Did we mostly want to humble brag about what I think is one of the cleverest product names in Canadian crop input history? Yes. But we also wanted to take a minute to talk about naming, and what it means not only to us but about who you are doing business with.
Names that mean nothing
Most crop input names are built to sound impressive and strong and cool, but ultimately mean nothing. Take a wander through the chem shed and you'll find military verbs, mangled Latin, apex predator names, and strings of letters and numbers on the end that exist so a trademark lawyer somewhere can sleep at night. None of it tells you anything about who made the product or who it's for, and that's not an accident. A lot of these companies operate everywhere, so their names have to say nothing in particular, to no one in particular.
We went a different way. Our products are named after small towns, highways, and landmarks across the Prairies: places our brokers live, places our growers farm, and places most of our team (except Mitch, our CEO, apparently) could point to on a map without checking their phone. Highway 2, 4D, Battleford, and Tisdale are all in our lineup, with the pipeline full of more rural support for years to come.
Are we lazy? Are we stealing identities? Or is there more method to our community madness?
Downstream of something real
We didn't actually decide to "tell a story about community" and then go looking for names that fit. The order of operations was the opposite, because we built a distribution model where the people distributing our products were already living in these towns and areas, being part of the community long before we came along.
We're aware of how this reads if you squint at it wrong. "We named our herbicide after your hometown" is exactly what a marketing team produces when a brand wants credit for caring about a place it has no actual footprint in. That's a fair instinct to have, and it's the reason this only works if the naming is downstream of something real. The naming is what that decision looks like once you're picking a name for a jug of herbicide.
Take Highway 2, the most (un?)popular highway in Alberta, and 2,4-D, one of the most common herbicides, well, ever. A clever name like Highway 2, 4D is the kind of name you only land on if you already know both things cold: the road and the chemistry.
Our product names, like our business decisions, aren't coming out of a board room overseas. We have the same backyards you do here in Western Canada. Ok, we have an office in Calgary, but that's just for efficiency.
The rest of the sentence has to be true
The real test isn't whether the name is charming. It's whether the rest of the sentence is true. Is the broker actually independent, actually local, actually keeping the margin local instead of remitting it to head office? Is the company actually Canadian-operated, actually focused on western Canadian farmers? If the answer to all of that is yes, the name is an accurate label.
That's also why we didn't go big. Sure, Battleford was the first capital of the North-West Territories, which is the kind of fact that would be catnip for a brand team looking for a story to tell, and while it is our flagship product, it's also a name that brokers and growers in that part of Saskatchewan already say a dozen times a week for reasons that have nothing to do with us. We first chose Battleford as our first product name as a temporary nickname because our first broker lived there, but the more we referred to it daily, the more this strategy came together.
It also does something quieter, which is make the product harder to confuse with the twelve other things on a dealer's shelf that all sound like they were named by the same consulting firm. A grower remembers a highway number and a 2,4-D reference in the same breath. He doesn't remember which of four almost-identical brand names had the extra syllable in it.
Obviously none of this makes the chemistry better, because a Certified Premium Generic already works because it's the same active as the brand it follows. The name is not a performance claim. It is a label for who made it, who sells it, and where they live.
If that is the part you care about, find a broker or become one.