Australia needs a food safety scare.

Do you know where your food came from?

Australian consumers need a food safety scare as a wake-up call and to get them asking the right questions about where their food comes from.

That sounds crazy, I know; but I have experimented with this topic in dozens of conversations over the last 12 months.

Let’s put some method behind the madness of that proposition.

Firstly, one of the hardest things you can ever hope to do is change peoples’ attitudes.  As the best marketers will tell you, it’s very, very difficult.  Australia’s agricultural and food producing industry has tried on many occasions to change the attitudes of Australian consumers.  The campaigns have been very aspirational and it hasn’t worked.

Australian consumers say one thing, and do the other – despite what they tell us in numerous surveys.  And it’s not just when it comes to buying their groceries.  For example, Australians also say they would be happy to donate their organs to save someone’s life, but never do.  You see my point.

By now we know enough about Australian consumers to start changing tactic.

This brings me to pressure points.

One of the key ways to change peoples’ attitudes is to find their pressure points.  Where do we find the pressure points for Australian consumers?  Inside their homes - we need to get inside their front doors.

If Australian consumers start getting nervous about what’s going into their kids lunch boxes; what’s going into the fridge; what’s going onto the kitchen table at night – they’ll start to ask questions.  I’ll get to the power of questioning in a moment.

Thirdly, we use the power of shared experience to spread our message.  If something happens to make Australian consumers nervous about where their food comes from, it becomes a shared experience.  Picture this - it would be the number one topic at school drop-off points, in the school canteens, at family functions, at kids sport on Saturday mornings, Facebook, etc etc.

Back to the power of questioning.  If the Australian agricultural and food producing industry wants to make retailers squirm, you set up a situation whereby their consumers start hammering them with questions, questions, questions about what they’re doing and how they do it.  Nothing makes a corporation sweat faster than when they are getting beaten around the head by angry consumers, who are banging their fists on the table and demanding ‘if you don’t answer my questions, I’m shopping somewhere else.’

Consumers just aren't asking the questions we want them to.

How do we make this happen?  Remember the Grim Reaper advertisements on TV. 

Absolutely legendary campaign, watched in peoples’ living rooms around Australia every night in 1987.  My idea is that we do a similar ‘grim reaper’ campaign about imported food, to show consumers what might happen if there is an accident regarding imported food from a country that has poor production safety standards.
 
If you had a grim reaper bowling an imported apple at a bunch of school kids, I think it would get peoples’ attention.  Watch the ad and imagine it talking about imported food.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U219eUIZ7Qo

So, what I’ve been proposing all along is that we don’t have an actual food safety scare and people actually start getting sick – we create one, by putting the notion in peoples’ heads of what might happen if they don’t change their attitude.  That’s all the Aids campaign did – the people watching it did the rest e.g. remember all the talk about the ad?

How do we know this works?  Well, at the moment there are other countries in the process of restructuring their entire food chain, because there was a food safety scare and consumers have now demanded change.  But for them it was too late.  Think horse meat.  Think baby formula.  Think milk contamination.

Anyway, just a few thoughts to stir the pot, because I don’t think what we’ve been doing is very effective.

What do you think?  Go the Grim Reaper tactic?