Truly Deeply/Madly

Over the years every time we have researched the brand value asso­ci­ated with organic label­ing, or some other form of envi­ron­men­tal posi­tion­ing, the feed­back from con­sumers has always been the same, ‘…give me some form of independent/third party accred­i­ta­tion to sup­port the claim, dou­bly so if I am pay­ing a pre­mium for the prod­uct.’ What is inter­est­ing in Aus­tralia is that farm­ers wish­ing to export organic food must be cer­ti­fied, but domes­ti­cally there are no laws gov­ern­ing cer­ti­fi­ca­tion – con­sumers are fair game!

But it is worse than that, it is more than con­sumers being fair game. With­out a well admin­is­tered accred­i­ta­tion sys­tem the efforts of authen­tic organic food pro­duc­ers are deval­ued and under­mined. If, as a pro­ducer you go to the effort of pro­duc­ing organic food, in the process per­haps fore­go­ing higher yields, and then see com­peti­tor brands on the mar­ket claim­ing organic sta­tus, when they are in fact not organic – extreme frus­tra­tion must be the outcome!

A key dri­ver of brand equity is authen­tic­ity. The same clearly applies when a brand wishes to lever­age the fran­chise in the organic label. It is there­fore fun­da­men­tal that organic grow­ers start using their col­lec­tive strength to assert influ­ence on the Aus­tralian accred­i­ta­tion sys­tem. They, more than any­one else have the most to gain. But it is clearly not an easy game, oth­er­wise we would have a much stronger sys­tem already in place, and of course beware of the free load­ers in this world – they can be rather feisty!

Recently, (14th Octo­ber 2009)  there was a very inter­est­ing front page arti­cle in the Vic­to­rian rural rag, The Weekly Times (been around since 1869, surely we can trust it), which stated in its open­ing para­graph, ‘….Victoria’s con­sumer watch­dog pulled the pin on an inves­ti­ga­tion into ‘fake’ organic milk when it was sued by the com­pany it was inves­ti­gat­ing.’
The com­pany in ques­tion was Snowy Moun­tains Organic Dairy, and they had gone all out to scare off any­one remotely inter­ested in ques­tion­ing their organic sta­tus – they devel­oped a whole new organic accred­i­ta­tion sys­tem called ‘the law suit’. The con­cerned retailer who raised the mat­ter with Con­sumer Affairs Vic­to­ria, is still lick­ing his wounds from the three sep­a­rate law suits served on him by Snowy Moun­tains Organic Dairy, and inter­ested jour­nal­ists were also on the receiv­ing end of the odd law suits.

We are clearly a long way from the ideal accred­i­ta­tion sys­tem when Gov­ern­ment watch dogs such as Con­sumer Affairs Vic­to­ria, choose to stay in their ken­nel. But there does appear to be some good news! My under­stand­ing is that Snowy Moun­tains Organic Dairy has closed down! I’d like to think the law of authen­tic­ity has won out. This crazy sce­nario, as reported in The Weekly Times, only started because the organic retailer who raised the alarm was act­ing on infor­ma­tion that Snowy Moun­tains Organic Dairy was no longer sup­plied by its ‘organic’ farmer, who was not cer­ti­fied as organic any­way. Crazy, yes! Only goes to show how far the accred­i­ta­tion process has to move.

Peter Singline
Brand Scientist

Tags: Brand Agency, Brand Design, Brand Experience, Brand Strategy, Corporate Image, Graphic Design Melbourne, Interior Design, Melbourne Brand Strategy, Organic-branding, Snowy-Mountains-Organic-Dairy, The-Weekly-Times

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 5th, 2009 at 8:21 am and is filed under Brand Voice, 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.