control, and traits, technologies and partnering. They are a fortune 500 company headquartered in St. Louis, Missouri and has 21,183 employees at over 400 facilities in 66 countries around the world. I will be focusing on the agricultural seed market of Monsanto (4).

Monsanto top brand are DeKalb, Asgrow, Deltapine. These three are their “bread and butter” and a majority of their profits come from these lines. Since these are high profit seeds lines they spend most of their research and development money and these. However, many consumers feel that the seed line Channel is a sleeper line. This is because the output of this line has been high the past couple of years and has been out producing the estimates. (4)

Monsanto’s consumers are farmers. The agriculture seed group of consumes consists of farmers who plant corn, soybeans, wheat, alfalfa, cotton, sorghum, sugar beets, and canola. As for the age of their consumers Monsanto targets all ages from the 18 year old that just graduated high school to the 80 year who has been farming his entire life. As a company they realize that not all farmers have education higher than High School. So that they can market on a level playing field they provide a websites, such as http://www.agseedselect.com, for famers to learn more about their products that are geared toward the consumer’s geographical area. These websites also provide the latest practices in the agricultural market (http://www.aganytime.com).

The buying process for farmers includes the following stages: planning, placement, products, and personal service. During the planning stage the dealer works with the consumer to help them maximize the profit potential by providing them with access to information about current products, soil reports, and predicted yield for the upcoming planting season. In...