Flower industry’s Mother’s Day campaign upsets
 
The New Zealand flower industry’s Mother’s Day marketing campaign does not impress Keep New Zealand Beautiful or the Newmarket Business Association.

The flower industry is the sole funder of the campaign organiser National Flower Promotion Group. The group’s sole aim "is the promotion of the local flower industry to New Zealanders”. Its website www.nfpg.co.nz describes its 2009 Mother’s Day campaign as being “based on the ‘reminder note’ concept. The aim of this eye-catching campaign is to remind your customers to ‘Make Mum feel good with flowers’.” 

However businesses in Newmarket don’t feel so good.

“These little pink and yellow fluorescent post-it notes are littering our streets and do nothing to entice people to buy flowers, in fact quite the opposite. The flower industry should know better than to litter the environment. They are farmers after all,” says Cameron Brewer, head of the Newmarket Business Association.

Simon Johnston, CEO of Keep New Zealand Beautiful agrees.

“What I saw in Newmarket is an absolute disgrace. Post-it notes by the hundreds stuck to walls, poles, and pay and display machines. They blow around the place, and the street cleaners have to spend hours picking them up,” says Mr Johnston.

Mr Brewer says: “The flower industry does very well out of Mother’s Day. In fact they tell us last year a whopping $1.8 million was spent on flowers in New Zealand in the three days leading up to Mother’s Day. That’s great for this home grown industry. However with benefit comes with responsibility. The flower industry needs to make sure it’s not biting the hand that feeds it, or in fact putting people off buying flowers this Mother’s Day.”

Mr Johnston says this kind of gorilla marketing can backfire on businesses and organisations if their means of promoting is perceived to be negative.

“Organisations need to take the environment into consideration. Communities do not appreciate a marketing company turning up and littering the streets to get attention for commercial gain. People just don’t tolerate it and its counter productive for their reputation. Hopefully the flower industry has got something better planned next year,” says Mr Johnston.

Ends

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