IBC2000-5 Marketing

Marketing and Promotion of Bison Burger and Related Products

Ken Childs, Manager
Star B Ranch
28428 Hwy 78
Ramona  CA  USA  92065

The following article was originally presented at the International Bison Conference in Edmonton, Alberta in August 2000.  The conference covered a wide array of bison topics including production, marketing, genetics, history and much more.  This article has been reprinted with the permission of the IBC2000 Chairman.

Introduction

A lot of time and money was spent developing the bison products of Star B Ranch. Robert Jensen (Jensen 2000) has talked about the stringent processes we pursue to  ensure a quality product that is consistent and safe for our customers.  Jacob Childs has talked about the problems encountered in producing safe, sturdy and attractive packaging of our products. The solutions are not cheap. It is important that our industry understand that to create an end product it can be very costly and this cost is reflected in the retail price the customer has to pay.

As a fellow rancher I understand the cost of managing a buffalo herd and ranch. It is expensive but I hope you as a producer can understand that we, the marketers of bison, incur a lot of cost as well in getting the product to market. If you decide to get into the meat side of the buffalo business as a producer you must invest in the marketing of your buffalo as a part of your business plan.

There are many challenges as we deal with bison marketing issues. As an industry we need to put money into resolving these challenges. The most important task is to convince consumers to eat buffalo meat on a regular basis.

Products You Market

Think carefully about your product line. At Star B Ranch we focus on bison burgers. This solved a lot of our problems in the marketing of buffalo meat in general. When you break a carcass down you end up with a variety of cuts. Some of these cuts can be very difficult to market. We found ourselves spending too much time trying to sell product that did not move well instead of putting the energy into a product that did. We sat down and reanalyzed our business plan and came to the obvious conclusion that buffalo burger was our number one product. It was what most of our customers wanted.

The decision to focus on buffalo burger worked out well for us. We can control our margins. We can control our marketing and promotional needs. I urge you to analyze your market so that you can develop the kind of marketing and promotional items that will work in your particular area and works with your products.

Customer Development

Do your research carefully on every customer. What type of consumer comes into this restaurant or this particular supermarket? What type of product will work well in that environment? Find out who their distributor is as you may be able to use them to get your product to the retailer.  Find out who their buyer is. Who makes the decisions? Do this before you walk in and make your pitch. This research will prepare you well to make the sale. 

Promotions and Budgets

Marketing focus and budget continually change with the development of different customers. We have a customer, an upscale gourmet shop with 18 locations whose patrons are very nutritionally oriented. They wanted to feature our buffalo Tri-Tips and burgers under glass. It was a great opportunity for us. We had to quickly develop some promotional material to merchandise our products in this setting. We realized that our marketing budget would have to increase to accommodate this customer.

For this customer we ran a contest for all the meat managers in the chain. The one that sold the most bison meat won a nice prize. That encouraged them to sell our product.  We bussed all the managers out to the ranch, gave them a tour, cooked them a big barbecue and gave them some hard core education on the qualities of buffalo meat. It was very successful. The ultimate goal here is to encourage customers to come into those gourmet stores and buy buffalo meat on a regular basis. We invested heavily in this particular promotion and although we did not make much profit initially, the objective is to promote long term sales.

Another promotion involved a golf tournament sponsored by a major distributor for buyers from many supermarket chains in southern California. Exactly the kind of people we wanted to reach. They asked if we would come in and cook some buffalo dogs and burgers for these people. Yes, we could. We were very visible with our refrigerated truck and large barbecue. It cost money but we connected with some very important people in the grocery business.

Once you have gained your customer, spend time to train the staff about bison meat and presentation. Have them sample the products themselves so they will be able to tell patrons about it. Run employee contests. For our restaurant customers we offer t-shirts and gift certificate prizes to the server who sells the most burgers. These incentives help make the staff enthusiastic promoters of your product.

Display

How important is display? In a small supermarket chain we have found that  you cannot always control where your product will be displayed to the best advantage. In our experience, we have been put next to the fish and turkey which we did not like so we invested in some small display freezers of our own that were placed in the meat department where we belonged. We also placed our own special label with our logo on the product to clearly identify what it was. In smaller chains this may work well to make your product stand out. It does bring customers to your product. How do you justify the cost of this? It is pricey but you must balance the cost against other options. When you analyze how much money you spend for promotional marketing per year in a supermarket it may be turn out to be a reasonable investment. 

In-Store Demonstrations

We have found that in-store demonstrations as a promotion cost about $150.00 each for 4-5 hrs and reach only a small percentage of consumers. Unless you do the demos yourself there is no guarantee of the quality of demonstration you may get. In one instance, a large chain of 33 stores requested that we do in-store demos. As we could not do all the demonstrations ourselves we hired it out but were unhappy with about half of the demonstrators. In store demos can work well but not in all circumstances. We found the display freezers to be a good alternative for some stores. The freezers give us year round success. I believe it will double our sales in some of these stores.

We have sometimes done cross over promotion in these demos. This can be beneficial if you choose a name brand product to complement your own. You want to be sure your product is the one the customer is focusing on. In one promotion we teamed with A-1 Steak Sauce and it was a good decision. Choose a respected name to partner with. An added benefit is cost sharing of the demonstration and promotional materials.

Food Show Demonstrations

Food Show demos are expensive but give excellent exposure. We do two a year. I recommend that if you participate in these shows, have a distributor in place. A Food Show can bring you volume customers so be prepared to handle that. A distributor can help. Your display should be eye catching. My compliments to the Canadian Bison Association for their display. It caught my eye. It was beautiful. Something like that would work well for us.

Promotional Materials

A concept that works very well for us is a steak marker. Both beef and bison burgers look very much the same. In one of our customer restaurants we have the chef place this marker right in the burger before it is served.  It makes a nice presentation and it reinforces the idea that this burger is special. We also place brochures where we can and table tents on every table to encourage customers to try a bison burger. We doubled our sales at that restaurant.

We now use paper table tents that cost about 25 cents each and are fairly disposable. We found that the more durable tents encased in plastic, although attractive, went missing with some frequency. At $2.00 each that became quite expensive. This is an area where our industry could invest some marketing dollars. Table tents and markers with a generic look could be ordered by the thousands for a reasonable price and made available to everyone that is selling bison across the country.

Marketing

We have a full time Marketing and Promotion person on staff who designs some of our brochures, recipe cards, holders, steak markers and buttons. Recently he created a brochure and recipe holder for our 350+ retail outlets. It has been a challenge to get them out there, have the meat managers assemble them and then station them in the meat departments. We found most managers happy to accept them and customers have the opportunity to see and take home helpful information. The cost is reasonable, about $12.00 each, they are well made and they have a long life. It has been cost effective to send these to our retailers via UPS rather than personally.

Our “Buffalo Patty” packaging is due for an updated look and although we could hire a professional we prefer to do it in house if possible. If you cannot do this have it done professionally. Your packaging is important.

My staff also designs computer generated personalized demo brochures to take with us to sales meetings whether it be a chain or an individual customer. It is an impressive sales tool, if you can do this in house easily.

Public Relations

Press releases work well  to inform a lot of people. You can hire a public relations firm to do this although they are expensive. We regularly issue press releases regarding new products or promotions. We also send out to the press our own releases regarding bison, bison meat and its qualities. You can too. Take advantage of free advertising where you can as TV and newspaper advertising is costly.