Farmers market communication needs
Farmers market managers need to communicate with vendors, customers, and other key stakeholders. On this project, our team surveyed and interviewed farmers leaders managers in Wisconsin to learn more about their communication and data collection needs. We compared markets in different types of communities — rural, suburban, micropolitan, and metropolitan.
My collaborators
Dr. Bret Shaw
Dr. Alfonso Morales
Marlie Wilson
Wisconsin Farmers Market Association
REAP
Research highlights
Farmers market managers saw the importance of promoting markets to customers, but small marketing budgets posed a challenge. For most markets, their annual promotional budget was less than $3,000. We recommended that resources geared toward market managers focus on low-cost solutions, such as inspiring word-of-mouth communication and helping market managers establish sponsorships.
We also found that market managers value learning from each other. Peer-to-peer learning opportunities for market managers would likely be popular.
Some challenges, aside from budgets, that markets face are high turnover rates in the market manager position (about 40% of market managers had been in their position for only 2 years or less), and lack of support from local governments. Only a third of the market managers we surveyed reported that their local government helped promote their market. This means that market managers might need help making the benefits of farmers markets more clear to their local municipalities.
Most Wisconsin farmers markets have small annual marketing budgets