VICTORIAN Farmers Federation president Peter Tuohey has urged farmers to ignore their region when branding produce and use the globally recognised ‘Melbourne’ brand instead.
The approach raises an important question for the state and the nation as it grapples with the complexity of not just branding our locally grown and manufactured produce, but also how we brand and attract the valuable tourism dollar.
For the past 20 years, Tourism Victoria’s “You’ll love every piece of Victoria” campaign has proven one of Australia’s most respected and successful tourism marketing and advertising programs. It celebrates the rich diversity of each of Victoria’s world famous regions and provides tourists with a platform to see beyond just Melbourne as a destination.
Most tourism marketing symbolises a destination through its most popular icon e.g. Queensland – Sun; Sydney – Harbour (Bridge & Opera House); Tasmania – Environment. Tourism Victoria’s research however showed that no single icon adequately represented the State. Tourists and Consumers described Victoria as a range of experiences and feelings.
The experiences identified as Victoria’s priority product strengths were: Food and wine, natural attractions like the Great Ocean Road and 12 Apostles, Arts, Theatre and Culture, Shopping, special events such as the Grand Prix, AFL and Australian Open, Skiing and conventions and exhibitions.
So what’s tourism got to do with how we promote and brand our food and fibre? The simple answer is “Provenance”.
Consumers today are becoming increasingly worried about what brands are telling them, or more importantly, what they are not telling them! They want to know more about the products they consume and where they originate from, that is, their provenance.
We live in an increasingly transparent world. Consumers now share more information with brands than ever before and in return they expect brands to do the same. The emergence of a new generation of digital tracking technologies, combined with the rapid advances in smartphones, is now making it easier for consumers to instantly trace the provenance of a product in-store before they buy.
As this technology becomes more established in society it will lead to a point where there will be an expectation that all products carry information about their provenance. Combined with this trend to provenance, a trend to shopping local is also leading some big brands and retail chains to a strategy called “Local Washing”. The recent campaign for McDonalds Hipster style Burgers is a strong case in point.
A recent Poll by Galaxy revealed that 58 per cent of people believe small business give their community an identity and 45 per cent said they provide better customer service than big chains. Despite Mr Tuohey’s view that regional provenance branding has limited value, there is no doubt a significant opportunity exists to develop a policy framework built upon the unique provenance of Victoria’s regions, just as it has for Tourism Victoria.
Identifying and promoting specific features and attributes unique to regions of Victoria creates a branded strategy that offers the chance to excite and unite. Agricultural provenance has been under promoted in Australia but is starting to gain momentum. Wine and viticulture provide a good example of how regions drive interest in and growth of specific characteristics. Again in the case of agriculture, for example, it is now widely recognised that Australia cannot be the Food Bowl for Asia, but must develop an emphasis on high quality produce that can command prices that meet our costs of production.
That is, a better metaphor is not Food Bowl, but Food Health Store, with a greater diversity of foods than we now export. Individual producers lack the capacity to establish a brand presence. There is a need to promote and facilitate the clustering of producers to gain the sorts of brand advantages that we see for wine regions. Dairy production in Victoria is already highly successful due to favourable natural resources and the clustering that occurred through processors. More needs to be done for a more diverse range of produce such that our ag industry is more robust in the face of climate and market variability.
Victoria is at an advantage in that it is geographically very diverse but does not suffer the same problems of distance that the larger states experience. Rather than shun local, regional branding, the time is right to embrace provenance and align our Tourism branding with our produce branding.
Check out Jim Gall’s final word in the ‘Decision Ag’ Magazine, published every month in The Weekly Times.