Why Genuity™? Building a Trait Master Brand
You won’t find the word Genuity™ in Webster’s dictionary. You won’t even find it on Wikipedia. Not yet, anyway.
So how did Monsanto come up with the name for our new family of elite trait technologies?
“When we set out to build our trait master brand strategy, we saw a great opportunity to create a brand platform that was different than how we’ve marketed traits thus far,” Dion McBay, Monsanto trait marketing lead, said. “Monsanto’s pipeline of traits will offer farmers great opportunity for higher levels of success, and we wanted to create a brand that conveys our commitment to help farmers do what they do best, even better.”
What’s in a name?
“When it came to building a master trait brand, we wanted a name for our brand platform that conveyed the equities our traits hold. We wanted a name that was an empty vessel--one that would allow us to unify our traits under one umbrella, simplify our brand position and relate differently than our competitors attempt to today.”
A team sat down and created a set of characteristics they wanted the brand to ultimately stand for. From that, they reviewed more than 2,000 names. The team narrowed the selection down to 18 and took those to farmer focus groups.
“At the focus groups, Genuity jumped off the page,” McBay said. “It was the one of the final 18 names tested that while some farmers looked at it with an eyebrow raised in the beginning, they said they saw a lot of things in it.”
What did they see? Genuine, genetics, gene. They also saw unity, ingenuity and ingenious. Not a bad set of attributes to be associated with our products. In fact, they were exactly what the team hoped for, as they equate to what we hope farmers will think about our trait technologies.
“Given the words the farmers associated with it, we think it gives us the opportunity to realize our brand promise of helping farmers do what they do best, even better,” McBay said.
What’s in a logo?
With the brand’s name set, the team then decided on the brand’s appearance, a process that also involved farmers and was very similar to deciding the name.
“We wanted to choose a font system that showed up in the market as something different,” McBay said. “The font is proprietary and unique to us. The reasoning behind that is so whenever somebody--even at the most casual glance--sees the name written, they recognize it as Genuity.
“We ultimately chose the crimson color because it correlated emotionally to success and innovation,” he continued. “The color scheme of crimson and silver, we believe, presents the brand in a way that farmers will very easily notice as different from any of the logo systems our competitors are currently using.”
The Genuity logo system includes four different icons that represent herbicide tolerance, insect protection, weather protection and increased productivity. The logos that represent each product’s characteristics and performance will be used for that product.
For instance, the logo for Genuity™ Roundup Ready 2 Yield™ soybeans incorporates the herbicide tolerance and increased productivity icons to indicate the second generation Roundup Ready technology and yield increase the product has demonstrated over Roundup Ready soybeans in field trials.
McBay says with more multi-trait stacks coming in the future, it will be important for farmers to be able to align our innovations with their unique agronomic needs that they face on their farms.
This leads up to three simple objectives--uniting Monsanto’s latest and future traits under a single brand, simplifying the farmer’s trait decision and differentiating our products from others in the marketplace--to create a brand that describes the family of trait technologies that enable farmers to do what they do best even better.
Monsanto Company is a member of BIO’s Excellence Through Stewardship(SM) (ETS) Initiative. This product has been commercialized in compliance with the ETS and Monsanto Product Launch Stewardship policies, after meeting applicable regulatory requirements in key export markets with functioning regulatory systems. Any crop or material produced from this product can only be exported to, or used, processed or sold in countries where all necessary regulatory approvals have been granted. It is a violation of national and international law to move material containing biotech traits across boundaries into nations where import is not permitted. Monsanto encourages growers to talk to their grain handler to confirm their buying position for this product. Excellence Through Stewardship(SM) is a service mark of Biotechnology Industry Organization. ALWAYS READ AND FOLLOW PESTICIDE LABEL DIRECTIONS. Roundup Ready® crops contain genes that confer tolerance to glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup® agricultural herbicides. Roundup® agricultural herbicides will kill crops that are not tolerant to glyphosate. Genuity™, Genuity and Design™, Roundup® , Roundup Ready® , and Roundup Ready 2 Yield® are trademarks of Monsanto Technology LLC. ©2009 Monsanto Company.
