Truly Deeply/Madly

Read­ing the Age newspaper’s Mel­bourne Mag­a­zine this week­end reminded me of the potency of com­bin­ing an arti­san and a brand with a pre­mium posi­tion in the mar­ket place. The mag­a­zine has a sec­tion cel­e­brat­ing the 2009 food hall of fame. It’s pur­pose is to hon­our those Mel­bur­ni­ans (and Vic­to­ri­ans) who have who have worked pas­sion­ately and single-mindedly to cre­ate a food offer­ing of dis­tinc­tion. When you read the sto­ries of the diverse range of indi­vid­u­als included you are imme­di­ately touched by the tire­less and obses­sive devo­tion they bring to the table.

Take David Black­more, a cat­tle­man from Alexan­dra. In the area where he farms there is a lot of black cat­tle, but none like his black cat­tle. Every other farmer, and there are some excel­lent farm­ers, all pur­sue the same approach, black Angus cat­tle. David has taken a dif­fer­ent path, black yes, but Japan­ese black, Wagyu cat­tle. The magic of Wagyu meat is in the fine white mar­bling which results in a never-before-experienced suc­cu­lence that sends the taste buds reel­ing in such ten­der­ness and flavour.

There are all kinds of sto­ries about these impe­r­ial cat­tle from Japan that are mas­saged, fed on beer and then sold at astro­nom­i­cal prices in Tokyo’s top restaurants. These are not just folk­loric (but cer­tainly very rich story telling). The Japan­ese have devoted  extra­or­di­nary care and atten­tion to the rear­ing of this unusual breed of cat­tle, focus­ing on the qual­ity rather than the quan­tity of their beef. The result is the ‘caviar of beef’. And what about the pre­mium prices these crea­tures achieve! In Aus­tralia go to Rock­pool Bar and Grill and you will have the priv­i­lege of pay­ing $110 for a 200 gram Wagyu from David Blackmore’s farm. Go to the butcher (and not many have it) and pay $220 per kilo­gram for a porter­house cut. Google Wagyu and you will find that a record paid for a car­cass in the US was $250,000 (now I know why there are a lot veg­e­tar­i­ans around, that is seri­ous dol­lars). There is some­thing at play here that is rel­e­vant to a lot of other food brands.

Firstly, there is a brand play­ing out.
Generic food types do not get you a pre­mium. When you eat Wagyu beef you know, you are eat­ing Wagyu beef. The eat­ing expe­ri­ence is always branded. Restau­rants inform you that it is Wagyu beef on the menu. If you bought some to cook at home for friends, you would bother to tell them that it is Wagyu, because it is dif­fer­ent and it is exclu­sive (and you paid a lot for it). When did you last sit down to tuck into a steak and be told to get excited because it was Here­ford or Angus cut?

Sec­ondly, there is an arti­san of sorts behind the prod­uct.
Arti­san typ­i­cally implies a sense of hand-making of food prod­ucts – there is a pas­sion and devo­tion that often extends beyond the call of duty. The same applies to Wagyu in Aus­tralia. Farmer David Black­more has 2,000 full-blood Wagyu on his prop­er­ties, and all of that has been derived from the sourc­ing of frozen embryos and semen, on a jour­ney that started back in 1993. It has never been a case of sim­ply rock­ing up to the sale yards for the reg­u­lar cat­tle sales. It has been painstak­ingly built one embryo at a time. The Age Mel­bourne mag­a­zine quote of David says some­thing of the arti­san in him, ‘….my fam­ily get sick of me. I am a bit pas­sion­ate about what we do.’ Pas­sion and obses­sion is a great start­ing point for the build­ing of any brand.

Thirdly, there is an impor­tant degree of exclu­siv­ity.
Price is such a won­der­ful proxy for exclu­siv­ity. As a con­sumer we are not always aware of the quan­ti­ties of a prod­uct avail­able, but we are very good at work­ing out how expen­sive a prod­uct is ver­sus another. And when it comes to exclu­siv­ity the higher the price the bet­ter. In fact it reminds me of some work I was doing for BMW about 10 years ago, when we were study­ing the impact of hugely depre­ci­at­ing value in the 7 series. At the time you had a sit­u­a­tion where you would pay top dol­lar for a new 7 series BMW, drive it out the show room and imme­di­ately expe­ri­ence the crunch of own­ing a car worth tens of thou­sands less. Rapid depre­ci­a­tion when you were really just look­ing for rapid accel­er­a­tion at the lights!

At the time I hap­pened to be away on hol­i­days and we caught up with an old friend who had re-married. Her new hus­band who we were meet­ing for the first time, hap­pened to be a spe­cial­ist in the med­ical pro­fes­sion. As we arrived at their place for lunch I too noticed (frankly you couldn’t miss it) his new 7 series in the drive way. So in the inter­ests of a lit­tle mar­ket research (and small talk, as it was not exactly flow­ing) I asked him if he had any con­cern with the depre­ci­a­tion rate of his new car. He sim­ply turned and looked at me with a touch of dis­dain and said ‘…if you are con­cerned with the level  of depre­ci­a­tion you can­not afford the car!’. In one very arro­gant bold state­ment he had reminded me that exclu­siv­ity has its price and you can either afford it or you can­not, and the way he stud­ied me I knew he was thinking…..’and I don’t think you can afford it’ (and he was right).

When it comes to food (as with any other cat­e­gory) there is value in remem­ber­ing that exclu­siv­ity has
it rewards in terms of being able to demand a pre­mium. But you need to be able to wrap it up in con­sid­ered brand­ing strat­egy and a huge doze of arti­san pas­sion capa­ble of cre­at­ing a qual­ity offer­ing. We have had the plea­sure of being on such a jour­ney with Lester Mar­shall from Cof­fin Bay Oys­ter Farm. But that is a story for another day, oth­er­wise this blog will start to have that surf and turf feel
about it.

Wednes­day 7th Octo­ber is Wagyu bbq night here at the stu­dio, so if you would like to share in some suc­cu­lent beef eat­ing just let us know – and we will show you how to build a brand one bite at a time.

Peter Singline, Brand Scientist

P.S The other alter­na­tive is to try the Wagyu burger, in NYC, you only need $42 for the experience!

Tags: Artisan, Brand, Brand Agency, Brand Design, Brand Personality, Brand Strategy, Brand Voice, Corporate Image, David-Blackmore, Exclusive, Graphic Design Melbourne, Wagyu

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 30th, 2009 at 8:44 am and is filed under Brand Voice, Small Brands Big Personalities, Thinking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.