How Vivaldi Built KWS’s Digital Customer Communication Strategy

Agriculture

The Challenge

KWS recognized that its fragmented digital efforts lacked strategic cohesion and customer focus. Without a unified approach, digital investments risked underdelivering on customer engagement and operational efficiency.

The Opportunity

Vivaldi assessed existing initiatives via a custom scorecard and benchmarked best-in-class practices. The resulting strategy realigned digital around customer needs, aiming to enhance communication, gather actionable insights, and streamline platform features.

The Outcome

The roadmap helped KWS focus efforts, implement high-value digital tools, and improve internal efficiency, engagement, and decision-making across customer-facing teams.

KWS Case Study Summary

KWS engaged Vivaldi to bring strategic cohesion to digital efforts that had grown fragmented and disconnected from customer needs across its global seed business. Vivaldi assessed existing initiatives with a custom scorecard, benchmarked best-in-class practices, and delivered a roadmap that realigned digital around customer engagement, actionable insights, and platform feature priorities, improving internal efficiency and decision-making across customer-facing teams.

About KWS

KWS SAAT SE & Co. KGaA is one of the world’s largest seed producers, headquartered in Einbeck, Germany. Founded in 1856, KWS breeds and sells seed for corn, sugar beets, cereals, oilseeds, and vegetables, operating in more than 70 countries and serving farmers globally with proprietary plant genetics.

Frequently Asked Questions

What did Vivaldi help KWS achieve with the digital customer communication strategy?

Vivaldi delivered a prioritized digital roadmap that refocused fragmented initiatives on customer needs and helped KWS implement high-value tools across customer-facing teams. The result was stronger customer engagement and improved internal efficiency and decision-making, replacing parallel digital efforts that had been underdelivering.

How did Vivaldi assess and prioritize KWS's existing digital initiatives?

The work used a custom scorecard to evaluate each initiative against customer impact, operational fit, and best-in-class benchmarks rather than against internal sponsors, which is what surfaced the misallocation. Scoring the portfolio openly is what allowed teams to retire low-value efforts without political fights and concentrate on the items that moved customer engagement.

Why does customer focus matter so much in agricultural seed industry digital strategy?

Farmers buy seed once a season and base the decision on agronomic outcomes that play out across months, so digital touchpoints that do not connect to those decision moments are noise. The seed industry rewards digital that earns trust during low-engagement parts of the year and delivers insight during the high-stakes moments, which only happens when the strategy is anchored in customer behavior rather than internal capability.

What can other industrial B2B companies take from the KWS approach?

The transferable lesson is that a scorecard-based portfolio review is more useful than another digital strategy document, because the underlying problem in most industrial B2B digital programs is not a missing strategy but a refusal to kill the legacy initiatives. Companies that build the scoring discipline first end up with a roadmap that survives the next budget cycle.