Student Experience: The Grand Challenges Framework

Farmers Choice was founded as a muti-faceted produce business. It has multiple revenue streams including courses that train recent college graduates in the field of agriculture and the sale of high-quality and affordable produce. Our responsibility as partners was to create a marketing strategy for Farmers Choice’s expansion into hydroponics.

The first step in our consulting endeavor was to understand hydroponics at a core level, which we discovered was a more efficient and less wasteful means of vegetable production compared to traditional farming. Furthermore, hydroponics gives urban communities access to high-quality produce, often at a lower price in the long run due to the minimal operation costs.

Through brainstorming sessions and ongoing interviews with our project partner, we have crafted an interesting approach to helping define and enhance Farmers Choice’s brand. Due to the limited financial and human capital resources of Farmers Choice, we emphasized creating a cohesive message about who Farmers Choice is as a business as it begins its expansion into hydroponic farming. We designed an updated version of Farmers Choice’s website, created an educational video and infographic on hydroponics for potential clients, and shared the story behind Farmers Choice and its founder.

We decided to apply to this program for two big reasons. The first being that previous experiences and lessons learned while abroad demonstrated to us how impactful cultural immersion can be, and we were very much excited to learn about South Africa, its people, its history, and its take on entrepreneurship. While the pandemic made an in-person learning modality impossible, Emzingo was able to create an impactful program where we got to learn a tremendous amount about both the history and culture of South Africa.

Throughout the class, we were all exposed to some untold stories about South Africa’s history and gained insights from a plethora of different perspectives. Perhaps one of our favorite aspects of the program was gaining experience working with an innovative, agricultural start up like Farmers Choice because I was able to fully invest myself and make the project a learning experience for human centered design.

Secondly, we decided to join because we all wanted to learn more about the social and income inequality problem that South Africa faced in the past before and during apartheid and the efforts to equalize opportunities and livelihood today. While we were not able to experience it first hand, the other project teams covered other problems that South Africa is facing such as composting and educational opportunities which helped give me a better understanding of the situation holistically.

The Virtual Immersion Experience with Emzingo was very helpful in learning more about South Africa’s history especially during apartheid and what moving forward meant post-apartheid. Through various dialogues with guest speakers we, as a class, were able to understand the historic events that culminated in the creation of an oppressive, segregated system similar to the experiences here in the US with the Jim Crow laws but at the same time vastly different in the formation and interpretation of social hierarchies of South Africa’s apartheid.

Through the speaker sessions, we each gained a newfound appreciation for socially impactful entrepreneurship and businesses that addressed core problems of the community with human centered design in mind as opposed to purely for-profit businesses. It also gave us all a sense of hope and pride that socially conscious entrepreneurship and businesses could serve as an outlet for growth and healing for the people of South Africa and especially more so for the youth.

An important key takeaway for us as a class is that it showed us how businesses could choose to take the initiative to be accountable for the communities that it serves and normalize creating positive and meaningful change.

Another important aspect was understanding the value of knowing your audience. In Dyson, we frequently do cases recommending marketing and brand strategies. These often include social media promotions and implementing online ordering. However, we quickly realized that this would not be fully transferable to Farmers Choice. In our first few meetings with Andile, the founder, we learned that the primary channel of communication was word of mouth and email. Potential customers would call to place orders or message them on Facebook. Creating an online ordering system on the website was something still unfamiliar to South Africans. Hence, we proposed a draft of the website that included a quick overview of the company as well as a contact us page for customers to fill up. We also created short infographics to post on Facebook.

When working with clients in the future, we now know to gather as much information to curate a holistic picture of the target clientele before ideating and creating prototypes towards a potential solution for our project partner.

Another takeaway was how rewarding it is to build a personal connection with your stakeholders. We each went into the project thinking that our relationship with Andile would be purely professional. However, the more our team learned about her story as a farmer and her motivations to make food and education accessible to all, the more we saw her as a role model instead of client.

Our takeaways were greater than just learning about consulting and social entrepreneurship – we were all able to get an inside look into the values and drive that make up a successful businesswoman. In the future, we are excited to create lasting relationships with project partners and clients with the intention to always be curious, open-minded and to grow from the experience both professionally and personally.