Farmscape for February 3, 2010   (Episode 3356)

Research being conducted by the University of Alberta suggests the value of advertising and promotion within the pork industry can't be underestimated.

Researchers with the University of Alberta have tracked aggregate pork consumption and individual household purchases of pork and held focus groups in an effort to assess the influence of advertising and promotion on pork purchases.

Dr. Ellen Goddard, the cooperative chair of agricultural marketing and business, observes while the pork industry tends to spend more on promotion than the beef industry, advertising tends to be inconsistent.

Clip-Dr. Ellen Goddard-University of Alberta:
We see a lot of advertising for generic pork.

Because I live in Alberta I notice that Alberta Pork does some pretty successful generic advertising of pork particularly in the summer when they want people to feature pork on their barbecue that sort of thing.

But we also have a lot branded pork advertising and you could think about even branded fresh pork advertising.

We look at semi-processed products.

We also see that there's a lot of spending on fully processed products like ham and that would all be spent by processing companies rather than the farmer groups.

From a little bit of experimental work I'm doing I have found out that people are very interested in finding out more about the production of the products they're buying.

Everybody would know that people are interested in buying local, they're also interested Country of Origin, they're also interested in production standards and they have some concerns about aspects of livestock production they've heard perhaps in the media, perhaps from their friends and neighbors that they don't well understand so we can't underestimate the importance of communicating the kind of standards that we have  in Canada even if it's just that it's a Canadian product.

Dr. Goddard says all of the studies show advertising and promotion is still an effective form of communicating with the consumer.

She says we have high quality standards in the Canadian pork industry and we need to make sure people are aware of the quality of the pork we're producing in this country.

For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

-Dr. Goddard addressed the 2010 Banff Pork Seminar last month.

       *Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Pork Council