East-West Seed
When Vegetables Rise, People Thrive.
_SECTOR: ENVIRONMENTEast-West Seed provides innovative seeds and services that help improve the livelihood of tropical vegetable farmers and promote sustainable farming and business practices. In 2019, founder Simon Groot won the World Food Prize, which recognizes the achievements of individuals who have advanced human development by improving the quality, quantity, or availability of food in the world.
Emergence harnessed the momentum of the World Food Prize to reposition East-West Seed from a seed company into a sustainable vegetable company through creative promotions and public relations. Emergence also conducted a media landscape analysis and created new messaging to enable East-West Seed to expand its reach further than ever before.
Copywriting | Graphic Design | Organization Building | Public Relations | Strategy
_THE CHALLENGE
Smallholder farmers in developing markets are often limited in what they can grow and harvest. Historical attempts at improving food supply in these contexts have focused on calories, rather than nutrition. This has a sustained negative effect on both nutrition and the environment.
_SEARCHING FOR THE SIGNAL
Based on interviews and an in-depth employee survey, we discovered that East-West Seed is well positioned to be a leading voice in farming best practices and knowledge transfer.
This led us to the idea that East-West Seed is changing the narrative from, “we are selling a commodity” to becoming solution-oriented.
_ EMERGENCE
To redefine the way East-West Seed was viewed by stakeholders, we shifted the previous positioning of the company as a seed company to focusing on its identity as a vegetable company.
Vegetables are good for the people who grow them, good for the people who sell them, and good for the people who eat them. East-West Seed helps make them more widely available.
This idea became the foundation for their new messaging and PR strategy, which were implemented at the World Food Prize event.
_EVOLUTION
Using the announcement of Simon Groot as the World Food Prize winner, we launched the updated positioning and deployed a full PR strategy and media kit. To date, we received:
Total pick up of 156 postings, with an audience of 108M
There were 494 views of the release, of which 133 were media
The release was given an 88 / 100 on engagement (based on pick up, traffic and audience)
Total release views and web crawler hits was 2.5K
Our media pick up was primarily from Business and Finance media: Seeking Alpha, Market Watch, MorningStar, Yahoo Finance, Business Insider/Market Insider, Investor’s Hub, just to name a few.
The largest pick up came from Broadcast, with 30.8% of all coverage.
