Meat Promotion Methods A Hobby

Press, Volume CII, Issue 30213, 19 August 1963, Page 13

Meat Promotion Methods A Hobby

An article in “The Press" on August 1 describing how Towers and Company, Ltd., a New Zealand-owned firm of meat wholesalers in Britain, is using a blonde in a blue bathing costume in its advertising to promote the sale of New Zealand meat has had repercussions.

Copies of the article have arrived in the offices of several competitors and at least one executive has expressed a fear that his firm is trailing in publicity methods. The article has also brought a flow of interesting mail to the offices of Towers, including a protest from someone signing himself as the honorary secretary of the New Zealand Society for the Protection of Public Morals. The firm believes it may be the work of a practical joker. The man who initially drew attention to the new form of advertising, Mr S. J Stevens, who has butcher shops in Christchurch and also in the Isle of Wight, said at the week-end he was pleased that heed was being taken of the need for wholesale distributors of lamb in Britain to use imagination and colour in their promotion. He was not a public relations officer for the firm as one of its competitors had suggested, said Mr Stevens His interest in promotion of New Zealand lamb had developed into a fascinating hobby since he made a three weeks’ visit to New Zealand in October-November. 1958 At that time he had gone back to Britain with the knowledge that an extra million New Zealand lambs would reach the British market m 1959, and he had then urged all the principal operators in London and the Meat Board to co-operate in a campaign. When the Smithfield marketing officer of one of the main firms had referred to his proposals in a disparaging way he had been stirred to write a paper on marketing

of New Zealand lamb in Britain entitled “Food for Thought” during his migration voyage to the Dominion in May, 1959. This had received scant attention at the time, but it had since found one enthusiastic reader in Mr Robin Pooley. the son of the managingdirector of Towers, who had since done much to pioneer the suggestions put forward both in promotion and packaging. As a butcher in New Zealand and England, who with many others owed his success, in the main, to handling New Zealand lamb. Mr Stevens said he was most interested in seeing that everything possible was done to ensure that trade in New Zealand lamb in Britain proceeded without hindrance.