Closer to customers

Faced with the constraints of the health crisis, Vilmorin-Mikado has devised new ways of strengthening proximity with all of its customers. Explanations.

The whole history of Vilmorin-Mikado has always been written on the ground, in the fields, in a close relationship with its customers. What could make more sense than standing at the end of a plot of land to comprehend the performance of a seed and to measure the quality of what it produces? By threatening to break this historic link, the Covid crisis disrupted this relationship and compelled Vilmorin-Mikado’s teams to look for new solutions to maintain it.

Bringing the field to the client… 

This was the focus of the initiative which took multiple forms, to match each market:

• an online digital platform with two weeks of events and access to interactive content, to catalog the various elements (France);
• a Facebook live stream with teams in the field and information relayed upstream to initiate the connection (Turkey);
• webinars on a new carrot variety (Italy) and on pepper cultivation (Peru, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Colombia). These exchanges at a technical level have had very successful outcomes:
• stronger presence on social media, with the opening of 15 accounts for various subsidiaries on Facebook, Instagram, WeChat (China), KakaoTalk (Korea);
• a hundred videos created to present products, explain cultivation techniques and give advice, and seven YouTube channels started (in Morocco, Brazil, Italy, the United States, France, Spain etc.);
• the first digital catalog launched for lettuces (France) and tomatoes (France, Turkey) with enriched and immersive content, allowing users to zoom in on photos and access videos.

While seeing, smelling and touching fruits and vegetables is important, maintaining this link to the field was essential. All these new tools can never replace on-the-ground meetings, but they reinforce the wide range of methods deployed by Vilmorin-Mikado to remain universally present and always close to its customers.