This season (2017-18), Just Avocados carried out some exciting promotion in South Korea in partnership with Avocado Industry Council (AIC) and our customer.
A successful application to the AIC’s contestable promotions fund allowed us to put together a budget of NZD $30,000 to conduct targeted marketing activity from October to December.
The key target for our marketing campaign was to communicating the nutrition properties of our New Zealand Avocados to health and beauty conscious consumers. Our customer was particularly interested in promoting muscular health, skin health, and low salt content to consumers. We believe that communicating these points successfully will contribute to the consumer understanding the value proposition for a premium for New Zealand avocado, over other existing supply origins.
We also wanted to target the different ways to best handle the NZ avocado. As previous experience suggests the consumer in Korea is still developing best practice re consumption of the NZ Avocado.
Throughout the campaign we used many different avenues to best reach our target consumer. Some of these activities included famous chef Hyun-hak Kim, who is the equivalent to Jamie Oliver in Korea. Hyun-hak created four avocado recipes which were then promoted through online food and lifestyle websites, a leaflet used instore, and through social media (Facebook and Instagram).
https://www.facebook.com/MannaMallKorea/posts/766998223502658
As well as promoting chef Hyun-hak Kim’s recipes on social media, we ran a schedule of posts across the campaign period covering a range of topics; general knowledge about avocados, how to choose an avocado, nutrition, recipes, fun things to do with avocados, holiday inspired posts (thanksgiving and Christmas) and even how to make a homemade facemask.
https://www.facebook.com/MannaMallKorea/videos/803845669817913/
We carried out instore sampling across 18 locations for a total of 54 days. This promotion resulted in an 80% increase in sales during the sampling period versus before the sampling took place.
We also attended the Asia No. 1 Coffee Event” with Manna Mall who are retail food promotion agency. This is a food service expo where Manna Mall presented a lifestyle market concept promoting the origin and farmers/growers of the produce they sell – “Do you know your farmer?”. We provided information and images of Far North grower Jason Mclarnon which was used on a sign above the display of our avocados.
Overall, we have enjoyed a very successful campaign, one that has increased sales and consumer education in the Korean market. This is reflective in our internal sales as Korea is the fastest growing market in Asia, both by volume and value, and we look forward to continual growth in this space in the coming years.