27/01/2021
Until there’s a way to provide assurance at every stage from the abattoir to the wet market that meat is locally processed from Australian cattle, there’s little opportunity for differentiation or marketing to increase sales.
Research conducted for the Livestock Export Program (LEP) confirmed that Vietnamese wet market customers want two things: fresh, recently slaughtered beef, and the experience of the wet market. Putting modern retail into a wet market deprives them of these two key elements.
So while the Vietnamese market is evolving rapidly, customers using this large, traditional channel do not have the same desire for the chilled, packaged and branded products you see in modern retail stores.
The key opportunity to increase sales in Vietnamese wet markets is by appealing to stall holders, who have a significant influence on what is sold through the strength of their relationship with the customer, recommendations, price, and a degree of consistency.
The project involved shadowing a small group of shoppers around a wet market, asking questions on what they were doing and why. This informed a survey of 100 people to test those insights, and the lessons were consistent:
Wet market shoppers find the experience is important to them for a number of reasons – some rational, such as price, negotiation, and trust; and others more emotional, such as social connections and the atmosphere.
Tactile experience – seeing, touching and smelling the meat – is very important and has a direct relationship with decisions on what to purchase.
There is very little chilled product or perceived desire for it. Warm beef is the norm and the preference.
The strength of the relationship between seller and shopper is influential and deep, but is only as good as the last transaction.
There is essentially no store structure or point-of-sale messaging in the wet market environment that provides the ability to communicate any differentiation of product. Rather, it is based on the shopper-seller relationship.
The relationship between seller and shopper has pushed the project in a new direction, investigating the value chain from the stall holder back through the supply chain to the abattoir. The aim is to work out how to position beef from Australian cattle so that it naturally becomes the preference, so sellers have the confidence to promote this to consumers, and there is confidence from all parties to support these promotions.
That understanding may provide opportunities to differentiate and value add that product, and potentially even identify ways to produce some kind of marketing campaign.