Narrative strategy · Brand identity
The words AGEYE now uses to explain itself
3 min read
Role
Narrative and Brand Strategy
Timeline
2021
Scope
Narrative strategy · Brand identity
Industries
Indoor vertical farming
Outcome
Mission and vision now used company wide
A mission and a vision, written from scratch
This work produced three pieces of writing: a mission statement, a vision statement, and a positioning line that says what kind of company AGEYE is. I wrote them with the CEO across several months of 2021, starting from three questions: what AGEYE does, who it is, and why that matters to anyone outside the building. AGEYE had working indoor farming technology and described it in language only engineers followed. Everything the company says in public is now downstream of those two paragraphs.
AGEYE's identity
The brief
In 2021 AGEYE described itself as making farming profitable again using next generation artificial intelligence. The sentence was accurate and it stopped short: it named the technology and left out what the company was for. Two things were true about AGEYE and appeared nowhere in its own materials.
It was not only building farming software. It was working on food security.
It was not only another AI company. It was working on sustainable agriculture.
None of that came through in how AGEYE talked about itself, so the job was not new words for the same claim. It was working out which claim was the real one.
The solution
The shift was from what the technology could do to what it made possible, so the mission opens on access to food and mentions artificial intelligence as the method rather than the subject.
Mission: “We are dedicated to using artificial intelligence and technology to ensure that everyone in the world has access to enough good-quality, nutritious food grown in the most sustainable way from seed to your dinner table.”
Vision: “Our vision is to revolutionize the way the world grows and consumes food by building a powerful and collaborative ecosystem of technologies and partners that leverage artificial intelligence to work together to make agriculture both profitable and sustainable.”
That reposition makes AGEYE an agriculture company that uses AI rather than an AI company working in agriculture. Same technology, described by what it is for.
AGEYE's Mission statement
The process
Giving a company a voice came down to two questions, and the second one cannot be answered first.
What does this company, as an entity, actually have to say?
How does it say that to the world?
Answering the first took months of conversation with the CEO, working through what AGEYE valued rather than what it sold. The identity also had to stretch as the company did. AGEYE’s offerings expanded to cover hardware as well as software during this period, so the wording had to describe a partner for sustainable agriculture rather than a technical AI product.
AGEYE office signage under the line one mission, one voice
The impact
Where the words ended up
The mission and vision are now the source text for AGEYE’s public writing. Website copy, investor pitches and partnership conversations all start from them rather than from a feature list.
For a company selling a technical product to people who grow food, one agreed sentence about purpose is what makes every document after it faster to write.
