Successful Tasmanian marketing campaign for the mushroom industry; and how supermarkets are trying to recreate UK marketing trends in Australia.
An Australian Mushroom Growers Association campaign to get Tasmanians eating more mushies proved a big success, with one supermarket buying up to 20 per cent more mushrooms per week during the six month marketing period.
The campaign was evaluated by Joanna Parks, a post-doctoral scholar from the University of California, Davis.
She says industry didn't embark on the campaign because it had any particular problem in getting people to eat mushrooms, but because industry wanted to increase its production capacity and needed to increase the market.
It would seem it worked.
"It had several different components: in-store displays with posters and brown paper bags printed with recipes, there was also a TV campaign with a celebrity chef and radio advertisements, and a public relations campaign where they gave materials to GPs to have in their waiting rooms for their patients, information and tasting booths at food events, and only in Tasmania.
"From our analysis, it was quite successful.
"The returns for the program were quite high, they definitely justified the investment in the program. Our estimates of the benefits/costs ratios for producers were about 7.5 to one, which is definitely in favour of the promotion activity."
