REPLY TO CRITIC OF N.Z. BUTTER ADVERTISING

Press, Volume XCVI, Issue 28434, 14 November 1957, Page 19

REPLY TO CRITIC OF N.Z. BUTTER ADVERTISING

(New Zealand Press Association)

WELLINGTON, November 13. Almost all the facts that Mr M. H. Oram had adduced to support his criticism of the advertising in the United Kingdom of New Zealand dairy products were wrong, said Sir Bernard Ashwin, a member of the Dairy Products Marketing Commission, today.

Mr Oram, a New Zealander who has been living in the United Kingdom for 14 years, is visiting Palmerston North. He said yesterday that New Zealand dairy produce had lost its pride of place on the British market as a result of more intensive advertising campaigns by other competing countries.

Sir Bernard Ashwin said that so far from yielding pride of place to anyone as a supplier of butter to the United Kingdom market, New Zealand had enhanced its position as the biggest seller in Britain. British housewives bought close on 40 per cent, of their butter from New Zealand, almost double the quantity sold by any other country. Since before the war the Dominion had increased its share of the British butter market from

28 per cent, to approximately 38 per cent. While prices for all butters had fallen, it was a fact that New Zealand was bringing a higher ex store price than English, Irish, Australian, Argentine, and most Continental butters. Sir Bernard Ashwin said that New Zealanders were the keenest critics of their own institutions and achievements, and as advertising was the easiest thing in the world to criticise, it was inevitable that during periods of low prices, well-meaning New Zealanders living in or visiting Britain should seize on this aspect of marketing and present it as a scapegoat to explain by inference the market weakness. The real reason for this weakness lay in the fact that the British market today was heavily over-supplied with butter and cheese.