Five Challenges To Marketing
By Jim Prevor, Editor-in-Chief, Produce Business
Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.
— John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money
The thought expressed above explains why surveying people on the subject of what motivates them is a short-term phenomenon — they don’t know the forces behind the scenes.
Mighty brands such as Sunkist live today on the reputational capital they built through advertising in the early 20th century. It has been decades since they spent much money on national advertising, but it is difficult to pick up issues of The Ladies Home Journal and The Saturday Evening Post, the great mass media of the first two decades of the 20th century, without seeing a Sunkist ad.
So when children today think Sunkist when they think oranges, it is the influence of their great-grandma reading The Ladies Home Journal in 1922 that is reverberating through the generations. Such is the immense power of advertising.
Yet despite the immense power of consumer advertising, it is a tool inappropriate for most producers. Five problems:
1. The margin isn’t there. Advertising costs money and with many products, it is possible to establish a set price that includes a margin for marketing. In fresh produce, we are dealing principally with commodities; the producer is a “price-taker” not able to insist on that margin for marketing.
2. The product isn’t there. When Heinz, Campbell’s and Coca-Cola advertise, they can count on having product in almost every supermarket in America, so advertising has a far better chance of moving product than with fresh produce. Even the strongest produce brands say those of the banana giants, may have any given product in only a third of all supermarkets. Some, such as Dole, because of its fresh, frozen and canned products may, together, have a branded product in every store — but not necessarily the product being advertised. If the product isn’t universally available, the advertising will be less effective.
3. The consistency isn’t there. To market a product, it must be consistent, yet few branded efforts have maintained this consistency. Mother Nature doesn’t produce consistently proper-sized, flavorful product at a reasonable price. Still, marketers have an enormous investment in shelf space at retail and in consumer habits. They also have infrastructure costs — warehouses, offices, salespeople, etc. Marketers are loathe to simply announce they won’t be shipping this month because the quality is not up to snuff. Most will try to keep shipping with the best available product — but that offers the consumer a variable-quality value proposition and reduces confidence in the brand.
4. The commitment isn’t there. Proper consumer advertising is typically an exercise in long-term brand development. Yet we frequently see companies begin consumer-marketing efforts, then pull back because of a bad year or a bad crop. Consumer attitudes and habits toward food change gradually and require persistent exposure to a message over extended time periods. One needs to have the capital or financing in place to see the project through regardless of short-term fluctuations.
5. The money isn’t there. Even if margins are adequate, a widely distributed, consistent product is offered and management is committed, changing national eating habits is expensive. It is easy to imagine a requirement of $50 million a year to begin to move the needle on national consumption of an item.
This means consumer advertising is out of reach for most marketers of fresh produce. As an industry, we have the Fruits & Veggies — More Matters program but it is underfunded and its health orientation and the inclusion of canned, frozen and juice make it a problematic vehicle for fresh produce industry promotion.
So if consumer advertising is unreasonable for most companies and the trade does not have an overall effective marketing program, what is a company to do?
The best answer right now is to piggyback on interest in sustainability and use what assets one has — packaging, labels, Web sites, PR — to communicate the authenticity of one’s product. Every produce item starts with a real farm, and the authenticity of that message can resonate far.
Many companies — Frieda’s comes to mind — have never had the money for extensive advertising but have effectively used PR, labeling, and branding to build a reputation with the media and consumers.
Every year some company or commodity promotion group drags us to its booth at PMA to show us its new TV spot. We all applaud and rarely see it again as the company runs it in a few cities as part of a deal with a local supermarket, a kind of trade incentive. Basically, we need to abandon the trade’s “TV envy” and use the impressions we gain from product on the shelves, effective PR and the tools of viral marketing, social networking and other Internet options to market to consumers in the way we actually can.
One day the industry as a whole will realize we are competing with dairy, beef, pork, etc., all with one hand tied behind our backs. Then we can rally behind an industry-wide consumer-marketing program that would actually be large enough to make a difference.