Beef rivals battle tradition

By GLENN SMITH in Taipei

In a move that would delight Sun Yue, the ancient author of The Art of War, four former foes - Australia, New Zealand, the United States and Canada - have joined hands to bring the modern Taiwanese housewife under their sway.

The problem is, she isn't buying enough beef.

"Low beef consumption in Taiwan contradicts the belief that as people get richer they eat more red meat," said Timothy Kelf, regional manager, South Asia, of Meat and Livestock Australia.

The Australian organisation is one of four members of the Beef Alliance, officially launched in Taipei last month. The others are Meat New Zealand, the US Meat Export Federation and the Canada Beef Export Federation.

Taiwanese are rich by any standard - their per capita income of US$13,000 ($23,490) rivals that of Western countries - but they each eat a mere 4.2kg of beef a year.

That pales next to the 43.5kg of pork and 28.8kg of chicken that the average Taiwanese gets through annually.

"We want to share in some of that volume," said Kelf, "and it is not unreasonable that we could take two kilos from each, and raise beef consumption to seven or eight kilos."

But changing consumer behaviour is not easy.

Nearly all of Taiwan's 23 million people are ethnic Chinese, and most emigrated in past centuries from China's Fujien and Kuangtung provinces where agriculture was based on the rice paddy, and pork, chicken and fish were the staple meats.

Another lingering ghost: In rural Chinese villages the water buffalo was a near member of the family, and eating beef was akin to cannibalism.

"The cow was the tractor," explained Kelf, putting it in practical terms. "If you eat your cow, you pull your plough."

How does the Beef Alliance intend to overcome Taiwanese reluctance to eat beef?

The knee-jerk reaction of marketing boards to marketing problems is to advertise, and that is what the Beef Alliance is doing in Taiwan, but it is taking an intelligent approach by countering culture with culture.

The alliance has launched an advertising campaign with a message tailored to the Taiwanese housewife's maternal instincts and Chinese cultural background.

Rendered directly into awkward English, the proposition, which doubles as a slogan, is: "To enjoy physical vitality and mental acuity, the iron in beef is the place to start."

Like their counterparts around the world, Taiwanese parents want their children to grow up healthy, not necessarily because they want them to perform athletically, but because they hope they will excel academically from kindergarten through to college.

"Feed your kids beef and they'll get good grades," is the subtle subtext of the advertising campaign.

Three television commercials convey that message by linking dietary iron to a child's physical and mental development.

Each demonstrates that beef is vastly superior to a rival source of dietary iron. The viewer learns that a few slices of beef have as much iron as a tall pile of pork chops, a whole roast chicken or a haystack of Popeye's favourite tonic - spinach.

The Beef Alliance will not say how much is in its war chest, but it will spend $7 million Taiwan ($360,000), mostly for airtime on the island's TV and cable channels.

Supporting the campaign are newspaper ads and educational events for children and mothers.

The campaign is strictly generic advertising - promoting beef as a meat category - without mention of country of origin. The goal is to encourage Taiwanese to eat more beef and in turn increase the sales of each of the alliance's members.

Kelf's American counterpart in the Beef Alliance, Joel Haggard, vice-president Asia-Pacific, USMEF, said beef consumption started to "stall out" in the late 1990s.

Yet Taiwan remains an important market - 90 per cent of the island's demand for beef is met by imports, virtually all of which comes from the four alliance countries.

Last year, Taiwan imported 65.1 million tonnes of beef, with Australia supplying 33.2 million tonnes (51.4 per cent), New Zealand 14.7 million tonnes (22.7 per cent) the US 13.2 million tonnes (20.3 per cent) and Canada 3.6 million tonnes (5.6 per cent).

Each of these beef exporters has staked a claim on a particular segment of the Taiwan market.

These product positions are fixed - the US is not going to switch from grain-fed to rangeland production, and vice versa for Australia and New Zealand - and this makes it difficult to justify the overlapping advertising campaigns waged in past years.

"We came to realise we were just shuffling around the deckchairs," said Kelf.

"We decided to stop beating each other to death and work together."

A year after a seven-week test run in Taiwan's southern city of Kaohsiung, the Beef Alliance promotion is in full swing in Taipei, the island's political, cultural and food-service centre.

Even so, the launch of the alliance does not mark an end to the rivalry between its members.

"Each country is still doing its own promotional work," said Irvine Paulin, director of the New Zealand Trade Development Centre in Taipei.

In a way, it is business as usual.

"In our own countries, we promote beef based on its nutritional values," said Kelf. "Here in Taiwan four groups have joined hands to do the same thing through the Beef Alliance."