LACK OF CONSUMER SURVEYS?

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32588, 23 April 1971, Page 12

LACK OF CONSUMER SURVEYS?

At both a meat marketing forum at Ashburton at the end of last week and in an address to the Canterbury section of the New Zealand Institute of Agricultural Science this week the new professor of marketing at Lincoln College, Professor W. O. McCarthy, suggested that little was being done by New Zealand organisations to find out what the consumers of their products wanted in them.

Professor McCarthy laid down two objectives of marketing—to give the consumer what he wanted and to get the product from the farm gate to the consumer’s door at as low a cost as possible. “Be clear the consumer is. king,” he told the agricultural scientists. “You can have the most perfect product, the price can be attractive but if people do not want it they will not long continue to buy it. The only good product is the one the consumer wants and if the fanner and middleman are to stay in business this is what they have to produce and present . . .”

ance—it tells him what is best It does not ask the consumer what he or she likes and dislikes or wants improved.” How often at a meeting like that at Ashburton when Meat Board, meat industry, farming and academic representatives met to discuss meat marketing, did they include a housewife on the panel to explain what she wanted and was willing to pay for? he asked.

Referring to a meat purchase that he had just made he said that he liked the tenderness and flavour but did not like the fat—could lean lambs be bred? he asked.

Professor McCarthy told the meat marketing forum that he had checked the latest copy of the Meat Board’s financial statements. In the last financial year about s3m had been spent under the heading of market promotion and $150,000 on research grants and investigations. Unless consumer survey studies were carefully concealed for some reason or other, he said that there did not seem to have been any money spent in this area. “Now how do you know what the consumer wants and what you should be producing if you do not ask him,” said Professor McCarthy at the Christchurch meeting. “Promotion is, of course, one aspect of marketing, but it must go hand in hand with consumer studies. Promotion badgers the consumer into accept-

“Meat marketing organisations appear to have little knowledge of what the consumer wants as opposed to what the seller thinks he wants,” added the professor.

A former member of the Meat Board, who was at the Ashburton forum, Mr C. F. Jones, of the Bay of Islands, said that he wanted to repudiate any suggestion that the board was not spending considerable sums on market research. This, he added, was being done by professional people of a very high standard.

Professor McCarthy said he still maintained that little or nothing was being done in the way of consumer surveys. When Mr Jones repeated later that consumer surveys had been made under the auspices of the board and he would arrange for infor-

mation about them to be passed on to Professor McCarthy, the professor said he would be pleased to see it

He said he wanted to quote two lines of "nonsense” from the Dairy Board’s annual report—“the board’s success at Expo demonstrated conclusively that New Zealand dairy products, specially formulated and packaged for the Japanese market, have strong consumer appeal." “I suggest that it may demonstrate nothing of the sort. It may demonstrate that if you go to a fair or show you will try anything once. Dairy cows are known to like licking almost empty paint tins. That does not demonstrate that it is good for the cows or the farmers.”

At one stage at the Ashburton forum It was pointed out that a problem in doing a consumer survey in Japan about lamb was that most people had never bad lamb. At both meetings reference was made to promotion of New Zealand lamb legs in Japan at an earlier period, when it was subsequently found that Japanese housewives did not have large enough ovens to accommodate such a joint Professor McCarthy described this as “a classic case of mis-promotion of meat”

Professor McCarthy told the Christchurch meeting that he had won two bets at the Ashburton forum—he had bet Mr Jones that the Meat Board’s Asian director and Mr P. T. Norman, New Zealand manager of Borthwicks, that their chief representative in Japan could not speak Japanese.

Professor McCarthy agreed that consumer surveys could give confusing replies, but he maintained that they were valuable if they were not carried out on a penny pinching basis and were properly designed, covered a reasonable sample of people and the proper analytical techniques were employed. If the Meat Board could spend s3m on promotion it was not too much to ask that it spend $500,000 on consumer surveys.

At the Christchurch meeting Professor McCarthy said that as far as he was aware very little consumer research had been done in the past in the wool field also. The International Wool Secretariat was now spending vast sums on technical market research. This was relevant and of immense value, but it was not consumer research.

"How can such people ever expect to communicate precisely Or effectively with the customer,” he asked.

As far as dairy produce was concerned it was difficult to determine if any money wag devoted to consumer research—his guess was that very little was or none. The emphasis was all on promotion, which was only one aspect of what should be a many-sided market attack.

Getting an opinion through an interpreter was like “having a shower with your clothes on the water eventually gets through to your skin but it has been well filtered by the time .that it gets there. “Have you ever heard of a Japanese businessman prospecting the New Zealand market who cannot speak English fluently? No fear.”

Mr Jones said that a member of the board’s staff in Japan did speak Japanese fluently and a young New Zealander, who had now returned to this country, was also a linguist and meat companies had seconded members of their staffs to Japan to become conversant with the language.