A great quote to end the week.

Heard this one today and thought it was brilliant:

Never spend money propping up people who are the victims of their own decisions.

Be still my beating heart.......or should I say hearts!

The other night I was channel surfing and caught an episode of Gordon Ramsay's Great Escape in Vietnam.  He ate the beating heart of a Cobra that was then cooked up and prepared for the rest of the meal.

This brought back amazing memories for me of one particular trip I did to Vietnam.

A few years ago I had the privilege of traveling around Asia developing new markets for an agricultural exporter that I worked for at the time.

I had just completed a successful week of business in Vietnam with our local agents and we decided to celebrate by going for a meal at a restaurant in Ho Chi Minh city.  Funny how they 'forgot' to tell me that this restaurant specialised in snake.

We arrived at the restaurant and were taken to a private room out the back for business people.  Whilst enjoying my first Heineken and reflecting on the week that was, I was told that the restaurant specialised in snake dishes and was I up to the task.  

They already knew that I was pretty adventurous, so of course it wasn't a problem.  I simply thought that we would order some dishes from a menu and out it would come.  No biggy right?!!

Well a few minutes later I started to notice that more and more of the staff were shuffling into the room and standing there grinning and laughing with all eyes on me.

As I stood up to shake hands with the owner of the restaurant who had just entered the room and introduced himself, I noticed that one particular lad with a glint in his eye, was standing back holding a hessian sack that seemed to be squirming.

Our agent explained to me that the restaurant rarely has Westerners and so the owner would like to show me traditional preparation of the snake.  I respectfully said yes! I'd love to see it.

The young lad holding the bag produced a 5ft grey water python and presented it for my inspection and approval.

The snake was then cut and its blood drained into a container.  At this stage I still had no idea what was coming.

They then cut out the heart of the snake and placed it on a small dish - it was still beating.  The heart was put into a shot glass and covered in a high octane rice wine and handed to me - it was still beating.

Our agent explained to me that drinking the snake heart would keep me a healthy, strong and virile male.  Not a bad sales pitch really - so oh well, when in Rome...............and down it went.

I then drank two glasses of the snake's blood (mixed with rice wine) and then either the kidneys or liver.  Overall the staff and owner were quite impressed.  The rest of the snake was taken away and prepared for the rest of the meal.  It was excellent!!

I have many more crazy stories of travels in Asia such as being arrested for suspected drug trafficking, being chased by heroin gangs, earthquakes, eating dog, typhoons, Vietnam airlines in the early days - if you want to hear them, poke me back.

As a side note, I've been watching some of the other episodes of Gordon Ramsay traveling through the back-blocks of Asia and I must say that the way he talks to and treats the locals is terrible.  Surely someone is coaching him on some of that stuff.  I know he goes for shock value but his actions and fowl language would be quite offensive to many.

Now is OUR time to be the Value Innovation Generation.

Walk into any decent marketing program or marketing subject and the first piece of reading you'll be asked to complete is Marketing Myopia by Theodore Levitt.  His 1960 Harvard Business Review article was a ground-breaking piece of thinking that introduced some of the most influential marketing ideas of our time.  Levitt was able to articulate a profound warning (and explain the consequences) to those industries and businesses that remain focused on mass-producing more and more of the same product; thinking that there will always be someone on the other side to buy it at a profit.

I encourage everyone from the agricultural industry to read it, with the industry in mind. It's a great lesson in being market-centric, not product-centric; and defining the purpose of your industry correctly.

The article is full of answers to the greater question that I see on many peoples faces; that is 'how is it that after being told to invest my equity into increasing productivity, because I was also told there is a food and fibre boom and everyone wants my products, I am now making less money than ever before?'


In 2008 the South Australian Government's Thinker in Residence was Professor Andrew Fearne, an international expert on value chain thinking who was here to review and provide inspiration for the food and wine industry.  He gave a detailed assessment of how effectively we are value-adding our food and wine products.


His final report in 2009 started like this: 'an overwhelming sense of denial. She'll be right. The rains will come. Governments will fix this. Somehow something will change - that means we can carry on the way we've always acted before. That's, I think, fundamentally the vulnerability I see. Instead of asking what it is we should be producing in the first place - expecting, wishing and hoping things will sort out; so we can carry on doing the things that we've always done before.'


He warned our food and wine industries to not just keep producing more and more of the same.


Today I read the following comments from a recent food industry conference: 'the rapidly changing food and packaging supply industries will continue to push producers and manufacturers to innovate and improve their business models.'


'If you’re sitting in a company that’s not looking bright, and is not innovating, the future is not bright for you in Australia.'


I've skimmed across some pretty chunky (but reoccurring) themes to raise my point, but the future is clear - we can't keep going the way we are going, as very soon a large proportion of the industry will no longer be with us.  They'll have gone bust trying to deliver more of the same; or gone bust because we lost our markets.


So I'm putting the call out to all of us that will be working in the industry over the next 20 years: I declare that we are the Value Innovation Generation and we have the next 20 years to pull all of our industry and Government sectors together and start working as an industry fraternity and alumni, hell-bent on making sure that when our job is done, Australia (as a whole) is a global marketing force to be reckoned with for food, fibre, wine and others.


Now there's an industry I would want to work in, if I was deciding what to do and study after secondary school.

Packaging gone mad.

I must admit that when I ordered our new accounting software from MYOB online, I wondered what was going to be in the box - given it's size.

Guess what - a big fat nothing!

The box is held into shape with a framework of more cardboard.

Come on MYOB - you could have sent me the disk and booklet in a nice envelope.

How is it that in 2012, leading products are still getting away with wasteful packaging like this?

I guess in some ways the carbon tax will force many companies to re-think their packaging (emission) strategies - and will provide them funding to do it.


Less packaging = less carbon tax.

I see a huge CSR marketing opportunity for MYOB - can they?

Buying Australian wine is very confusing..........so I don't.

I'll come straight out and say it.  I have absolutely no idea what most wines companies are saying when they describe their products in their marketing collateral.

I make this statement because I consider us a perfect target-market for the wine industry.  Educated young professionals, double income no kids (DINKS), working hard to maintain a certain lifestyle that includes having a few nice drinks.

Over the last few months I've been looking at how the wine industry promotes it's products and it comes across as being very 'in-house' - as if everyone is talking amongst themselves.  As a potential consumer I feel on the outer for not understanding wine making chemistry and edaphology.

So I said to myself "self, who are the top selling wines in Australia and is it easy too see why people are buying them."

The best I could find was a 2010 report on AC Nielson sales data for the Australian wine industry that listed the top 25 selling wines in Australia.

Yellowglen made number 1 and had 4 wines in the top 25.

5 of the 25 were cleanskins?!

5 were from overseas - 4 from NZ and 1 from Italy.

The ol' Passion Pop made number 8 on the list - what the?

I started going through some of the web sites.  Wow, what an experience.  Marketing and branding 100% dedicated to selling me something.  And all they've done is worked out what I want to get out of life and sold it back to me in a bottle.

I kid you not - I was half-way through the Yellowglen web site and I caught myself thinking "Hmmm, I might get a few of these for my wife, she'll love them."  I've never looked at Yellowglen in my life and in 10 minutes they had converted me to a purchase.

A quote from the report - his words not mine: 'Nothing sums up more how so much of the wine trade is divorced from the reality of what customers want.'

How can cleanskins, New Zealanders and Passion Pop be our most popular wines?

So who is getting my share-of-wallet on drinks?  Beer and cider winning hands down.  Cider is starting to overtake beer very quickly.