Beef ’s tasty message resonates with consumers, council told
Oklahoma Beef Council members were told Thursday the organization collected a significant amount of checkoff fees during the final quarter of 2017.
They were told the amount of $1.3 million, for sales between Sept. 1 and Nov. 30, was about 31 percent higher than what had been collected during the same period a year earlier, although staff members also told the council an explanation for what might have caused the increase wasn’t yet clear.
“We are not sure why,” said Bob LeValley, the compliance director for the council. “There are more cattle in the country, but not that many.”
Some members of the council speculated the increase might have had something to do with Oklahoma’s ongoing drought, although others noted the state’s dry conditions hadn’t escalated to a point that would have necessitated a need for ranchers to sell off their herds before the end of last year.
“When you think back on it, a lot of this took place before the drought” really was underway, LeValley said.
Forecasts are difficult to make. Heather Buckmaster, executive director of the council, said the bottom line is the stocker cattle trade in Oklahoma makes it hard to forecast checkoff collections due to the variability of sales.
Also, she said U.S. Department of Agriculture inventory numbers do not reflect those cattle, either.
The council and its staff did agree, though, they don’t see the increased collection as a windfall. They said they expected to see a lower-than-normal amount of collections as the year continues.
“I don’t think we will see a wheat pasture run that we’ve historically seen in February or March because of the drought,” LeValley said
Beef Council members discussed the collections after getting an update on their financial data for the final quarter of 2017, the first quarter of the organization’s fiscal year.
The three P’s
Alisa Harrison, a senior vice president with the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association who oversees the national organization’s marketing, said the national association has been concentrating its efforts to simplify, refine and reinforce messaging that emphasizes beef’s value to consumers.
That included a relaunch of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association signature campaign: “Beef. It’s What’s for Dinner.”
Beef, she said, has three assets the organization seeks to emphasize: “Protein, people (producers, packers, butchers and chefs that grow and prepare the food) and pleasure, meaning beef’s taste. People think that beef tastes great.”
She said they also simplified the organization’s efforts to get the message out by consolidating multiple websites into beefitswhatsfordinner.com.
Four months in, Harrison said total visits to the site are about 3.4 million and total page views are 4.9 million, compared to 1.1 million visits and 1.9 million page views during the same period a year ago.
She said the organization particularly is excited about its Rethink the Ranch campaign, telling the Oklahoma Beef Council that people are spending, on average, about three minutes on a website page covering that issue.
Harrison said she thinks it is easier for both the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association and state organizations such as the Oklahoma Beef Council to get their messages out now than it was 30 years ago, because today’s options enable the organizations to target particular messages at particular groups of people.
“With digital media, a consumer can like it, comment on it, take a walk or say I love it,” Harrison said. “And while that means you have to be smarter and that your message has to resonate, you also can pivot and adjust your information, based on what the consumer is interested in.”
Most importantly, Harrison said that digital marketing efforts enable beef producers to have a direct conversation with the consumer.
“A cow-calf producer rarely got to do that in the past, but this way, he can, and that’s very beneficial. The benefits outweigh the risks or the challenges of it.”